Samantha Cristoforetti Saw The ISS Glow Orange
[ranking: 14]
In 2014, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti was on her way to the International Space Station for the first time when she saw the normally gray ISS was bathed orange light. It was the sun reflecting off the solar panels and onto the space station, something only a handful of astronauts had ever seen. Cristoforetti was taken aback by the beauty of what she was seeing. In a blog post, she wrote, "The enormous solar panels were inundated with a blaze of orange light, vivid, warm, almost alien."
Conspiracy theorists hooked onto the words "almost alien." They began speculating that the solar panel reflection was a cover story and she had, in fact, seen a UFO. You can see the ISS change colors at around 11:34 in the video above.
Yang Liwei Heard A Mysterious Knock Outside His Ship
[ranking: 1]
In 2003, Yang Liwei became the first astronaut sent into space by the Chinese space program. He's said he heard "someone knocking the body of the spaceship just as knocking an iron bucket with a wooden hammer" on his maiden flight. He looked outside of the ship's porthole but was unable to find the source of the knocking. Considering space is a vacuum, it was even weirder that he heard a sound from outside the ship.
Liwei is not alone in this discovery, either; other Chinese astronauts heard the sound on missions in 2005 and 2008.
Leroy Chiao Saw Some Creepy Lights Zoom Past Him
[ranking: 6]
Leroy Chiao commanded the International Space Station in 2005. While on a spacewalk, Chiao saw white lights aligned in an upside-down check formation whiz right past him. Some people have posited that a string of fishing boats along the South American coast could explain what he saw, but Chiao was 230 miles above Earth when this happened. Those would have to be some seriously strong boat spotlights to be seen from all the way up there.
Chiao told HuffPost, "I'm skeptical of claims that we've been visited by aliens from another planet or other dimension, but I don't rule it out 100 percent."
A Conspiracy Theorist Thinks Alan Bean Saw Glass Domes On The Moon
[ranking: 9]
Richard C. Hoagland, a proponent of alternate space theories, believed Alan Bean saw glass domes from a long-extinct alien civilization on the moon. In an interview, Bean described space as looking like "black, patent-leather shoes" from the surface of the moon. Hoagland maintained: "Space should be velvet-black. It should be inky-black. It should be infinity, unending, deep, endless black. It shouldn't be shiny."
The only explanation for Bean's description, Hoagland concluded, was that he was seeing space through the reflection of a glass dome.
Multiple Astronauts Saw Dazzling Light Shows
[ranking: 10]
During the Apollo 11 mission, astronauts reported seeing "light flashes" in their eyes. The crews of Apollo 12 and Apollo 13 were warned about this and reported that they also saw strange bursts of light, even when their eyes were closed. Experiments were conducted on the next four Apollo missions to try and figure out what was causing these weird visions.
NASA determined that the astronauts were seeing cosmic rays. We don't see cosmic rays here on Earth because they are absorbed by our atmosphere, but without that barrier in space, astronauts were seeing something no one had ever seen before.
Musa Manarov Shot Footage Of An Alleged UFO
[ranking: 7]
During a Mir (a Russian space station) mission in 1991, cosmonaut Musa Manarov was watching a visiting space capsule dock nearby. He was filming its approach when he saw an object that looked like it was coming off the spacecraft. But Manarov knew that there was simply nothing that could come loose at that point, and as he continued to watch the object, it floated downward and away from the capsule.
Manarov still can't explain what he saw up there, but he knows for sure that it was not space junk, as some people have claimed.
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