"observing" UFO activity with the WISE IR telescope

[MrPosti...@kymhorsell.com]

Another day, another space telescope.

I ran across the WISE IR space telescope in some recent zine articles
about astronomers stitching together images for the whole sky over the
past ~20 y.

While the resulting stitched movie -- that's available at least on
Youtube -- has features that make it less than interesting for my
work, the actual raw observations are more interesting.

Unlike some other space telescope work WISE later renamed NEOWISE
assembles all the "rejects" into neat bundles that can be used for
interesting things.

The telescope was designed to look at 4 IR bands at bns of stars
in our neighbourhood but during the now decades-long mission mns
of images caught sight of other things. Initially (relatively) fast
moving objects seen in the frames are suspected to be known asteroids,
planets, comets, satellites (given WISE has a 500 km earth orbit, it's
mostly looking upward and will tend to see satellites passing over its
head), and other junk inside and outside the solar system.

If said objects don't seem to jive with any known planet or moon kept
on file at JPL the image is flagged anomalous and thrown into a
special bin.

Where people that might be looking for anomalous things might come
across it.

I'm setting up a basic display of the results so far at
<kym.massbus.org/UFO/WISE>.

The main density plot shows the first year of WISE's full-time
operation (2010) by time along the X axis. The numbers of Julian Days
that normally are used to tag space photos and astronomical
observations in general. The Y axis is the celestial latitude
("declination") above and below the ecliptic. The color code is the
assigned "magnitude" of IR light in WISE's "w1" band (about 2 nm).

We see various features including box-like structures that are mostly
an artifact of the s/w that estimates missing values. (Somewhat an
irony since we are looking at "trash data").

But the speckles in the image -- both dark and light -- contain
information about the :"anomalous objects" or camera artifacts that
were capture over 2010.

It turns out the presence of these speckles closely correlates with
ground-based observations over N America. Using the NUFORC data-set
I've created about 250 categories of UFO -- based on the reported
color, shape, location, time of day and even direction of travel of
the relevant object(s).

Unlike other space telescope data where many of the categories scored
very significant correlations with the light intensity data, with this
data only a very few but highly interesting categories seemed to be
related.

While no "shape" or "color" category of UFO sighting seemed to line up
with changes and spacial distribution of "anomalous IR" seen by WISE
during 2010, time-of-day (dawn, dusk, daytime and nighttime) were
highly correlated. Also highly correlated with Light UFO sightings in
general and certain other "light characteristics" including brightness
of said light were highly correlated.

In general only IR from certain directions was found to highly
correlate with the key UFO sightings categories.

Unlike some space telescopes that orbit at points far from earth, WISE
has a more or less fixed 500 km orbit. So anything it spots at e.g.
declination 60S is likely to be some object or aberration somehow
associated with the sky in the approx S polar region.

I am preparing a short posting on the results that will be posted in
the next day or 2.

In other space telescope news I've managed to stitch together various
full-frame images from other instruments and managed to spot some
anomalous "objects". But it also turns out that light-based telescopes
have many artifacts of their own and it's unclear whether the various
"blobs" that appear from time to time are actually something real or
just some artifact of the telescopes very complex optics. Some of the
"objects" and their antics seem quite interesting but at the same time
what seem like significant lens flares appear in the relevant full
frame images (albeit at such a low level that they have otherwise been
unflagged as anomalies by the telescope teams -- they apparently don't
interfere with the measurement of any light flux from stars in the
relevant frames so they may have gone un-remarked so far).

It remains that case, however, that averaged over large enough regions
of the sky visible to the relevant scopes the aggregate areas of
lighter-than-normal and darker-than-normal regions do highly correlate
with interesting UFO activity as seen on earth.

But so far no stitched-together images seems to show any sharp edge let
alone anything like a moving black triangle or cone.

--
Another UFO report comes out next week, some incidents still unexplained
ABC News, 28 Oct 2022 23:04Z
The enduring debate about whether UFOs are caused by extraterrestrial beings
will once again be front and center next week as ...

The French Government's Space Agency Just Hosted an International
Conference on UAP
The Debrief, 28 Oct 2022
The National Center for Space Studies (CNES) recently held its
long-awaited second CAIPAN conference, under the authority of the
Information and Study Group on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (GEIPAN),
on Oct 13th and 14th in Toulouse, France. The attendees, ranging
from the military to private researchers, represented visitors from 13
countries, several of whom presented what they believe to be among the
best data and technical analyses involving unidentified aerial
phenomena (UAP).
[Conf proceedings gave some good hints about what NASA is doing and
what evidence it has to look at. NASA Science Mission Directorate's
Daniel Evans said among the broader body of UAP reports, there is a
"small fraction that appears to demonstrate extremely advanced
propulsion technology, and beyond that, UAPs most clearly pose a
safety of flight issue"].

Lake Monduran to host alien expedition
The Courier-Mail, 27 Oct 2022 07:02Z
Keen alien spotters may snag more than a barra when they join a UFO
specialist for a Lake Monduran expedition in hopes for an ...

NASA's UFO panel convenes to study unclassified sightings
Reuters on MSN.com, 25 Oct 2022 0:42Z
A first-of-its-kind panel organized by NASA opened a study on Mon
of what the govt calls "unidentified aerial ...
[The committee's function apparently is to define what or what not is
to be considered a UFO when e.g. military personnel or pilots make
reports to relevant organisations. Now that laws are almost in place
contractors and military personnel with high security clearance will
be able to report sightings of unusual things to the Pentagon's UFO
office. Until now it was a crime to report such things to anyone, even
other departments of the same organisation. However, exactly what shape
or color or flight characteristics UFO's have been observed to have is
a US state secret and routinely redacted from FOIA requests. But as a
quasi military organisations NASA will be used to these myriad of
interacting Catch 22 situations and will have the appropriate hurry up
and wait 100 point plan ready to go].

NASA announces 16 people who will study UFOs to see what's natural -
and what isn't
USA Today, 23 Oct 2022 19:41Z
Made up of scientists, aviation officials and a former astronaut, the group
will "lay the groundwork for future study" of ...
[Slightly different from "investigate UFO sightings"].