Last week, a piece of footage purportedly showing something appearing above the horizon became the basis for one of the most popular stories on this site in recent weeks. So what was it? And why do UFO hunters continue to claim that the ISS is more than it seems – even though, as almost everyone knows, this is largely a huge waste of everyone’s time?
“I saw some lights that looked like they were lined up and it was almost like an inverted check mark,” astronaut Leroy Chiao told HuffPost last year, of a famous incident during a spacewalk outside the ISS in 2005.
“And I saw them flying and I thought it was terribly strange.”
But no, it wasn’t aliens. Like several such “eerie sightings” by ISS astronauts over the years, this was a case of unsettling — but mistaken — idenтιтy .
