Eerie footage captured by Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner on board the International Space Station (ISS) which appears to show five as-yet unidentified "space guests" has been sent for analysis by Russian scientific experts.
The apparent UFOs were filmed flying over the southern hemisphere with an incredible backdrop in the form of the Aurora Australis. The cosmonaut just happened to be filming a timelapse while passing over the Antarctic when he recorded the strange sightings.
The footage is so intriguing that it has been sent to experts for analysis, a spokesman for the Russian space agency (Roscosmos), Vladimir Ustimenko, confirmed.
“It is too early to make conclusions until our Roscosmos researchers and scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences tell us what they think,” Ustimenko said.
“It was decided to hand over those materials to experts, who will tell us what that was in their opinion.”
The footage was also sent to the Central Research Institute of Machine Building (TsNIIMash) and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Vagner, who dubbed the objects "space guests," arrived at the ISS back in April. He posted the footage to his 20,000 Twitter followers in an August 19 tweet, asking: “What do you think those are? Meteors, satellites or…?”
Online party poopers were quick to speculate that the objects were most likely some of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.
The artificial constellation of satellites, designed to provide free internet to those of us back on Earth, are notoriously bright and the subject of much criticism among the scientific community for ruining astronomical observations.
The “UFOs” may also be something else mundane like a dirty lense, dust particles floating into shot or other tricks of the light, as the ‘video’ was actually a collage of images stitched together.
However, for a more complete answer, we’ll just have to wait for the expert analysis to come back.
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