Expert: Jayendra Upadhye - 7/30/2008

Question
have seen through my telescope, things that move past the moon as if they were in orbit. I have inquired to NASA, and they said it was dust or bugs. No way, Any time I look, if I look long enough, (5-10 minutes) I will see these things. They look like rocks or debris floating around the Moon. No change in direction, or path, just looks like orbiting debris. Is there something? Have you seen any thing orbiting the moon, or pass through its field?

Thank you
Brian Neuwald


Answer
Hi Brian,
Havent you heard about the famous Percival Lowell case of canals on mars??

The poor fellow was seeing things chiefly because the mind "invents patterns" where there are none! Even the slightest germ or hint is enough, we literally build castels out of thin air.

The general causes are:-

1 - Something dark transiting fast across the field of vision.
   That could be one any number of nocturnal "pests" hovering around
   the sky in search of "those very bugs" nasa was talking about!!
   (Bats, the occasional sea gull if you are near the sea, some
   migrating bird, even a lazy dragon fly at low altitude would be
   like a b52 in your telescope!! And your mind on hair trigger
   would be imagining aliens next!!!).

2 - Many times, (and people do not even realise this), the "eye
   piece" or even the main objectives are actually composite lenses,
   with "their own interstices" between the combinational lenses.
   Light often is observed to create multiple ghost images of point
   sources of light if the angle is right. I have seen many such
   SILLY photos on sites displaying "mysterious orb over mans
   shoulder" etc!! The octagonal shape, hazy sides etc are clear
   give aways of this type of occurances. Somethimes each "orb" is
   followed by another of lesser size along a line! Again telling us
   what the "root cause" is!

3 - if there are internal mirrors (L shaped telescopes have them) to
   deflect angle of the main beam into the eye piece, and there is a
   speck of dust there, or on the inside of the eye piece, you are
   done for!! You would see god knows how many "steady ufos orbiting
   the moon!!

So relax, the issue is more "near to earth" than you think.
In order to see a Lunar UFO, the ufo would have to be really huge.
And you wont even begin to understand the problems large strutures in orbits face due to gravitational gradients across them. Such a large structure would be bent by lunar gravity (self weight) to conform to the "straight" (meaning curved orbital path) path of the curved space time of the orbit.

Only very foolish aliens would venture into moon orbit with such gigantic structures.
Not to mention earth bound radar "smelling fishy things" 400,000 km away.

NORAD would have fired its crackers long ago. And we would ofcourse have known about that only after about 20 years, when declassification happened.

regards
Jayen