Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

MISIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS 211
night at the most rational of locations, a rocket launch. It helps me
remember that anyone can get fooled; I just wish that more people
would be more critical about what they see.
As for that Shuttle launch, it was successful despite any fowl
play. The camera was installed perfectly, and returned many gigabytes
of interesting and useful information about what is really
going on in space. And I will admit it here, in this book, for the
first time: in some of those images I did see evidence of intelligent
life in space. In many images from Hubble I have seen long, bright
streaks of light that were clearly not cosmic ray tracks, misguided
tracking, asteroids, comets, or moons.
What were they, then? They weren’t alien spaceships. The long
streaks were caused by human-built satellites, placed in orbits
higher than Hubble. As they passed through Hubble’s field of view,
their motion left a streak of light.
We have met life in space, and it is us.