As a lifelong supporter of our space exploration efforts I have observed many hours of NASA footage. Never have I seen events such as those recorded by STS-48. Lighted objects could most certainly be debris or ice crystals illuminated by the sun, however, I can conceive of no possible scenario that could explain the objects that are travelling in opposite directions. Presumably, thruster plumes should propel debris in one direction only. Another potential explanation would be meteor storms or space debris from previous launches. But again, these explanations cannot account for the observed trajectories . According to our source, NASA no longer distributes a live downlink from shuttle missions, instead using a delay similar to that used by talk radio stations to censor offensive remarks. Sanitizing video downlink from shuttle missions, and deleting sections of the official archives is not in the interest of the taxpayers who fund NASA. The need for further official scientific inquiry is obvious. In the meantime, the anomalous events recorded by Discovery astronauts during STS-48 can only be classified as UFOs, in the strict sense of the term. Note: Vince DiPietro's report to FUFOR (the Fund For UFO Research) provided the descriptions of events for which video was unavailable to HUFON Report. Interestingly, DiPietro, a NASA employee at the Goddard Space Flight Center now publicly endorses the "ice crystal" explanation. Copyright 1992 by Houston UFO Network / Vince Johnson End of File The following copyrighted article first appeared in the September 1992 HUFON REPORT, the newsletter of the Houston UFO Network, all rights reserved. Non-profit publications may reprint this article as long as its source and author are attributed. See accompanying article "Sts48.Txt" and graphic "Event2a.GIF." For more information call (713) 850-1352. ---------------------------------------------------------- The Strange Case of STS-48 by David Mayo It was 1:43am Saturday morning, June 6, 1992. My wife had retired for the evening and I was flipping through the cable channels as men are compelled to do. Just by chance (or providence), I landed on KHTV (Ch 39 locally) where the program "HardCopy" was airing. The host was stating "...amazing videotape taken by a space shuttle astronaut, astounding evidence of UFOs!" Well, For over a year and a half I have been compiling UFO-related television segments from various programs. I jumped up and shoved my latest tape in the VCR and hit record. What followed was intriguing to say the least. Don Ecker, staffer to UFO Magazine, had obtained footage filmed from a recent shuttle mission and had brought it to "HardCopy." The footage showed a dark Earth positioned in the lower two-thirds of the screen. Banded around its middle, the lights of a major city sparkled. The Earth's curvature ran from right mid- frame to upper left corner. Above this, dark space was punctuated by a few stars. A small bright object suddenly appeared midway down the visible edge and traveled right to left at a fast rate following the curvature. There was a brief flash of light that bloomed from the upper left corner and the object made a sudden sharp right hand turn, picked up velocity and sped off into the darkness of space! A split second after this unusual turn, another object streaked upwards from lower in the frame and whizzed past the approximate point where the first object would have been had it not made the right hand turn.Don Ecker expounded that this was an alien spacecraft making an evasive maneuver just before something is shot at it. Mr. Ecker's opinion not withstanding, NASA's official explanation was that it was ice crystals formed from waste water. "HardCopy's" stance was that this piece of film was either the UFO smoking gun or space debris. I found the entire footage to be something unique and possibly important. Still, this was "HardCopy" after all, not "60 Minutes" and with most news events the truth follows some time later.The next day I called a few people I knew to inquire whether they had seen it.Vince Johnson and Bill Eatwell had not. However, later, Bill called me back with a mysterious message. He said that after speaking of this program to some of his friends, an unnamed caller instructed him to contact me and ask that I refrain from speaking about the footage any further and, in particular, not publish anything about this in HUFON REPORT. If I agreed and showed good faith, I would receive more information about the event. At first,this rubbed me wrong. I could understand that if the footage was a "smoking gun" and if an investigation was underway, the need for secrecy may be justified. What I couldn't accept was hearing all this third hand. If I am asked to spike a story, I want to know who is doing the asking. Instead, I was mollified by the promise of straight answers to any 10 questions I wished to ask about the HardCopy footage. My curiosity, at this point, had grown exponentially. Being the beggar and unable to choose, I agreed. On June 8, I faxed the 10 questions I had compiled to Bill. He, in turn, faxed them to a neutral fax location (number) he was given. The questions were as follows: 1) What is the entire scenario of what I witnessed (i.e., what was transpiring)? 2) Which shuttle mission did this occur on? 3) If the object is an alien spacecraft, what was its size, speed and distance from the camera? 4) Was this object taking evasive action to avoid some sort of weaponry?