(NICAP.org)
The whole UFO case report:
“Fran Ridge:
Sept. 20, 1973; In orbit over Indian
Ocean
During revolution # 1863. Astronauts Alan Bean, Owen
Garriott and Jack Lousma spotted what they described as a red ‘satellite’,
which they photographed (4 color photos) and mentioned during a subsequent
debriefing. We have radio conversation (transcript only) with Houston CapCom
about 4.5 hours after the sighting of this object. There was no man-made
satellite that could explain this sighting and hence the object was truly
anomalous. This case is multiply-listed as a Cat 8 (photo), Cat 11 (sighting
from air/spacecraft), and flagged as a NASA incident. 10 mins. Distance from
Skylab was 25-30 miles .
Estimated diameter was 800
feet .
Joel Carpenter:
One of the things that’s so darn fascinating about
this case is something that Dr Maccabee and Brad Sparks bring up in the article
on Maccabee’s site. One interpretation of the sighting is that the object was
approaching on an orbit in a 51 or 52 degree inclination and about to intersect
with Skylab’s 50 degree (but much higher) orbit. They mention that that
inclination was used by the Soviets. But actually, they often used 65 degrees.
51 degrees was used for certain very specific flights: the Salyut space
stations and the manned Soyuz ships that docked with them. At the time of the
sighting, Salyut-1 and Salyut-2 had been flown, and both had failed. Salyut-2
was launched in April 1973 and was actually the top secret Almaz military
station, the counterpart of the US MOL reconnaissance space station. Salyut-2
had recon gear aboard, but failed before it was manned for the first time,
about 2 weeks after it was launched.
Brad
Sparks:
Skylab-3 remains a mystery with the color photos and
optical ranging yielding an approximate 800-foot size of the space UFO, much
larger than the largest satellite then in space (the 150-foot Skylab-3). [Sparks
My comment:
My comment:
“There was no man-made
satellite that could explain this sighting and hence the object was truly
anomalous,” Francis L. Ridge writes. This means that this is one of the UFO
cases that prove that UFOs are as real as airliners flying overhead.
Related
posts:
The Skylab III UFO
(google.com photo)