Unmasking a Klingon ship

Posted at 10:51 AM on December 8, 2011 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Did a coronal mass ejection "uncloak" a Klingon bird of prey ship?

You have to love the YouTube guy who noticed the object saying "it's definitely some sort of manufactured object."

Or not.

Gizmodo seeks out an answer...

It could very well be a glitch on the sensor, a ghost image from the planet Mercury itself. If you pay close attention, you can see that the two lines follow the same direction that the planet does. But if it's a ghost image, why does it end so abruptly? How is it so well delimited? Why does it look like a spaceship?

The answer, according to Nathan Rich, lead ground system engineer at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, is in the way the images are post-processed.

A series of images shot from another satellite seems to show the same thing.

Definitely Klingons.

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Comments (8)

Very cool! They posted a second video on the Gizmodo link (near the bottom). They also show Mars in the same shot. If you look near Mars, there is another, similar object that appears after the CME hits Mars.

Posted by Brian | December 8, 2011 11:25 AM

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Typical MPR left-leaning bias. THIS COULD JUST AS EASILY BE A ROMULAN CLOAKED SHIP.

Posted by John P II | December 8, 2011 11:37 AM

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I used to give potential travel companions a test consisting of one question: " "If an alien craft suddenly appeared, and a benevolent appearing being said, "Come with us." What would you do?" "

( I now have two little aliens living with me, so I don't engage in much of that kind of travel anymore.)

Posted by Jim Shapiro | December 8, 2011 11:41 AM

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This most certainly is not a Klingon or Romulan ship. The largest birds of prey were around 500 meters across. The Romulan Warbirds were 1200-1500m in length. Mercury is 5,000,000 meters in diameter. The scale is way off to be a ship. The more likely explanation is a secret government attempt to build a Dyson sphere :)

Posted by Eric | December 8, 2011 11:45 AM

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"I used to give potential travel companions a test consisting of one question: " "If an alien craft suddenly appeared, and a benevolent appearing being said, "Come with us." What would you do?" "

( I now have two little aliens living with me, so I don't engage in much of that kind of travel anymore.)

Posted by Jim Shapiro | December 8, 2011 11:41 AM "

And why would you engage in that kind of travel anymore, you have the best of company to travel with for lifetimes already! : )

Posted by This is NOT lucy | December 8, 2011 11:54 AM

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I hope we have the photon torpedoes loaded and the phaser banks are fully activated.

Posted by The Big Dog | December 8, 2011 1:17 PM

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The idea of some 'other' form of intelligence existing in this or other universes, other than the human race, is absurd. Cough cough.

Posted by This is NOT lucy | December 8, 2011 4:22 PM

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Some credit must go to Captain Sulu, who first discovred that cloaked ships can be detected by visual distortion of stars in the background.

Posted by Bob Moffitt | December 9, 2011 7:47 AM

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