People want to believe, but this doesn't make it real.
The International Space Station is rumored to orbit the Earth every ninety-three minutes, but this is impossible because it’s a movie production with terrible special effects and role-playing actors.
Its existence is propped up by faulty eye-witness testimony which can be explained away the same way we dismiss UFO and Bigfoot sightings: we don’t accept hearsay or rumor as evidence. The inclusion of Bigfoots or UFOs as possibilities is premature as these have not been proven to exist and therefore don’t deserve consideration above mundane explanations, such as airplanes or bears.
The tracking apps and website transit schedule tell you when the space station will cross the sky near you. Supposedly.
I contend the orbiting space station is as fake as the televised interior footage we are shown. However, many people believe there to be “something” up there. I have a few explanations as to why, but none have anything to do with an actual orbiting space station or space station-like object.
The app or website gives a hypothetical orbit just as Pokemon apps give a hypothetical location for a hypothetical creature.
To date, nobody has produced a video of the ISS in the sky with a second device displaying the transit schedule in the same frame.
While we get many videos of lights in the sky purported to be the space station, these are never attended by footage from the corresponding tracking app.
This matters because the correlation between the app and the light in the sky has not been established. How is this, you may ask? Easy:
The ISS transits we do see are always
a) passing in front of the moon or
b) passing in front of the sun
c) or if in the sky, are indistinguishable from airplanes and lack corresponding tracking app data in the same frame
What this means in instances a) and b) is no direct observation of the space station. At night, it cannot be seen because it must reflect the sunlight. Like all low earth orbit objects, it would have to reflect the sun and therefore could only be seen in proximity to sunset and sunrise.
During the day, it would not be visible, and moreover, the camera would need a solar filter to see it.
With both these options, the direct eye-to-space station observation is ruled out. There is no eye witness. The footage is from a zoomed-in camera.
For an ISS transit to be accepted as evidence, there must be a visible space station in the camera’s field of view and a corresponding shot of the tracking app.
If the scene cuts away to present the “insert shot” or close-up, then it is no longer observed or witnessed directly. The viewer must accept, on a leap of faith, that the editor didn’t cheat with an insert shot faking the ISS.
For the footage to be treated as real we must remove the opportunity for sleight of mind. The ISS is a hell of a magic trick, and the belief in its orbit is sustained by credulity, hearsay, a desire to believe, and the non-sequitur fallacy which assumes that any light in the sky might possibly be the ISS.
We must remove that assumption of “something” up there because people saw the light. This is not a high enough standard of evidence. Lots of people claimed to see airplanes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11/01.
To recap:
Alleging a light in the sky is a space station without a corresponding tracking app on the same shot will be dismissed as evidence.
Transits in front of the moon and sun are 100% fakeable and cannot be counted as eye-witness observation for the reasons stated above.
The existence of the ISS has not been demonstrated with evidence. Most alleged witnesses cannot produce evidence, or they shift the burden of proof and tell you to get your own because it’s so easy. It’s so easy nobody can do it, sure okay.
I challenge anyone to prove the ISS exists with a tracking app and that light in the sky is correlated. No sneaky solar/ lunar insert shots and no more hearsay.
Tim Ozman,
IPR Host