I felt that this subject of “the cloaked alien UFO the size of freaking Mercury” was hardly worth the time since dozens of other people, including bloggers and actual authorities on the subject which include the scientists who get and analyze the pictures of the alleged spaceship from SECCHI (Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation) have pounced on it and tore it apart much to what was supposed to be the dismay of the too overly-enthusiastic people who disseminated a certain video. Instead (typically), there are cries of outrage and accusations of conspiracy and the usual “people are too sheeple to see the truth” thing going around.
The whole thing started with a YouTube user called “siniXster” who uploaded the below video in which he asserts that the circled ‘object’ in the picture (also below) is “cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it’s cloaked.” He continued in the video, “It’s obvious that it’s cloaked and only appears when the CME [coronal mass ejection] hits it.”
What's that to the lef- Oh my god! Is that the DEATH STAR?
Pushing aside the obvious question of “how the heck do you know what a cloaked spaceship looks like” and everything else, others jumped on board including a YouTube user called “Time4TruthDOTorg” (unsurprisingly from The Daily Saucer) who started disseminating siniXster’s video below:
Time4TruthDOTorg says in the description,
“Fellow YouTuber “siniXster” has found what appears to be some sort of cloaked object slightly to the right of Mercury. It is completely cloaked until it is hit by CME (coronal mass ejection). I have absolutely no idea what this could be..”
Well, okay. People squinting at their monitors and declaring discovery of hidden spaceships or objects. Seems legit. Totally not “Loose Change” material.
“An object made of dark matter?”
Um..what?
“Is that even possible?”
I..don’t know?
“A cloaked spaceship?”
How the hell did we jump from “I have absolutely no idea” to aliens? This is like a parody of the History Channel. This user ends with: “WTF is it? Extremely strange and fascinating!” He also warns us after this tidbit to “go to SECCHI and record this before it disappears” because scientists are totally trying to cover up an alien spaceship the size of Mercury. Those fun hating bastards. Look, it’s perfectly rational and sane to think that there are other forms of life out there that may or may not be humanoid or something in the vast, hundreds of billion galaxy-filled universe (from what we can see so far). But to think that there’s a giant, supposedly “cloaked” alien spaceship that just happens to be in one of the trillions of solar systems that also happens to be inhabited by us and for some reason is near the freaking sun and will also supposedly land on our planet in early 2012 is just taking it outside of the box and putting it in the loony bin. I thought that the numerous articles would clear up some things, but no, apparently people don’t read past the titles of the articles that say (from Discovery News), “A Cloaked Alien Spaceship Near Mercury?” and (from The Periscope Post) “Massive alien death star spotted parked by Mercury. Possibly.” because I’ve already gotten forwarded e-mails saying “OMG SPACESHIP NEXT TO MERCURY” from several different people on this whole matter. Anyway, in response, the SECCHI website posted a FAQ where it answers the question of “What is causing the artifact near Mercury in [the picture]. Why is it rectangular?”. Their answer:
In these HI-1 images, a daily median is used as the best near-real-time method to get CME enhancement. This results in dark spots from planets such as Mercury. When we derive the background, we do an interpolation between two daily median images. Since we make these images the day we receive them, we do not have a daily median for the next day, just the previous day. When the interpolation is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image. Therefore, if (when) we re-generate these images, the bright artifact will go away because we have a daily median from the next day. Following is an illustration of the daily median images. The monthly background has been subtracted to bring out the planet artifact.
There. That’s it.
