Former NASA employee, James Oberg, who later turned into a space journalist and historian, is interested why a lot of people believe in UFOs. He was particularly interested in videos of abnormal lights flooding the internet, claiming the lights were from extra-terrestrial origins. He spent decades studying them.
Being an employee of the top space agency of the United States has its perks and sometimes, it can give a person access to the world's most controversial secret. Just like this ex-NASA employee who recently told the truth about UFOs based on inside information from the time he was still affiliated with the agency. But it is not what conspiracy theorists would expect.
Oberg worked with NASA in the 90s and later on picked up a hobby, which is explaining every UFO sighting there is. He usually appears on UFO sighting websites commenting that what was in the videos weren't really UFOs but "space dandruff."
Space dandruff can be caused by blasts just like the 1996 NASA STS-75 incident. A tether attached to a satellite broke causing a cloud of ice crystals to float around. Many who witnessed the lights from the sky initially took it as UFOs. That is one UFO sighting explained.
Oberg spent too much time analyzing data from UFO sightings and cross-referencing them to mission logs to try and explain every video sighting he chanced upon. Because of his perseverance and after decades of doing this, he finally came up with a finding that the human senses are trained to identify slow-moving objects and a specific or pre-calculated speed and conditions and when presented with a different set of setting, confusions follow.
"Our sensory system is functioning absolutely perfectly for Earth conditions," says James Oberg, former NASA employee in an interview with Atlas Obscura. "But we're still a local civilization. Moving beyond our neighborhood has been visually confusing," Oberg added.
He also doesn't believe that the agency is hiding the truth about UFOs to believers and conspiracy theorists. According to Oberg, it is just a result of watching too much sci-fi movies.
"I've had enough experience with real spaceflight to realise that what's being seen in many videos is nothing beyond the 'norm' from fully mundane phenomena occurring in unearthly settings," said Oberg in a statement.
But believers shouldn't hate on Oberg, unlike other debunkers," he is more concerned about possibly explaining UFO sightings and why people react to it the way they do, not just in disproving every UFO sighting captured on video.