The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume CI

Today’s newsletter is a follow up to Volume XCVII. If you haven’t read about the UFO I photographed that nobody cares about, please start there. And to everyone who wrote me to say they really do care - thanks for your support!

Years ago I was watching one of those magazine journal style TV shows, I feel like it was CBS’s Sunday Morning, and there was a segment about a blind man who photographed the sky. He was not born blind. His sight had deteriorated in old age and all he could see were shapes and colors. When he looked up in the sky all he saw was swirls of color and he loved it. So he started photographing it.

The man was dexterous and familiar with his camera, but he did not know what he would get when he snapped a frame. He had an assistant, one of his children I think, who would take the film to the photo stand to get it processed. Not so long ago, you may recall, that anticipation, waiting to see how your photos would turn out. I miss that. The mystery of what would be delivered when you finally opened the envelope and the vibrancy of Kodachrome spilled out before you. Now, with digital imagery, results are instant. There is a little less magic involved. But we still take pictures because they are little miracles that preserve a single moment. We know where we were when we took them and they become time capsules for everyone who ever gets to see them.

The blind man could only squint at his photos and still saw only blurs, but he captured remarkable images, so stunning, that his friends gathered them into a collection large enough to publish. Lovely images of billowing thunderheads. Rainbows arcing through sunsets. Lightning blasts across blackened cityscapes. Fascinating and wonderful. They named the book The Sky Unseen. There are other books with similar titles, but they are not the picture book I seek.

I have never found this book. I have always remembered the story though, and thought about how even a blind man could take a great picture. I have been searching for a copy for years. It is not to be found. Probably a small press run, and not catalogued anywhere, but impressive enough for a news exposé and for me to commit the title to memory, yet forget the name of the photographer. Sorry, pal.

If you know of this book please tell me where to find it. I would love to see all of the pictures. In the meantime, I will have to rely on my own photography.

Yes, that again. Discovering things in my photography that I had not seen when I took the pictures is becoming more commonplace for me. For that, I blame poor eyesight, and as such, identify with that old man in the news story. I hope I don’t go as blind as him. I love being able to see. And drive. I love watching TV. The ability to see is one of the greatest joys life offers, and cataloguing what I see on a piece of paper, or on a screen, so I can see it again? That is bliss.

So, I was disappointed with myself when I finally saw some of my pictures from Iceland, especially the videos. A shaky hand, poor audio, and dozens of dusty specs dancing across the frame. The scenery is lovely but my attempts at capturing it will not be winning awards. I will enjoy them myself but will publish only a select few on social media. More on that later.

One of the terrible pictures I took on this trip was of Venus.

Oh great, here we go. Venus again.

Thank you for your sardonic enthusiasm. Yes, Venus again. That elegant, ever-present bright planet chasing the Sun around the sky. Once you know how to find her, like the Moon, she becomes a dear friend. On the plane to Iceland looking out the window to the west, I saw her coursing along the horizon, gliding amidst the northern lights. Again, shaky pictures, nothing worth bragging about. But I knew it was her, even though she looked as red as Mars. She was so close to the horizon, Venus appeared bigger than usual, just like the Sun and Moon do when they set. The redness in her hue was due to smoke from Canadian forest fires.

While I did not get a good photograph, watching Venus on the horizon, looking bigger and redder than usual, helped me postulate my hypothesis about why my UFO looked the way it did.

Here is my UFO from March 28, 2020 again, just to bring you up to speed. These are side by side photos of the same object taken with the same focus and zoom lens, magnified the same way, taken only ten seconds apart.

What could it be? The fast and easy answer is that it is a spaceship with aliens inside. But I can’t prove that. Other people have taken pictures of objects they can’t explain, too. The internet is inundated with UFOs, and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), the US government’s new definition of weird stuff up in the sky. You can watch YouTube videos and read reports for hours, days, weeks, years, and never draw a solid provable conclusion.

Here is a video from Turkey purported to be an object that would hover for hours over the Sea of Marmara. It was spotted at about the same spot several times between 2007 and 2009. There are multiple videos and witnesses.

This is just one video. Click the link above for details about these sightings. It shows the object clearly and was filmed with a big zoom lens on a basic video camera. A bit less shake would make it easier to watch, but you can pause it any time. I have no doubt that it is a film of an unidentifiable object in the sky. It was not faked. The best way to describe it is that it looks like a spaceship. Some viewers of this one even claim they see beings standing in the windows.

There are plenty of hoaxes out there. I wish there weren’t because all hoaxes do are make fools of those they trick. There is no need for it. When genuine anomalous objects are presented in the wake of hoaxed footage it boosts skepticism. Hoaxes increase disbelief, so when a truly unique sighting is presented, they ruin the conversation for everyone. A perfect example is Aesop’s fable The Boy who Cried Wolf. Except that (spoiler alert) the kid gets eaten by wolves.

With all of the photos and video out there we must ask who is to be believed? Why would they lie? Hoaxers do so for simple reasons; attention, money, fun. So you must weigh evidence carefully. Just asking what an object is, is not enough. It is necessary to consider the source. Are they a hoaxer? If your answer is no, the next question should move along the lines of trying to explain what they filmed, if intriguing enough. How did they come to have a camera in the right place at the right time? How much footage do they have? Is it edited? Still, these questions are meant to snuff out a hoax. Better questions, once the undeniably weird object is scrutinized, are; What is it? What is it not? How did it get there? Where did it go? Will it come back?

Since the US government is getting back into the game of studying aerial phenomena, they have been at work debunking whatever they can explain, and denying knowledge of anything they can’t. This tack makes perfectly good sense, but some skeptics of the government (who believe they have hidden agendas), ask the same questions over and over again, and keep getting the same answers, because the truth is hard to swallow when the only real answer is “We don’t know.”

If they keep goading the authorities some Space Force colonel is going to finally lose it in front of the cameras after being fed up with stupid questions and will end up blasting the press corps. “I don’t know what it is. Do you? No. You don’t. But you think we do? I’ve got news for you. Nobody knows, that’s why it they are unidentified. Nobody can identify them. Lights in the sky. So what? Lights never hurt anybody.”

“What about laser beams?”

“Don’t be stupid. If you’re worried about going blind, stop looking directly into laser beams. Use your brain. We don’t know what they are. In fact, we don’t even care. It doesn’t matter. They don’t do anything. They don’t knock down planes. They fly out of the way. They don’t make noise. Only laws they break are the laws of physics and we have no way to penalize anybody for that, especially because we don’t know who they are, what they want, where they are from, how they got here, and where they are going. And we don’t care.”

Then he rips one of the many microphones out of the lectern, spikes it like a football, and stomps away.

Nobody can answer a question that nobody knows the answer to. All anybody can do is search. The videos from Turkey have been pored over for years and nobody has found any proof, or any truth. All we can do is suppose. It is amateur footage taken by a man who steadied his lens the best he could and got what he got. It is easy to blame the camera for producing an anomaly. Yet, I am sure that most of the time, when he focuses on other distant bright objects, he doesn’t see spacecraft. If he does, there is either a problem with the camera, the operator, or there are way more spaceships out there than we know about.

Pictures taken by people who are able to describe what they saw when they took their photos will always have the most to explain. Robots, however, have no such issue. When I say robots, what I mean are trap cameras, like your Ring doorbell or surveillance cameras set up to catch a glimpse of wild critters in the woods. When cameras are tripped they get what they get. You can’t argue with them. You can’t say they did not see what they saw because they obviously did. The photos are proof.

This UFO captured by a nighttime security camera on the Gold Coast of Australia is a prime example of getting what you get with undeniable results. It took photos of something. Sure looks like it was flying. Maybe there was more than one. Was it a drone flying around?

I have doubts about it being a drone. I researched bright drones and found they look more like this, with red and green navigation lights. I don’t think the security camera in Australia, the guy in Turkey, or I, myself, filmed drones.

We filmed something we could not identify. We filmed spacecraft.

I will leave you to your own opinions about the pictures from Australia and Turkey, but when it comes to my UFO, let me bend your ear just a bit more.

First of all, I should remind you of my goal: proving that it is not the Moon. I am certain of that because all of the other pictures I took of the Moon that night, looked like the Moon. Everything else I pointed the camera at that night was not the Moon and did not look like the Moon. Only the Moon looks like the Moon, and my camera made no mistake, morphing an image of the Moon into something it is not, several times in a row.

How do you know it is not a drone?

I never heard it, for one thing. It was silent and I thought I was looking at a star cluster.

Was it a plane or a helicopter?

No. They make noise and I know what they look like, and they don’t look like this.

Could it have been a satellite like this one?

Maybe! That sort of looks like what I photographed. But most satellites are small. You can hold a CubeSat in one hand.

The COSMIC-2 satellite is the size of a typical microwave oven. When flying miles high above it probably can’t be photographed so clearly with my camera. It would have to be much closer to earth (within our atmosphere) for me to get a picture like I did. These satellites occupy a long-term orbiting position of about 550 km (342 miles) above Earth, also called "mission orbit.” If my camera took a picture of a microwave oven-sized object over 300 miles away it would not have detail. It would be a spec if it could even be seen. So, I don’t think it was one of these.

But let’s not rule out satellites altogether.

The biggest one up there is the International Space Station. It is just a bit longer than a football field and gets photographed from Earth all the time. But my UFO is not the ISS. I am certain because it does not look like it and the ISS was not in the vicinity at the time I took the photos.

There are over 7,000 man made objects orbiting earth. Most of them are junk; used rocket bodies and debris that will stay up there indefinitely, until they hit something and change their trajectory, sending them on a new orbit, further out into space or hurtling toward Earth. When I searched for satellites passing overhead on March 28, 2020 I found one candidate that could possibly meet the criteria for being in the vicinity of my western sky.

The ARIANE 40+ Rocket Body is a tumbling mass of debris that is one of the brightest man made objects in the sky. It was in my western sky passing by at the very time I took my pictures that night.

They shot it up there to put a satellite into orbit and now the leftover parts are space junk. It is about 500 miles high and it orbits the Earth every 100 minutes. I found all this out with the websites below.

This one lets you plug in your location and time of observation and can tell you what was overhead. Of all the tracked satellites observable that night from Clearwater, Florida, the ARIANE 40+ R/B met most of the criteria for being in the right place at the right time. It was in the western sky, close to Venus and the Moon, traveling SSW to W right at the time I took my pictures. It moves at 4.64 miles per second and is one the brightest objects orbiting Earth. You can track it yourself.

Here is the path the ARIANE 40+ rocket body took that night.

From my viewpoint on the ground, looking due west, maybe this is what I photographed. The odds of it being this object get better with every detail I discover. Rocket bodies are not necessarily one single used rocket cylinder zipping past. Many times they are a debris field made up of multiple pieces of a rocket; nuts and bolts, tubing, wires, and various chunks of metal, some as small as a spec of dust. They roll and flip about glinting light from the sun on their various surfaces. They have no working electronics, no lights, no horn, no radio, no first-class cabin. They are junk.

Finally, however, I can’t prove it. If the ARIANE 40+R/B is what I filmed, it changed shape several times because it is a bunch of debris. As it moved past it never looked the same way twice.

Can my camera take a picture of a rocket body 500 miles high? Maybe. If you consider atmospheric magnification, like when we see when the Sun or Moon on the horizon, looking bigger than at high noon, or like Venus did when I saw her over Greenland, then it may be possible that a natural magnification took place, making the object appear bigger or closer than expected, skewing my calculations of distance.

So, now that we have all of the evidence about what was up in my western sky that night, let’s reflect on what is really, truly important here; proving that Jim from MUFON is wrong. He did not do his research, not the way a true investigator can, as I have now shown. He went for the easy explanation. The simple answer. He blamed my camera for taking a bad picture of the Moon, which it did not.

I don’t know what I photographed, but it was not the Moon. The more I look at the photos, and my camera’s capacity for taking photos through a cheap zoom lens, the more certain I am that it is unlikely to be a defunct rocket body. The object I photographed has structure. It has lights. It is unlikely to be 500 miles away because even a 100 foot long rocket body that far away, even with the assistance of an atmospheric lens, with my camera, would still be just a spec.

I know I am not any world class photographer but I worked steadily to get my picture of Venus with the Moon. Here is the photo I wanted to capture that night. I went out many nights over the last few years, snapping away, experimenting with my simple lens and all of the different settings. Finally, I got the photo I wanted on Wednesday, ‎February ‎22, ‎2023, ‏‎at 7:52 PM up in my western sky.

Maybe my UFO is space junk. Maybe it is a spy balloon. Or a drone. But no matter how you slice it, I know one thing for sure. It is definitely NOT the Moon.

It is an Unidentified Flying Object.

Thanks for reading.

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation.