A post by Andrew Wozny on Examiner.com talked about the possibility of three large objects that were heading towards Earth. Wozny posted a few pictures of a blue blob floating in space with an accompanying article in which he quotes SETI Astrophysicist, Craig Kasnov.

Examiner

E.T. does not need to phone home anymore, someone, or something is on it’s way to earth.

SETI Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov ( not to be confused with Craig Kasnoff ) has announced the approach to the Earth of 3 very large, very fast moving objects. The length of the “flying saucers” is in the range of tens of kilometers. Landing, according to calculations of scientists, should be in mid-December 2012. Date coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar.

A few very large objects rapidly approaching the Earth – says SETI astrophysicist Craig Kasnov. Don’t take his word for it you can check it out for yourself. He recommends to go to the site http://www.sky-map.org/ and enter the coordinates of the giant UFO:

19 25 12 -89 46 03 – the first large object
16 19 35 -88 43 10 – a cylindrical object
02 26 39 -89 43 13 – the object as a circle

The project participants are assured that the facilities are absolutely real, and the American space agency NASA is trying to conceal important information.

None of these objects can be seen from the northern hemisphere. The second set of numbers in each line tells us that the “object” or “objects” is/are coming in from very deep in the southern hemisphere sky.

In any case, the only thing we can do now – wait for it – says Kasnov. – Soon celestial objects will be visible in a good telescope.

Keep your eyes on the skies… the truth is out there.

A video of the claim can be seen here:

Usually when I see these types of photos and claims, I tend to shy away. I figure I don’t want to clutter GT with frivolous claims. Plus I don’t want to insult your intelligence. I also take precaution when posting things from the Examiner.com. I mean, come on! 3 large objects slowly cruising towards Earth, who are the “length of flying saucers” and are supposed to land on 2012? Sounds like a bad summer blockbuster right?

A new post from Phil Plait, who was part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, over at the Bad Astronomy blog clears things up:

Are there three giant spaceships on their way to Earth, dooming us to extinction when they arrive in — gasp! — December 2012?

Duh. No.

But you might think otherwise reading an article about this on The Examiner’s website. It documents the three spaceships, shows images, and even has quotes from a SETI astrophysicist!

SETI Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov (not to be confused with Craig Kasnoff ) has announced the approach to the Earth of 3 very large, very fast moving objects. The length of the “flying saucers” is in the range of tens of kilometers. Landing, according to calculations of scientists, should be in mid-December 2012. Date coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar.

There are some teeny, tiny, problems with this story, though. Like, the “spaceships” are actually image defects and aren’t real, there’s no way to figure out how big they from the picture, and the “astrophysicist” quoted in the article doesn’t even exist.

But gee, other than that…

1) The spaceship that wasn’t
It’s been a while since I’ve done a good ol’ smackdown debunking, so let’s take these one at a time. First things first: the spaceships. Shown here, as you can see, the article refers to a picture of a big blue wormy-thingy floating in space. What could it be? Well, because I don’t trust articles online talking about giant spaceships invading us (or anything anyone says about doomsday in 2012), I went to the original pictures themselves.

NASA has an image archive viewer called SkyView, which I used to use all the time when I worked on Hubble data. It has access to dozens of surveys of the sky taken using various telescopes, including the Second Digitized Sky Survey the UFO article mentions. Amazingly, the article gives coordinates for the “spaceships”, so I took a look for myself. The DSS2 used various filters when observing the sky, but since the picture shows a blue object, I looked in the blue image first.

dss_blue_ufoHere’s the actual blue image from the DSS2 survey. Hmmm. You can see the object there, but also a lot of schmutz the article picture doesn’t show well. However, having seen stuff like this a bazillion times, I can tell right away this is what’s called an image defect, something that isn’t real. The original survey images were taken using glass plates sprayed with light-sensitive emulsion, which you can think of as film but on glass instead of thin flexible plastic. Later, the plates were scanned and digitized by technicians. When that happens, it’s impossible to get rid of all the defects that crop up, including hair or dust on the plate, small cracks and chips, and so on.

To my very experienced eye (30+ years as an astronomer, and well over a decade dealing with digital imagery including staring at raw Hubble data in excruciating detail) that’s what we have here. The other images are similar, showing blobby stuff that looks like lint or some other foreign object that got stuck in the plate when it was scanned.

Spaceships, they ain’t. Shocking, I know!

Read the whole article over at Bad Astronomy