James Oberg

So yeah, really, really difficult.

James Oberg, retired NASA space engineer and mission control member, now a journalist, space historian, and professional UFO explainer, suggested that the mysterious object was McDivitt's own booster rocket.

He stressed the point that the tadpole photo was presented to the public, which ufologists still hail as one of the best UFO photos ever made.

But that was never the object seen by the astronaut.

[laughs] The pro-UFO camp argued that the objects appear to follow curved paths, some of them even on trajectories following the curvature of the Earth, which small fragments close to the shuttle would not do.

Instead, they had to be large objects flying at high speeds, far away in the distance.

James Oberg, the guy we mentioned before, is one of the main proponents that the video simply showed tiny fragments up close, flakes of ice or insulation and just random bits and pieces that peeled off the shuttle.

He even coined a new term to refer to this type of debris, space dandruff.