One of the most spectacular video footages of a UFO encounter was taken by cameras onboard the Discovery space shuttle on 15th September 1991. The video sequence was picked up live by a number of amateurs who were directly monitoring the transmissions. The material has been shown in news broadcasts and circulated amongst UFO researches worldwide.The video shows several small, bright objects manoeuvring on screen, apparantly interacting with one another in a complex fashion. Sceptics have usually insisted these are merely shots of some of the many small ice particles which inevitably end up in orbit with every space shuttle.

A sudden, bright flash of light is then seen to the left of the picture, below the shuttle. The UFO then turns at a sharp angle and heads out into space at very high speed. Two thin beams of light (or possibly condensation trails) move rapidly up from the Earth's surface towards where the UFO would have been if it continued in its original orbit.

Subsequently, careful analysis of the video shows that:

The distance from the Discovery to the Earth's horizon is 2,757 kilometers.The UFO's speed before accelerating into space
is calculated at 87,000 km per hour (Mach 73).Three seconds after the light flash, the UFO changes direction sharply and accelerates off into space at 340,000 km per hour (Mach 285) within 2.2 seconds. (Such an acceleration would produce
14,000 g of force.)

The light flash and light beams (or contrails) that shoot into space have variously been described as a ground-based attempt to disrupt or destroy the UFO. Hoagland interprets the incident captured by the Discovery's videocamera more specifically as a "Star Wars" weapons test against a Star Wars drone (the UFO). Other UFO investigators prefer to describe it as a Star Wars attempt against an extraterrestrial UFO.
 
Whichever version you prefer, the technology implied is most certainly impressive - at least of Star Wars calibre.More recently, from New Zealand, investigators have reveiwed the video and corrected the actual time it was taken.

They have found the UFO incident was recorded over Australia and not the Philippine islands as was originally thought. Discovery's trajectory had already taken it across Surabaya in Java and above the Simpson Desert, Western Australia.

The UFO is first picked up coming over the horizon when the shuttle is close to Lake Carnegie, WA. Later, the light flash and one contrail can be tracked back to Exmouth Bay near the North West Cape military facility. A second contrail can be tracked back to the Pine Gap military facility in central australia.

US investigators have been asking their Australian counterparts to provide further information which they don't have and which they probably can't get. All the information we have on the incident so far comes from the US and New Zealand. And, of course there are Australia's stringent secrecy laws to contend with.

Professor Jack Kasher from the University Of Nebraska, who worked with NASA scientists at the Mitchell Space Centre in Alabama, studied the footage and produced a 105-page report. Kasher states: 'NASA claimed they were ice crystals. We proved that was physically impossible. Ice crystals couldn't change direction the way these objects could. We calculated that if they were ten miles away from the shuttle, the biggest went from zero to 2,500 mph (4,023 km/h) in one second.'

The scenario was probably captured on video purely by chance. Along with other UFO incidents recorded on video by NASA, this material has contributed significantly towards NASA's recent decision to discontinue live transmissions from space.