STS-80

STS-80 was a Space Shuttle Columbia mission that launched from Kennedy Space Center on November 19, 1996, and landed there on December 7 after 17 days, 15 hours and 53 minutes in orbit, at the time the longest shuttle flight. Commander Kenneth Cockrell, pilot Kent Rominger and mission specialists Story Musgrave, Tom Jones and Tamara Jernigan deployed and retrieved two free-flying science platforms, the ORFEUS-SPAS II astronomy satellite and the Wake Shield Facility, which grew semiconductor thin films. Two planned spacewalks were canceled when Jones and Jernigan could not open the airlock's jammed outer hatch, a fault NASA traced to a loose screw.

The mission's UFO reputation began with its television downlink. Martyn Stubbs, a Vancouver television professional with access to satellite equipment, recorded NASA's live shuttle feeds in the 1990s, and his archive became a major source of the shuttle footage that circulates in UFO media. The best-known STS-80 sequences show a shuttle camera looking back at Earth as it recovers from sunlight, with points of light near the horizon and lights drifting over a large storm system. Promoters have long called them the "smoking gun," and the clips circulated again on Reddit and X in October 2026.

Tom Jones, who flew on the mission, has rejected that reading. Discussing a widely shared clip from the flight with Popular Mechanics, he said that "ice crystals or flakes of thruster residue in the near field are floating by" and are pushed out of view by a thruster's exhaust plume, and he added that there was "no way to keep people from using public domain footage for silly purposes." The downlink tapes carry no range data, a limit acknowledged even in an October 2026 post promoting them, so the clips alone cannot show how far away or how large the lights were.

A separate set of images entered the official record on July 10, 2026, when NASA contributed three STS-80 photographs to PURSUE Release 04, the Department of War's fourth tranche of UFO files. NASA's captions say the crew "captured a series of three images of an unidentified object in low-Earth orbit." In the first two the object sits near the center of the frame, to the right of Earth's limb; in the second it "appears to have rotated or tumbled about its major axis, which is consistent with the behavior of a free-floating object." In the third it is superimposed against Earth and appears to continue along a path between Columbia and the planet. The captions give no exact date, crew member or camera, and the photographs were filed with the rest of the archive's unresolved cases.

The stills drew wide comment after the release. Astrophysicist Avi Loeb told NewsNation that some images in the tranche were puzzling but that the shuttle photographs probably showed space trash, and Reddit users pointed back to Jones's earlier explanation of the flight's video. Promoters of the Martyn Stubbs tapes noted that NASA's three frames are separate from the downlink footage. STS-80 therefore carries two distinct records: unofficial video clips that have circulated for decades, and three official photographs that NASA itself described as showing an object behaving like something free-floating.