Aldebaran S on Unsplash

Space is often described as silent, tranquil, and beautiful. A black infinity of stars, traversed by gleaming ships, where the laws of physics are precise and unfailing. For those who have left Earth’s atmosphere, however, tranquility can sour quickly. Astronauts train for malfunctions, orbital debris, and isolation. What they don’t train for are events that cannot be explained. For decades, astronauts from various countries and programs have reported unexplained events in orbit. Unresolved to this day, each of their accounts, whether dismissed as misidentified objects, psychological responses to stress, or something far more sinister, has one thing in common: the terror of discovering the inexplicable with nowhere to hide.

A Knock at the Door

NASA on Unsplash

In 2003, Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei became the first person in space sent on a mission by the Chinese space program. The entire event was carried out in a highly confidential manner. During his trip into space, Liwei heard a loud sound that caused him to become quite unnerved.

It was a loud knocking sound, as if something were banging on the outside of the spacecraft. It was a regular, metallic sound, almost like if you took an object and were hitting an iron sheet. Liwei immediately peered outside of the ship through a small porthole. The door was firmly closed, and nothing appeared to be dislodged or hit the door.

Nothing. He saw nothing. It is weird enough to hear a knocking sound in space, which is not really a place where you can hear much of anything. That is because space is a vacuum, and sound cannot vibrate and carry as it does on Earth. Even weirder is that Liwei was not the only Chinese astronaut to report hearing the knocking sounds.

On two subsequent missions, in 2005 and 2008, Liwei’s fellow countrymen also heard this noise. After the mission, an internal investigation and engineering reviews were made, but no real explanation for this noise was ever given.

The Glowing Object

NASA on Unsplash

NASA had already sent four human beings into space when Gordon Cooper became the first American to pilot a space capsule alone on a mission that circled the globe 22 times. Somewhere between hours 17 and 18, as fatigue and system checks were becoming routine, Cooper saw a bright green object outside his Mercury capsule. It was moving with purpose, quickly drawing closer to his spacecraft, as though it might be pursuing it. Unlike space junk or other orbital debris, the object did not simply drift past but seemed instead to approach with intention.

Oddly enough, the sighting was not just Cooper’s. The tracking station at Muchea, Australia, located at a considerable distance from his spacecraft, also detected a fast-moving object quickly converging upon his capsule. Taken together, the two observations added a measure of validity to an event that might otherwise be chalked up to a visual illusion. The astronaut would later state that the sighting on his flight “confirmed for me something I knew 15 years before I went to space.” As part of a class he was taking as an undergraduate, Cooper and his fellow students had witnessed a series of unexplained aerial events in Colorado. The flying saucer near Earth’s orbit, he claimed, was not a single unusual incident but evidence of a broader presence of things that move around like that, intelligently and with purpose.