Hello and welcome to the program. You
know, a full warning in this episode, we're asking,
can NASA be that dumb? That's
correct. Can NASA be that dumb? Of
course, we're talking about this latest chunk of space
junk that has fallen from outer space and actually
went through a guy's house and they're trying to
determine if it was NASA's fault. This
article comes to us from watching the post .com. It
says a piece of metal tore through his roof. Was
it junk from a space station? And
the article is by Daniel Wu, written April 4th,
2004. It's got a pretty nice picture
of this hunk of space junk here. I'll
put the links up at the Kofi and the locals'
websites. It says Alejandro Otero was
traveling overseas when he received a panic call from
his son back home. He goes, Dad, are you guys
sitting down? Otero recalled an object tumbling
from the sky had struck Otero's Naples Florida house
with a bang that startled his son. Otero
cut his trip short and returned home to find a
hole torn through his roof and second story floor. The
bewildered father searched for the culprit and found
an unusual projectile, a dense cylindrical piece of
charred metal, a little smaller than a soup can
lodged in a wall. Now I have to imagine this
thing falling from space like that must have been
going pretty fast when it hit that house. Just
it's just it's really frightening to imagine what
could have happened if somebody would have been
struck by this thing. I mean, instant death. It
didn't look like a normal piece of debris to Otero.
He insisted I knew it was
from outer space. Otero's theory might not be far
off. He learned from searching
online that a pallet of old batteries, jettison from
the International Space Station in 2021 had been
expected to re -enter Earth's atmosphere on March
8th the day his house was struck. He
connected with astrophysicists on social
media and together they wondered had his house been
hit by a garbage disposal from orbit several years in
the making. Now just think about this. NASA
has all the stuff floating around up here. They're
just dumping this stuff off, not a care in the
world. They know it's going to hit,
you know, planet Earth somewhere. I
suppose they figure, well, you know, what's Earth's
like, what, two thirds, three quarters of water?
It'll probably land in the ocean
somewhere. Nobody'll notice, but not necessarily.
You know, you have what, six
billion people on this planet. It's
bound to hit someone someday. And
it just about did right through this guy's house,
through the second floor, down to the first floor.
And does NASA care? No.
Did they warn anybody? Hey, everybody be on the lookout
for falling space junk on March 8th. Nope.
Not a word. Silence. It was compelling enough to
warrant NASA's attention. Investigators
from the agency came to Atera's house last week to
retrieve the metal cylinder and determine whether it
came from the ISS. Yeah, not a minute too late.
It's unreal, Atera said. NASA
spokesperson, Josh Finch, said the agency is
analyzing the object in Florida's key space center
to determine its origin. If the debris did come from
the ISS, Atera may have just been the victim of
astronomically bad luck. It's
common for NASA to toss its trash into space where
it usually is vaporized upon re -entering the
Earth's atmosphere. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist
at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
wrote in an email, you know, the go to a
completely new place or man has never been. And
the first thing they do is fill it with trash.
Disgusting, actually. But
the load of space garbage whose re -entry coincided
with Atera's house being struck was particularly
noteworthy. The haul, a 2 .9 ton pallet of
old nickel hydrogen batteries. Isn't
that awesome? 6 ,000 pounds of batteries was
the heaviest object ever jettisoned from the ISS
when it was flung into space in March 2021. Gizmo
reported. Yeah, I know we've got satellites
around here and we got people going up and down
all the time. And I know there's a lot of
people that live on planet Earth, but we've got 6 ,000
pounds of nickel hydrogen batteries. So
let's just dump them off. The
worst than some idiot driving down the highway
just dumping their garbage out because what these guys
were doing could be deadly. But
she noticed the whole theme of the article here. Well,
that's just how we do things. And
if you're a little person and you get in the way,
well, that's just too bad. NASA
had intended to load the old batteries in an
unmanned cargo spacecraft for disposal, but a failed
Soyuz rocket launch in 2008 snarled the schedule of
spacewalks and departures from the ISS and forced
astronauts to release the pallet into space on its
own, according to Gizmodo. Well,
isn't that spatial? Blame it on the Russians. You
know, there's an old saying, poor planning on
your part. Does not constitute an emergency
on my part. And NASA seems to be full of
poor planning. That pallet was expected to
orbit Earth harmlessly for several years before burning
up in the atmosphere, according to a NASA news
release from 2021. Oh yeah, they've done a good
job with that. The US space force tracked the
pallet as it orbited the planet over the next few
years, McDowell said. In early March, McDowell
tweeted that the pallet was predicted to re -enter
Earth's atmosphere around March 8th and that some
pieces of debris might survive entry. Germany's
federal office for civil protection and disaster
relief issued a warning about the incoming debris,
according to space .com. Well,
what happens if this thing hits the Pentagon or the
White House or a nuclear power plant? I
mean, can you see how careless these people are
and how incompetent they are? Ateros
son wasn't hurt when the metal object took his
house. Ateros said Ateros was compelled
to investigate the source of the mystery projectile.
He conversed with McDowell on
social media and eventually connected with NASA. The
agency represented his visit to his house March 28th to
retrieve the metal object. He
said, I don't hear a word about them taking
responsibility. McDowell said he thinks there's a
good chance the projectile that struck Ateros home did
originate from the ISS based on tracking of the
space junk's descent. He said, duh, debris was
probably scattered over a few hundred miles from
midgolf to Florida. McDowell said, I think very likely
that Ateros object is indeed from the pallet.
What if the thing would have
hit a passenger plane in midflight? Would
that have been nice, wouldn't it? Well,
we, you know what, we would never hear about it.
We would just be told, well,
you know, it's probably a boing. After
the investigation, Ateros would like to keep his
cosmic souvenir. I asked for that a hundred
times. He said, Ateros said that,
well, NASA's representatives were shocked and apologetic
about his experience. They told him they first needed
to confirm the debris was in fact the agency's
property. That's why they took it. They
did not confirm whether they would return the
object to Ateros. He said, no, he'll never see
that again. That's my guess. I'd
love to keep it for all kinds of reasons, but I'm
not holding my breath. Ateros
said, you know what, he would have been a lot
smarter to put this thing on eBay, I think as NASA
investigates, Ateros is also working to fix his house.
He has contacted his insurance
company about repairing the roof. I
imagine they'll call that an act of God. Sadly,
I went on the website and filed the claim and had to
click on what kind of damage it was. Ateros
said, there was no option that matched. I
clicked other. Wow. Now that's such a great
case and a pretty decent article how NASA treats
taxpayers, how NASA reacts when it fails. And
you have to ask yourself, why would we trust these
guys to share pictures with us ever? Until
next time, this is UFO Warning over and out.