http://www.randi.org/jr/110703.html "Astronaut Dr. Edward T. Lu safely returned from orbit two weeks ago from a six-month-plus tour as science officer on the International Space Station (ISS)..... A very interesting event took place during Ed's six months as the Science Office aboard the ISS. There were mysterious flashes of light that he saw while studying Earth's aurora from orbit. Ed was an astrophysics researcher before becoming an astronaut in 1994, and he estimates that he spent 100 hours watching the northern and southern lights during his half-year in space. In fact, he rhapsodized on the auroral light shows, which occur well below the station's 380-kilometer (236 mile) altitude He reported the beautiful shimmers and pulses that result from natural variations in incoming solar particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field. And, the Sun was building up to a maximum activity in the last days that Ed was up there noting these wonders. But on three occasions — 11 July, 24 September and 12 October — he saw something markedly different that puzzled him: flashes as bright as the brightest stars, which lasted only a second and then blinked off again. In one instance, he called crewmate Malenchenko over to the window, and he witnessed the bursts, too. Now, the UFO nuts out there will relish this as further support for extraterrestrials looking in on us, but Ed Lu tends to be a bit more rational. He noted that these phenomena were very different from the random but harmless retinal flashes that many astronauts experience when heavy cosmic rays hit their eyeballs. Yes, being less protected that we are under the Earth's atmosphere, astronauts and cosmonauts are peppered with more cosmic rays that we can experience. They "see" little flashes that record the passing of cosmic radiation through their visual centers. True scientist that he is, Ed has tried to rule out other obvious explanations. The flashes he and Malenchenko saw didn't look to him to be the sunlight reflecting from the fellow-traveler dust particles that accompany the ISS. Those flashes last longer than a second. Nor, he thinks, were they meteors entering the atmosphere below the ISS; they would have appeared as linear streaks. Since the mysterious flashes only appeared in the direction of the aurora, Ed knows that the viewing conditions were wrong for a satellite or other artificial object. He also checked weather maps, which showed no lightning storms below him at the time of his observations. All of this led him to the tentative conclusion that he had seen a previously unreported phenomenon, probably associated with the aurora. In an interview with Nature Magazine by telephone from the space station, Ed commented on his discovery: "It's a good thing to get this out in the open, so that people who do know more can start to think about it." Yes, of course it is. It will probably be several months before Ed will be able to get around to examining the evidence in detail and discussing it with aurora specialists, who should really be very interested in something so novel and unexpected."
