Need Debunking: Video claiming zigzaggin objects and movement prove EVA filmed in pool

mudr0

New Member
I searched through the metabunk site to see if these particular points have been addressed, but didn’t find anything, as this is not merely a "those are bubbles" claim. I need help debunking this:

A youtuber (named p-brane) is claiming that objects cannot zigzag in a weightless vacuum (outer space) and “any object in motion that is not tethered has to go in a straight line”.
upload_2019-2-1_19-52-1.png
1. The video shows “bubbles”/debris zigzag as they move through space as if being influenced by water currents in a pool.

2. Next, the video shows stationary objects in outer space being displaced by nearby objects moving towards (but not touching) them. The claim is that this can only occur underwater and not outer space.

I can see that the “bubbles”, when the video zooms in and slowed down, looks more like flat jaggy flakes of something… definitely not bubbles, but I’m not sure about the claims p-brane is making about movement and displacement. Can anyone help?

I have the video timestamped queued in 3 places to take you to the relevant demonstrations and claims being made:

1. [zig zagging "bubbles" footage]
2:23-2:58
1a.
So here we are supposedly on the ISS, this is from a space walk. And here is a piece of debris or actually we know it's probably a bubble that just made a right turn.Nothing can make a turn, there has to be zero atmosphere for them to step out of a vehicle going 17k mph.Thee can be absolutely no atmosphere at all, not even ruffle a feather or a hair on their head. So right there it's busted
Content from External Source
1z.JPG

1b.2:58-
[objects cannot zigzag in a weightless vacuum]
2z.JPG

Source: https://youtu.be/IcwhwZr7_EU?t=176

C. [astronauts foot appears to cause air or water flow that moves a strap]
strap.JPG


Source: https://youtu.be/IcwhwZr7_EU?t=398

D. [an object in motion appears to cause air or water flow to move an (antennae?) cable]
cable.JPG


Source: https://youtu.be/IcwhwZr7_EU?t=450
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have the video timestamped queued in 3 places
well your first embedded timestamp is referring to footage that is not a spacewalk. it is the Atlantis docking with the MIR.
During the STS-74 mission in 1995, the crew used an IMAX camera to document the space shuttle Atlantis's rendezvous and docking with the Mir space station. The 65mm camera system was located in the Atlantis' cargo bay and provided a unique fish-eye perspective
Content from External Source
edit add link: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/shuttle_station/features/imax_s95_22116.html

not sure that matters. but just saying.

as far as his zero-g claims... i'm confused what that means because
By contrast, greater distance leads to rapidly diminishing gravitational pull. But where the space station roams, some 220 miles (354 km) up, the force of gravity is still about 90 percent what it is here on the surface. Earth's gravity is still pulling down on astronauts in orbit.
Content from External Source
https://www.space.com/7050-gravity-space.html
 
Last edited:
not sure that matters. but just saying.

I'm not sure either, but thanks for your reply. :)

Hoping to get more feedback from others too. Trying to get these 2 things nailed down.

BTW, thanks for improving my thread title and adding that screenshot.
 
Hoping to get more feedback from others too.

I try. the change in direction of this little debris at 02:25 seems to happen in the exact moment of docking (as deidre mentioned, not a spacewalk as the narrator claims), hence change of momentum of the ISS (more mass attached after docking), not much, but enough that it looks like the debris would change direction. in fact, it is the ISS which changes slightly its speed compare to it.

and I think that that goes for most of his "proofs", slightly orbital course-corrections of the ISS and because the cameras are fixed to the station, it just looks like the debris would change direction.
 
Space next to a space station, especially on a spacewalk, is not a pure hard vacuum. There's navigation jets and various other emissions of gasses both from the space station and from the space suits. Gasses in space also travel in straight lines, so a puff of gas can (in theory) blow around a nearby ice flake.

And thinking about ice flakes in a vaccum in freefall, it's possible (off the top of my head) that they self propel by rapid boiling/sublimation.

There's quite a lot of explanations that you'd have to eliminate before settling on "it is fake". The pool explanation doesn't work either, as there's no light reduction with distance.
 
2. Next, the video shows stationary objects in outer space being displaced by nearby objects moving towards (but not touching) them. The claim is that this can only occur underwater and not outer space.
the cable at 07:30? I could be wrong, but I think I see some (pressurized?) gas coming out of that tumbling "thing" (no idea what this is, either) and that gas is causing the movement of the cable.
 
In one scene in the first video, the camera appears to be attached to a person and is moving erratically. It looks to me that the particle is moving in a straight line, very close to the camera, but that the camera movement makes it look like the particle is jerking about. On top of that, bubbles don’t jerk about wildly, either. If you could find video of 2 particles moving in different directions in the same scene, that would be definitive proof that they’re not bubbles.

The other videos are interesting. I spent a few minutes trying to find out the air pressure outside the ISS without luck but did find that the number is very small. While there is sufficient atmosphere to slow the IIS down, there is not enough air to allow moving objects to push others.

After watching the last video multiple times, it seems possible that the moving “object” actually does contact the cable in question. The edge of the object may have brushed the cable. The coloration of the object, the lighting, and the resolution of the video make it tough to see, but the corner or edge closest to the camera seems to fade in and out of picture as the lighting changes due to the movement.
 
well your first embedded timestamp is referring to footage that is not a spacewalk. it is the Atlantis docking with the MIR.
During the STS-74 mission in 1995, the crew used an IMAX camera to document the space shuttle Atlantis's rendezvous and docking with the Mir space station. The 65mm camera system was located in the Atlantis' cargo bay and provided a unique fish-eye perspective
Content from External Source
not sure that matters. but just saying.

as far as his zero-g claims... i'm confused what that means because
By contrast, greater distance leads to rapidly diminishing gravitational pull. But where the space station roams, some 220 miles (354 km) up, the force of gravity is still about 90 percent what it is here on the surface. Earth's gravity is still pulling down on astronauts in orbit.
Content from External Source
https://www.space.com/7050-gravity-space.html

Yes, the second linked article is relevant. I have not viewed the video yet only skimmed the comments, but already I have a question. There is a common belief that at zero G weightlessness is caused by the distance from Earth. Though gravitational attraction does fall with the square of the distance, the ISS is in low earth orbit about 250 miles away, so far too close to allow such weightlessness.

It is because the astronauts are in free fall, just like passengers on a plane in a parabolic arc or in a freely falling elevator. Orbiting has been described as continually falling towards the earth, but missing to one side.
 
I searched through the metabunk site to see if these particular points have been addressed, but didn’t find anything, as this is not merely a "those are bubbles" claim. I need help debunking this:

A youtuber (named p-brane) is claiming that objects cannot zigzag in a weightless vacuum (outer space) and “any object in motion that is not tethered has to go in a straight line”.
upload_2019-2-1_19-52-1.png
1. The video shows “bubbles”/debris zigzag as they move through space as if being influenced by water currents in a pool.

2. Next, the video shows stationary objects in outer space being displaced by nearby objects moving towards (but not touching) them. The claim is that this can only occur underwater and not outer space.

I can see that the “bubbles”, when the video zooms in and slowed down, looks more like flat jaggy flakes of something… definitely not bubbles, but I’m not sure about the claims p-brane is making about movement and displacement. Can anyone help?

I have the video timestamped queued in 3 places to take you to the relevant demonstrations and claims being made:



Source: https://youtu.be/IcwhwZr7_EU?t=176



Source: https://youtu.be/IcwhwZr7_EU?t=398



Source: https://youtu.be/IcwhwZr7_EU?t=450

I checked p-brane's video for source information on the video clips, but none is provided. I wondered whether more contextual info and perhaps higer res images might help to interpret what is happening.

Of course, on action that migbt help is to contact the relevant s
Pace agencies for their comments. It couldn't hurt.
 
The edge of the object may have brushed the cable. The coloration of the object, the lighting, and the resolution of the video make it tough to see, but the corner or edge closest to the camera seems to fade in and out of picture as the lighting changes due to the movement.
most likely. what I thought to be some gas, seems to be just the blurry reflection of the astronaut on the surface of the station when he grabs after the object.
edit/
I checked p-brane's video for source information on the video clips, but none is provided.
at least from the last spacewalk with the moving cable the title give it: ISS expedition 56 EVA 51.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_56

last year in june.
 
Last edited:
at least from the last spacewalk with the moving cable the title give it: ISS expedition 56 EVA 51.
is that on his video? dang. i just spent like an hour looking though footage :) but you won't believe this .. i did think "that looks like Faustel's hangy thing" and turns out it is!

anyway the hangy things are clled security tethers.
upload_2019-2-2_13-44-15.png


and you can see in video that there is a thin string coming out the one side. if you play this vid a bit forward you can see how that little string is moving another cable all over.
string.JPG

th very quick bit with OP clip is a bit later than my embedd. here is the Timestamp on the pic.
string33.JPG

full video

Source: https://youtu.be/caSRfwrbPAs?t=11191


ps. they are running an ethernet cable, the guy from NASA says before my embed time play.. if anyone cares.
 
Last edited:
In one scene in the first video, the camera appears to be attached to a person and is moving erratically. It looks to me that the particle is moving in a straight line, very close to the camera, but that the camera movement makes it look like the particle is jerking about. On top of that, bubbles don’t jerk about wildly, either. If you could find video of 2 particles moving in different directions in the same scene, that would be definitive proof that they’re not bubbles.

Agree. It's a parallax effect.

-It's a wide angle lens and the debris is much closer to the camera than one might assume.
-The camera is moving back and forth.
-The background object - the MIR spacecraft - is distant.
-The apparent zigzag movement of the debris is caused by parallax. The object is not actually moving in that way.

I'm too lazy to make my own video, but this should demonstrate.

This is a static line of lights. The only thing moving is the camera. The closest light "moves" in relation to the farthest light. These lights are close together. The effect in the video is more dramatic because the debris is very close to the camera and the MIR is much farther away.



Try it yourself. Hold your finger close to your face. Move your head back and forth. Concentrate on a distant object. Your finger will move in a zig-zag pattern in relation to the distant object. But it's not moving. Your eye is.
 
Last edited:
Thanks to everyone for all the input, it is much appreciated.

After watching the last video multiple times, it seems possible that the moving “object” actually does contact the cable in question. The edge of the object may have brushed the cable. The coloration of the object, the lighting, and the resolution of the video make it tough to see, but the corner or edge closest to the camera seems to fade in and out of picture as the lighting changes due to the movement.

With regards to the 3rd timestamp example, I’ve gone back and forth thinking the same thing that maybe the safety tether was actually hitting the cable. Although I will say, further into that video portion, p-brane changes the contrast to be able to see better, and when he alternates between two frames, it sure looks like the tether is causing the cable to move without hitting it.

On the 2nd video clip example, the astronaut’s boot causes the strap to move without touching it, so I really don’t know what’s going on with that.
 
On the 2nd video clip example, the astronaut’s boot causes the strap to move without touching it, so I really don’t know what’s going on with that.
perhpas you can find the original video of that so we can see some context.
 
With regards to the 3rd timestamp example, I’ve gone back ...

Maybe this will help. I’m revising my opinion on this example in light of the information provided by @Dierdre regarding the Safety Tethers. The safety tether has a thin cable coming out of it that attaches to a hard point on the ship surface. The tether is so thin that the low-resolution camera does not pick it up. In other words, the block that we see in the video (which I originally said might contact the cable), is actually in the middle of the safety line and probably doesn’t contact the cable.

When the astronaut moves away from the hard point (the anchor point), the entire length of the tether straightens into a line, which moves the block and the invisible wire downward (toward the spacecraft), touching and moving the cable. If you could see that wire, it would go from the block towards the lower left side of the screen, over the top of the cable.

If we had the original footage at original resolution, you could probably see the safety wire.

Regarding timestamp #2, I don’t know what’s causing the effect but the interaction between foot and strap is not consistent with my observations while filming underwater. I can’t offer my own videos as proof, but we should be able to find something online.
 
If we had the original footage at original resolution, you could probably see the safety wire.
i'm not sure the outside cameras are any good. even in the helmet upclose shots where you can see the cable well, it disappears when it hits a shaded area of the ship.

in the beginning of the footage (footage here is fullscreen but timestamps are off by 4 minutes or so), it shows the the path of what they are going to do. Apparently the red stripes are Arnold this time (not Feustel)... the long [thin] safety tethers look to be either 55 or 85 feet. How big the ISS is and where he ended up tethering in that shot is beyond my mathematical interest level :) it seems they are 'retractable' cable mechanisms though, so based on the direction the mechanism box seems to want to float most often, i'm guessing he attached to that highest and closest blue handrail.. but that's just a guess as microgravity and distances aren't my strong suit.
mission.JPG


st.JPG
 
perhpas you can find the original video of that so we can see some context.

It may be tough since all p-brane said was that it came from a 9-hour video. I looked through 9-hour video that’s already in the thread but was unsuccessful. I did though see the thin string attached to the safety tether.

With that said, my mind was swirling from all comments everyone left the other day. I must’ve seen your words and timestamp regarding the thin string attachment on the safety tether, but it didn’t register, until I was scanning that 9-hour video in hopes of possibly finding the scene of that 3rd timestamp of my starting thread post. I apologize for being so slow on the uptake. Your observation is key. Thank you.


Maybe this will help.

Absolutely. Many thanks.
 
Last edited:
It may be tough since all p-brane said was that it came from a 9-hour video.
this p-brain is really working trying to find "odd" things! google images actually gave me a hit!
USEVA48-12.jpg
http://spaceflight101.com/iss/us-eva-48-successfully-completed-outside-iss/

its EVA-48. the japanese guy, it's his first spacewalk so the few places i stopped they were always talking about his tethers :)

anyway, it probably is 9 hrs long too. (5 parts, parts 1-3 are 2 hrs each)... but as soon as i saw the cable string thether here i stopped scrolling, so never got to the actual footage. but i'm linking the video with embedded timestamp from my pic here. the pink dots are mine, the cable line is directly below my dots.
debunk.JPG



Source: https://youtu.be/H6FrcnGjJWg?t=900

ok couldnt resist. p-brain purposefully used a bad photo resolution so we cant see the cable. it's clear as day in the video.
upload_2019-2-3_22-57-56.png


and you can watch his far
foot push against the cable as the strap moves. :( bad p-brain.
77.png
 
Last edited:
Not to confuse the issue, but I was watching ISS mission 56, spacewalk #51 and found some good footage of the safety device as they are connecting units to one of the astronauts. You can see how thin the cable is.

Here is the video:

Source: https://youtu.be/H5HakyzDxE8


At 3:30 you can see the female astronaut in the background preparing the units and then there is a switch to one of suit cameras, which shows the units very clearly, and then a brief moment when they pull out a couple of inches of cable.
 
It may just be me but it seems a little difficult here to work out what people are referring to. There are three clips in the OP, so saying which one a particular debunk is of would be helpful.

Also, I'm not sure what the reference to "P-Brane using a bad photo" is since he's using video footage.

Then some of the references to watching things on videos are followed by stills.

I'm also unclear how we can know that P-Brane purposefully fudged this.

Could someone do a nice tidy up/summary please? :)
 
I'm not sure what the reference to "P-Brane using a bad photo" is since he's using video footage
i changed it to "bad resolution".

I'm also unclear how we can know that P-Brane purposefully fudged this.
he references getting the clip, of the foot pushing the strap, from a 9 hour video. So he didn't just copy it from another conspiracy channel or he wouldnt have known that that space flight was that long. If you watched that section of spacewalk in post #20 you would see it is impossible not to see the tether wire/cable.
 
Agree. It's a parallax effect.

There's another example on the video where the camera seems fixed and stationary but the debris is changing direction as it's moving. Now, it may be a matter of the various gas emissions from space station itself as Mick West has suggested, or it is at the moment of docking and there is a change in mass and momentum as DasKleineTeilchen has mentioned.


Source: https://youtu.be/IcwhwZr7_EU?t=2m22s
 
Last edited:
ok i did not find the OPs exact blob or zoomed out footage, and my brightening skills leave something to be desired, but i think this at least shows that whatever is happening is happening immediately after those two pieces locked together.
(the orange tube is part of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and is attatching to the upper white tube which is the MIR space station... which you can watch by back tracking my video embedded timestamp by a few minutes)

Because i did find two other blobs floating up and to me the sun on the vessel is exact. i tried brightening the footage in this pic to better show how the sun on both pics is the same.
the yellow circles on my footage pic (right: timestamp 15:18 ) are where you can watch the blobs move up in this video attached.
yy.JPG


this video starts about 10 secs before the blobs start to appear, the left hand blob appears first, because i want to show how the camera is moving.

Source: https://youtu.be/OoSIhDomRmo?t=878
 
Last edited:
It's from an IMAX movie called Mission to Mir.
timestamp approx 17:44

That’s it! Right at the moment of contact and linking together of the Atlantis and the MIR, that floater on the right changes course and moves away. Also, there’s another floating blob on upper left that also changes course at that very moment and moves away. The two floaters change course in opposite directions. Maybe it is a release of gasses that Mick West mentioned. You do great detective work.

The floater on the right appears pancake flat, which is obvious to see as it flips over and over.
 
Last edited:
changes course at that very moment and moves away.[/The two floaters change course in opposite directions

:) i'm actually not sure if that's just a coincidence. they do talk about in some clip i watched, one of the ships using jet [thrusters?] to jam it into place. But no idea where they would be or if that would cause a flow of something [gaslike].

I'm wondering if it just happens to hit the fisheye lens at just the right spot, that it only appears to change direction. @Mick West might know better. I didnt see the blob at the upper left though.. it does seem to do a fishhook at the same time. hhmmm....

I can't believe all the sites i read through and noone bothered to say "yea, imax made a movie about it"!
 
The floater on the right appears pancake flat, which is obvious to see as it flips over and over.
to me what is interesting is that in the OP zoomed in clip, the blob appears to be moving up then to the right.. but in the original footage it is coming towards us and then (to me anyway) it is going downwards.

That's why i'm always suspicious if channels don't link their source. I'm not saying p-brane was purposefully hiding things on this one, he might have seen the footage from some other CT channel. But it's a good example of not trusting things from just a clip with no context.
 
Moderation Note: deirdre
I edited the OP a bit to give labels to the 4 different examples being discussed in this thread. I also added some screengrabs so people can refer back to the OP to match up comments.
 
He references getting the clip, of the foot pushing the strap, from a 9 hour video. So he didn't just copy it from another conspiracy channel or he wouldnt have known that that space flight was that long. If you watched that section of spacewalk in post #20 you would see it is impossible not to see the tether wire/cable.

So I've come around to your way of thinking here - hence the clickbait title of my video - and agree that he's being more than a little naughty:


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Q20Kwy59c

Hopefully I did enough of a crediting job.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top