James E. Oberg

James E. Oberg is a former space shuttle engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the author of ten books on spaceflight, who is frequently cited for offering sceptical, prosaic explanations of reported UFO sightings.¹

Oberg’s best-documented sceptical interventions concern anomalies filmed during Space Shuttle missions. Regarding the STS-80 video showing disk-like objects, Oberg wrote in a web posting of February 1997 that the event was identical in origin to scenes from STS-48 and to numerous others throughout the shuttle programme.² Oberg said he put the question directly to astronaut Story Musgrave, who he described as not shy about discussing anomalies of any kind, and that Musgrave told him he had seen nothing unusual on the flight, at that point or any other.³⁴ For the STS-48 video anomalous objects incident, journalist Ross Coulthart described Oberg as a notorious sceptic debunker who attempted a rebuttal suggesting the objects were ice particles thrown off by the shuttle’s thrusters, with their apparent movement caused by thruster manoeuvres.⁵ Maaneli “Max” Derakhshani has said he considers Oberg’s ice-particle explanation a plausible first guess, but finds that the available STS-48 data do not fit it well.⁶ Separately, Mark C. Carlotto said Oberg attributed the flash seen in the STS-48 video to a Reaction Control System (RCS) thruster firing.⁷ Derakhshani has also said that Oberg, then of NASA, had back-and-forth exchanges with Mark C. Carlotto and Jack Kasher over the STS-48 incident, but did not do so officially on NASA’s behalf.⁸

Oberg’s work has extended into other areas of spaceflight controversy. In 2006, NASA commissioned him to write an official NASA book explaining why the Moon landing hoax conspiracy theory is unfounded, a commission that Richard C. Hoagland said was later abruptly cancelled by another part of the agency, which withdrew from publishing the book.⁹¹⁰ Following the loss of the Mars Polar Lander (MPL), and days before Thomas Young issued his investigation report, Oberg published a story via United Press International accusing NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) employees of having known from early in the mission that the spacecraft was doomed by software problems linked to its landing legs.¹¹ JPL employees denied the report in terms including “bunk,” “complete nonsense,” and “wacko."¹² On 2000-03-29, Dan Goldin flew to JPL to address personnel following the Goldin address to JPL personnel, which came after two damaging weeks that included Oberg’s UPI accusation and the release of the Young Report.¹³ Mike Bara has said that Oberg’s intervention led to Ken Johnston’s dismissal from his unpaid position as a JPL Solar System Ambassador, and separately described an Oberg article for National Broadcasting Company (NBC) News as an assault on Johnston’s integrity.¹⁴¹⁵ Oberg also dismissed comments made by John Glenn during a 2001 Frasier appearance as simple humour, given their comedic context.¹⁶ In an account concerning the 1964 Vandenberg sighting, Florenze Mansmann backed Robert Jacobs’ account after reading that sceptics Oberg and Philip Klass were attacking it as fanciful and uncorroborated.¹⁷

Discussing the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2017 reporting, Oberg said he was doubtful about the programme, on the grounds that plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits could account for the stories involved.¹⁸ He said many people are active in the air and do not want others to know about it, and are happy to lurk unrecognised within the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.¹⁹ At the same time, Oberg said he welcomed research into unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and considered there could well be a “pearl there."²⁰