Collection
Two authoritative sources, both public, and they do not agree.
The comfortable theory of misinformation is that claims survive because people are credulous. These files describe something harder. In each of them the primary record — a federal agency, a national park service, a peer-reviewed paper — contradicts another part of the primary record, and the popular version survives by quoting whichever voice suits it. NASA’s photograph catalogue lists the features of frame STS088-724-66 as mountains, snow and a river drainage; NASA’s own feature article publishes the same frame with an arrow marking the Great Wall. NASA’s catalogue calls another object “space debris” and never says which debris, so the identification everybody repeats is not the agency’s at all. The Park Service dates the Racetrack ice breakup to 21 December; the published paper records the movement on the 20th. Read together they make a point no single file can: that a claim can be checkable, checked, and still unresolved, because the checking produced two answers. That is not a failure of the sources. It is what a real record looks like, and it is the reason this publication cites the specific page rather than the institution.
Leroy Chiao shot it with a 180 mm telephoto in 2004. He said afterwards that he never saw the Great Wall, and wasn’t sure his picture showed it.
A dark object drifting over the South Atlantic, shared for a quarter of a century as a 13,000-year-old alien satellite. NASA’s public catalogue says what it is, in a field of its own.
Heavy rocks leave long trails across a dry lakebed and nobody has ever seen them move. That was true for seventy years. It stopped being true on 20 December 2013.
The rock is phonolite porphyry and the columns are cooling cracks — that much is agreed. How the magma got there is not. The NPS lists four origin hypotheses and says discrepancies remain for all of them.
