The Japanese Moon footage

The archive holds one telling of this film. In it, footage shot by an unnamed Japanese astronomer is said to show an object of great length moving over the Moon and casting a shadow on the surface, at a speed the telling puts above two hundred kilometres a second. The twenty-five kilometre figure in the same telling belongs to the object in the last Phobos 2 frame, not to this film. It is presented as possibly related to the Phobos mystery, the Soviet probe lost near the Martian moon in 1989, and the telling dates the film to nearly four years after that loss.

What is on the record

One telling on one channel. The archive resolves one claimant, and the record holds nothing more of him than the description: an unnamed Japanese astronomer. No documents are attached and the dating to 1992 is approximate.

Outside the telling the only trace the archive has found is a 1990s note by the Lunascan Project on a Japanese amateur's video of a dark object crossing the southern highlands near Tycho, aired on the American programme Sightings. The project could not confirm from its frame grabs that the object cast a shadow, saw it tumbling, and read it as a passing body or a piece of hardware. Whether that is the same film is not established, and no astronomer is named anywhere. The ordinary readings for films of this kind are the ones that apply to any small object crossing a telescope's view, a satellite or a bird or a video artefact, but none can be assessed without the film. Two hundred kilometres a second is far faster than anything orbiting the Moon, and a shadow on the surface requires the object to be close above it.

Why it sits where it does

This entry grades L0, a single account from a single channel, and it is thinner than most: the archive holds a description of a film rather than the film. The pin marks the Moon as a body. What was filmed, if anything was, is not resolved here.