Musgrave's plasmoids

Story Musgrave flew on the Space Shuttle six times between 1983 and 1996. The archive's telling, carried by NewsNation, is secondhand: Michael Gold, a former NASA official who sat on the agency's UAP study team, told the host Ross Coulthart that he had been reading Musgrave talking about plasmoid objects seen through the window of the shuttle, and Coulthart called it clearly something highly anomalous. The fact sheet gives no date and no mission for the sighting.

What is on the record

One telling from one channel, and one resolved claimant, Musgrave himself. The archive holds the telling's description rather than a transcript of the astronaut.

Outside the archive's holdings Musgrave's own words are on record and they differ. In interviews in 1994 and 1995 he spoke of a "snake" six to eight feet long which he saw on two flights, rubbery and moving with internal waves as if swimming. He suggested it may have been a rubber seal shed from the main engines. He did not use the word plasmoid in those accounts. The archive therefore reports plasmoid as the telling's word and not as the astronaut's.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L0, a single account. It is testimony relayed at second hand on a broadcast, with no tape and no second witness in the file. What Musgrave saw outside the window is not resolved here, and the nearest thing to an explanation on record is his own guess at a shed engine seal.