It’s not often we get a fortuitous example of how the UFO-conspiracy crowd manufactures their BS. … OK, maybe it happens all the time! But an absolutely must see time elapsed video put together by the Cassini-Equinox team provides just such an opportunity. Below is that same video together with some background, culminating in the UFO nonsense.

When I was growing up, Saturn’s rings were thought to consist of three main parts, A, B, and C. Pioneer and the Voyagers put an end to that! We now know the ring system is composed of hundreds of individual ringlets resembling grooves on a phonograph under medium magnification. Embedded throughout the vista are all kinds of puzzles of physics. There are spokes and fluted edges, braided streamers and knots, some regular or semi-permanent, others appearing only once never to be seen again.

Much of this has been captured on video before thanks to Cassini. Recently, the team put together a fantastic montage with commentary of the exquisite dynamics playing out a billion miles away around the solar system’s celebrity planet. The video was kindly formatted on YouTube by Phobosuchus1 below. If you’re so inclined, by all means feel free to take a moment to thank him or her for that gift!

These tiny shepard moons were inferred before they were confirmed. But no one dreamed how many there were! To date hundreds of them have been discovered. Each a tiny, lumpy icy ball, some smaller than a kilometer across, dragging and sculpting the glittering ring material like patient artists working on a cosmic canvas. How they came to exist so near the chaos, alternately stressed by Saturn’s gravity and pummelled by their brethren, is still a matter of some debate.

Now for the bullshit: UFO nuts take footage like this, or of Mars, or off trash can lids strung between telephone poles, modify it, and present it to the public as inexplicable and therefore proof of alien spaceships.

So, aliens traveled across light-years to … circle Saturn for eons playing in the ring system. No doubt that would be fun, but it’s hard to imagine any other incentive. More importantly, why waste perfectly good vlogger skills on crap like this? There is enough beauty and mystery in the universe without adding transparent nonsense to the mix.