On the 13th March, 1989 the Space Shuttle 'Discovery' was launched. 20 hours and 45 minutes into the mission at 0642 hrs. Eastern Standard Time, the above message was heard from a Discovery crew member.

The message was recorded by Donald Ratsch in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He is a member of the Goddard Amateur Radio Club, which monitors all NASA space flights.

Before this amazing message an amateur radio enthusiast in Ohio states that the crew of the Shuttle told Houston Mission Control that there was something wrong, "We have a fire". It is thought that this was a codeword for UFO and would alert Nasa that the Shuttle had a problem.

Straight after the transmission it is alledged by another radio enthusiast Mr. Oechsler that NASA instructed the crew to switch frequencies to a secure mode.

The incident was reported by the media and the tape played on LBC (London Broadcasting Company) from where the wav file was obtained.

For some time Nasa denied that the actual message was transmittted from a Shuttle mission. However Nasa spokesman James Hatfield has now stated that the tape is genuine but the incident was a hoax.

The attached Wav file lasts for 37 seconds. The female voice at the start is a presenter from LBC who relates what the Discovery message says. You will then hear the message repeated 4 times. Of course the original message was only spoken once but to help you hear it clearly I have repeated it 4 times.

{{{}}} To listen to RealAudio file click here

Is the Shuttle Recording a Hoax?

sts-29 march 1989 Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 18:51:37 -0800 From: sts48@ix.netcom.com (Donald Ratsch) Subject: Re: NASA WAV file To: bdzeiler@students.wisc.edu (Brian Zeiler) Brian, yes I have the full story on that. The details was carried on the July 1989 issue of the MUFON Journal. Briefly I recorded some of the radio broadcast via my audio scanner from the space shuttle Discovery through WA3NAN, the club station of the Goddard Amateur Radio Club at Greenbelt, Md, transmitting on 147.450 MHZ. It is a retransmission from the NASA Select original. I heard what I thought was one of the male astronauts saying, "Houston, Discovery, we still have the alien spacecraft under observance". Well I was pretty excited and got in touch with Walt Andrus of MUFON and Vince Dipietro (Mars Face Fame) who is employed at Goddard Space Flight Center who I later handed over the tape to have a voice print analysis performed to compare the target voice to the astronauts' voices that were aboard during that mission. The result of the analysis showed that a few positive hits on Astronaut Bagian (the physician on board) but not enough hits to say he was the one who said the target words. So the results were inconclusive. Later a check showed there was no target voice on the original NASA Select audio. About a year after that, I was again monitoring the audio from another NASA mission via my scanner and I heard that voice again, saying something similar to the target voice a year earlier. However on this mission, all the astronauts were different compared to the other one. This led me to conclude that unfortunately, the target voice was a hoax probably from an amateur radio operator. Jim Oberg emailed me some time ago and asked me about that case and I told him what I just told you. ..