Of the many scientific satellites in space, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) seems to have particularly drawn the attention of UFOlogists. SOHO is a joint project of the European Space Agency and NASA, launched in December 1995 to study the Sun. Daily images of the Sun in extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths, and of the extended solar atmosphere (corona) in visible light, are made available to the general public through SOHO's Web page at http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov. However, almost since day one, there have been claims that these images show more than the solar features that SOHO was designed to study, and that there is a NASA conspiracy to hide these facts from the public. Occasionally these claims center around previously unknown planets in the solar system ("Planet X"), but the most common claim is of extraterrestrial crafts, i.e., UFOs. Recently, one group of UFO proponents, EUROSETI, decided to hold a conference on the subject, which was held at the National Space Center in Leicester, Engl and.

Over the years, the SOHO team had become used to fielding questions from the public about UFOs in their images, but once the EUROSETI conference was announced, the team started receiving so many requests for information from both journalists and the general public that they decided to post a response. The SOHO team started with a purported UFO image that was published in an Australian newspaper reporting on the conference, and found the original SOHO image that it was based upon. In their article, they outline the series of steps needed to take an innocuous flaw produced by a cosmic ray hitting a few detector pixels, and process and stretch it until one ends up with something that looks like a UFO. Tided "How to Make Your Own UFO," and augmented with a detailed explanation of the various image artifacts that have led to UFO claims in the past, the article