Crash remnant

Well, another alleged UFO artifact has been analyzed and found wanting.

It's gotten to be a pattern, hasn't it?  Someone claims to have rock-solid evidence of something fringe-y -- hair or bone from a Bigfoot, the skull of a humanoid alien, ghost photographs, extrasensory perception -- and upon examination, it turns out to be tenuous at best and an outright fake at worst.  Nothing, certainly, that would convince an honest skeptic.

Now, allow me to state up front something I've said many times before here at Skeptophilia; I'm not a skeptic because I don't like the idea of the paranormal.  Honestly, I would love it if some of this stuff turned out to be true.  Not only is there simply the coolness factor, it would open up huge avenues for scientific research.  And don't @ me about how scientists are narrow-minded conservatives who are desperate to uphold the status quo and therefore would ignore hard evidence even if it existed; the truth is that scientists are constantly looking for new stuff, because finding something truly novel is how careers are made.  If they tend to give a suspicious side-eye at most of these claims, it's because they understand how data and evidence work.  (As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "We know what the hell we're looking at.")  Their training has made them all too aware of how easy it is to be misled by what what you would like very much to be true.

To quote the great physicist Richard Feynman: "In science, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself.  And you are the easiest person to fool."

That said, I find myself in much sympathy with Fox Mulder, even so.

In this case, a chunk of metal was provided to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a Pentagon program whose purpose is to check out anything odd that might have national security implications.  It was provided by To the Stars Academy, an independent research organization headed by Blink-182 front man (and UFO aficionado) Tom DeLonge.  The Academy's press release upon handing the artifact over to the AARO stated that "the material is clearly engineered with distinct layers of MgZn and Bi at structured thicknesses only microns thick" and "there is no precedent for this structured combination of materials."  Further, supposedly its composition would allow it to function as a "terahertz waveguide" (whatever the hell that is) which would give it the ability to "reduce inertial mass" -- in other words, to act as an antigravity device.

Ignoring the levitation bit for the moment, the part about there being "no precedent" for its structure highlights the problem with claiming something is an "alloy of alien origin."  Despite Georgi LaForge's analysis on Star Trek: The Next Generation that every spacecraft they run across is made of a phaser-resistant blend of whathefuckium and damnedifweknowite, there are only so many elements on the periodic table to choose from.  And there aren't any holes.  So to have a good case that a chunk of metal comes from an alien spacecraft, you have to be able to show that although the chunk might be made of the ordinary complement of chemical elements, the way it was put together is somehow different than what we could accomplish here on Earth.

Which is what DeLonge et al. are saying.  He also stated that the piece of metal comes from a crashed spaceship recovered in 1947 -- he never mentions the R-word, but that's the implication.  In any case, the AARO kind of went, "Okay, we'll look at it" (you'll have to imagine the sigh and eyeroll that probably accompanied it) and handed it over to Oak Ridge National Laboratories for analysis.

And what they found was...

... drum roll...

... it's terrestrial in origin.

The report said:

There was widespread domestic research on [magnesium] alloys for airframes, engines, weapons, and delivery systems starting in 1915 and peaking during World War II.  Many experimental [magnesium] alloys failed for reasons not well understood at the time of testing, e.g., stress corrosion cracking.  Unsurprisingly, records of failed [magnesium] alloy designs are scant.  Neither AARO nor ORNL could verify the specimen’s historical origin.  Unverifiable, conflicting personal accounts complicate its undocumented chain of custody...  The characteristics of the specimen are consistent with mid-20th-century magnesium alloy research and development projects, which often involved the use of zinc, lead, and bismuth additives for various purposes, including corrosion resistance.  The banding and structural features observed in the specimen align with manufacturing techniques from that era, such as vapor deposition.

And it doesn't have the ability to reduce inertial mass, so throw away your patent application for an antigravity/levitation device.  The Laws of Thermodynamics indicate that you can't decrease inertial mass unless you convert it into an equivalent amount of energy (the amount being determined by Einstein's equation E = mc^2).  This is not something to be undertaken lightly, as that kind of mass-to-energy conversion is how a nuclear bomb works.

You'd fly into the sky, all right, but I don't think you'd be happy about it.

In any case, if you're curious, you can find links to the complete report from AARO here.

There's nothing wrong with continuing to hope for positive results apropos of UFOs and other such alleged phenomena, and it's absolutely necessary to maintain an open mind and keep looking.  But -- disappointing as it is for those of us who grew up on science fiction -- the honest position at the moment is that the evidence we have thus far simply doesn't meet the minimum standard of what is required by science.  It'd be nice if that weren't true, and perhaps one day there'll be the proof we've all been waiting for.

But sadly, Tom DeLonge's chunk of metal from a 1947 crashed spaceship ain't it.

****************************************

A miscalculation of scale

In the first pages of Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, a woman out walking her dog in rural Maine stubs her toe on an object protruding from the ground, and when she kneels down to see what it is, she sees that it is a curved bit of metal that can't be pried loose.  It seems to extend indefinitely as she digs away the loose soil around it.

It turns out to be [spoiler alert] the upper edge of an enormous spaceship that crash landed on Earth millions of years ago, embedding itself nose-downward, and eventually being buried by geological processes until only a little bit of it was above ground.

Kind of an interesting mental picture, isn't it?  A spaceship collides with Earth, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (or random people walking their dogs) ages later.  It does, however, bring to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the Roswell incident: "A super-intelligent alien species knows how to cross the galaxy, but then they can't even land the damn spaceship?  If they're that incompetent, maybe they should just go home."

I bring all this up because of a discovery in Russia I found about because of a loyal reader.  Some coal miners, working at a mine in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia, unearthed a strange object that they claim is an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  Boris Glazkov, who found the object, said, "have to say it wasn't hard to see as it was really distinctive and large.  I've never seen anything like this object, which is obviously not natural, out here in the middle of nowhere before.  It is a real mystery."

The Kuzbassrazrezugol Mining Company, Glazkov's employer, confirmed discovery of the object, saying it was discovered at a depth of forty meters.  And everyone associated with the find is in agreement; what we have here is a crashed flying saucer.

So without further ado, let's take a look:

Pretty strange, eh? You can see why I thought of The Tommyknockers.  Imagine this thing making a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, carrying its panicked alien crew hurtling toward the Earth, then burying itself deep in the ground, killing all that were aboard.

But then the object's discoverers provided a second photograph, one that gave us perhaps a little more information than they intended:

Interesting how big it looks when you have no way of knowing how big it actually is.

And this reminded me of a second book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the brilliant Douglas Adams.  In particular, I recalled a passage about a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy... 

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

So the miners who discovered this thing must believe that alien races are really tiny, if that's their spaceship.  Makes you wonder what we've been so afraid of, all this time.  If the aliens show up, waving around their itty-bitty laser pistols, we could just step on 'em.

Or, failing that, hire a small dog.

And of course, there's a completely natural explanation for this thing.  It's what's called a "concretion" -- a symmetrical glob of sedimentary deposits that have become cemented together.   They can look pretty peculiar:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe/AWI, Concretion-PS2119 hg, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But that doesn't mean they're evidence of aliens.

Also, if this was a "flying saucer," wouldn't it be made out of something other than rock?  But maybe this was a Stone Age spaceship.  Maybe instead of laser pistols, the tiny aliens inside brandished clubs and flint knives.

Of course, we could still step on 'em.

So that's our latest non-evidence for aliens out of Siberia.  Kind of a pity, really.  It would have been cool if it had been real.  However, I'd prefer it if such a discovery wasn't followed by what happened in The Tommyknockers.  Without giving away any more of the plot, let me remind you that it's a Stephen King novel.  Suffice it to say that Bad Shit Happens.  So maybe we should all be glad that what the Russian coal miners discovered was just a big round rock.

***************************************

Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

I'm a rocket man

As a fiction writer, I have to admit that my characters often feel very real to me.  I've said more than once that I feel like I'm getting to know characters more than I am inventing them, and there have been times that a story has taken off in an entirely new and unexpected direction because some character has seemed to grab the keyboard out of my hands and written him/herself a different part.

Despite that, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in a bit of whimsy.  I may not know what the source of creativity is -- for myself or for anyone else -- but that's a far cry from my thinking that Tyler Vaughan, the reluctant hero and cryptid-chaser from Signal to Noise, is really out there looking for Bigfoot in the Oregon Cascades.

That's a distinction that seems to have escaped Lucio Ballasteros, an 87-year-old writer from Ourense, Spain.  Ballasteros wrote a series of science fiction novels about a planet called "10/7" where a race "like humans but more highly developed" lives.  And he was so enamored of the idea that now Ballasteros has...

... built a spaceship to go to the planet himself.

Ballasteros's spaceship, in progress

The spaceship, built of aluminum and methacrylate, has cost Ballasteros over 100,000 Euros (about $114,000) of his own money to construct, so he's nothing if not determined.  Also, the guy is 87, which makes it doubly impressive, because he's doing the building himself.  Me, I hope that when I'm 87 I have that kind of energy, although I also hope that I'll use it for something other than building a spaceship to fly to a planet that technically doesn't exist.

Ballasteros says you can find out a lot more about the project over at his site Despertar ("Wake Up"), although I'm afraid much of it was lost on me because my Spanish is kind of limited to "sí," "no," "gracias," and "una cerveza, por favor."  But I did find a translatable page about Ballasteros at the news site El Ideal Gallego, which was helpful, even though Google Translate does leave much to be desired.

Be that as it may, I found out that Ballasteros said that the construction is finished "except for some engines," which seems like kind of an important part.  He sounds a little unsure of whether he's ready to take off even if the engines are installed, however.  In order to go to 10/7, "Humanity would have to evolve psychically and spiritually."  And I have to admit, he's got a point.  I'm not sure our current state of affairs would be anything to brag to an advanced extraterrestrial civilization about.

He also said that the whole thing was going to be powered by several 280-watt solar panels.  Well, I did a little bit of figuring, using Ballasteros's estimate of the mass of his spaceship at 1,180 kilograms.  I assumed that "several" solar panels was five, which would mean the maximum power output is 1,400 watts.  (For comparison purposes. this is about the same power draw as twenty ordinary incandescent light bulbs.)  The escape velocity on the surface of the Earth is 11,186 m/s, so for a 1,180 kilogram spaceship, this would require the expenditure of 73,800,000,000 joules of energy.

Which his engines would have expended after 53,000,000 seconds or so, which is about a year and a half, assuming that 100% of the energy is used for the purposes of thrust.

I hope he's not in a hurry.

Oh, and if you're wondering why the planet is called "10/7," Ballasteros is happy to explain.  "The planet 10/7 is the planet God-Man, in which I projected myself when I was young and have lived," he says.  "It is attributed to the rebellion of the angels; God could have punished them temporarily on the planet 10/7, where 10 represents the unity of God and 7 represents the seven dimensions of the human being."

Right!  Sure!  What?

So I'm not optimistic about Ballasteros's chances of a smooth liftoff and safe arrival at 10/7.  But other than that, I suppose this falls into the "no harm if it amuses you" column.  And all in all, he seems happier messing about with his spaceship than I am, sitting here wondering whether Donald Trump is going to open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse before Congress can get off their asses and impeach him, or if he's simply going to sit around tweeting dick jokes about people he doesn't like as a way of showing everyone how presidential he is.

Which, honestly, makes me tempted to ask Ballasteros if he has room for a passenger.

*************************

One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

Spaceships on ice

I love science, and am delighted with the progress we've made in understanding the universe.  This has come along with a lightning-fast improvement in the quality of our technology, and although most of my friends consider me a Luddite, I'm actually in favor of that, too.

However, there are times when our technology gets ahead of our good sense.  When, in fact, it becomes apparent that in some ways, our devices are smarter than we are.  And one of those instances has to do with the geographical close-mapping project, Google Earth.

As our ability to create detailed aerial photographic maps of our planet has improved, so has our knowledge about places that are inaccessible to conventional human exploration.  But the problem is, the photographs are becoming detailed enough that we're falling prey to our perceptual biases, and coming up with some pretty wacky explanations for what we're seeing.  Here are a few examples:

• The discovery of a peculiar pattern of lines in the deserts of western China, that some people believed were mimicking the streets around the White House, in preparation for an attack.
• A digital artifact that made it look like there was a grid of giant squares on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, leading to claims that the Google Earth people had discovered, and then covered up, evidence of the Lost Civilization of Atlantis.
• A five-pointed star in Russia that was variously described as a training camp for children of the Illuminati, a refuge for Satanists, an alien landing site, or a sign from Mother Earth that she's not happy with us, and actually turned out to be the remnants of a Soviet-era lakeside campground.

So you can see that we don't have a very good track record of interpreting what Google Earth is finding.  Add to that all of the misidentifications made by people pawing through NASA photographs from Mars (where various wingnuts have found "evidence" of a thigh bone, a flip-flop, a skull, a fossilized gopher, and a vicious-looking Martian bunny), and it's understandable that I'm not ready to lend much credence to the latest "discovery"...

... which is a crashed spaceship in Antarctica.

The UFO enthusiasts are leaping about making excited little squeaking noises over an image from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, more specifically from 80°34’08.4″S 30°05’19.3″W, which showed the following:

See that diagonal mark in the middle of the image?  That, we find out, is no geographic feature.

It's a downed spaceship.

What evidence do they have?  Well, you're looking at it.  Everything else is just taking the above image, magnifying it until it gets really blurry, and finding bits of that blurred image that look like metallic reflections or spacecraft windows or hatches or whatever.  Next thing you know, they'll be claiming that this is rising up out of the snow:

As long as no one expects me to get on my Tauntaun and ride out to investigate.  I'm not taking a chance of freezing my ass off and then having to get shoved inside some smelly animal's abdominal cavity just in order to survive, all in the name of exploration.

But the guy who discovered the image, Russian UFO hunter Valentin Degterev, is adamant that we doubters are wrong. "I think there is very large disc-shaped flying machine amongst the frozen ice," Degterev said.  "It is definitely not a polar station, nor a plane (as there aren’t any airplanes or helicopters this big in the world).  There also aren’t any ships lost in Antarctica. It seems this is an artificial object from the distant cosmos."

Because, apparently, that's the only other option.  British UFO hunter Nigel Watson thought Degterev was spot-on, however. "It’s hard to tell if this ‘classic’ saucer sticking out of the ice, or whether it is a break in the ice," Watson said.  "Antarctica has a long tradition of being the resting place of crashed saucers or a base for their operations."

How convenient, given that Antarctica is so inaccessible to conventional exploration -- and verification of your claims. 

Pretty sneaky guys, those aliens.  Never crash-landing their saucers in places that are thickly inhabited.  Can't you see the discussion, as the ship is going down?

Alien 1:  "Our guidance system is failing!  The inertial dampers are offline!  We're going to crash!" 

Alien 2:  "No!  We can't crash here!  We're over Newark, New Jersey!  If we crashed here, then everyone would find out about our existence!  We can't have that!" 

Alien 1:  "I have it!  We'll stay aloft for another ten thousand kilometers, and then dive headfirst into an ice sheet in Antarctica." 

Alien 2:  "Brilliant!"

So if the mark on the ground in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet isn't an alien spaceship, nor an Imperial Probe Droid, what is it?

Easy.  It's a crevasse.

The movement of glaciers frequently opens up cracks, and the overlying snow cover collapses inwards, forming a slot-like hole.  (Sometimes it takes a while for the snow cover to fall, which is why hiking over glaciers is so dangerous -- what looks like solid ice can be a thin crust of snow over a hundred-foot-deep plunge.)

So sorry to burst your bubble, UFOlogists, but if you're looking for the smoking gun, alien-wise, this isn't it.  Just as the Chinese lines weren't a mock-up of Washington, DC, the seafloor anomaly wasn't Atlantis, and the star wasn't an Illuminati summer camp, this isn't a downed spaceship.  You'll just have to keep looking.

Back to scanning Google Earth images.  Make sure to tell us what you find.  As long as it isn't vicious alien bunnies.  If you find one of those, I'd rather not know.

A miscalculation of scale

In the first pages of Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, a woman out walking her dog in rural Maine stubs her toe on an object protruding from the ground, and when she kneels down to see what it is, she sees that it is a curved bit of metal that can't be pried loose.  It seems to extend indefinitely as she digs away the loose soil around it.

It turns out to be [spoiler alert] the upper edge of an enormous spaceship that crash landed on Earth millions of years ago, embedding itself nose-downward, and eventually being buried by geological processes until only a little bit of it was above ground.

Kind of an interesting mental picture, isn't it?  A spaceship collides with Earth, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (or random people walking their dogs) ages later.  It does, however, bring to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the Roswell incident: "A super-intelligent alien species knows how to cross the galaxy, but then they can't even land the damn spaceship?  If they're that incompetent, maybe they should just go home."

I bring all this up because of a recent discovery in Russia.  Some coal miners, working at a mine in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia, unearthed a strange object that they claim is an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  Boris Glazkov, who found the object, said, "have to say it wasn't hard to see as it was really distinctive and large.  I've never seen anything like this object, which is obviously not natural, out here in the middle of nowhere before.  It is a real mystery."

The Kuzbassrazrezugol Mining Company, Glazkov's employer, confirmed discovery of the object, saying it was discovered at a depth of forty meters.  And everyone associated with the find is in agreement; what we have here is a crashed flying saucer.

So without further ado, let's take a look:

Pretty strange, eh?  You can see why I thought of The Tommyknockers.  Imagine this thing making a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, carrying its panicked alien crew hurtling toward the Earth, then burying itself deep in the ground, killing all that were aboard.

But then the object's discoverers provided a second photograph, one that gave us perhaps a little more information than they intended:

Interesting how big it looks when you have no way of knowing how big it actually is.

And this reminded me of a second book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.  In particular, I recalled a passage about a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy... 

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

So the miners who discovered this thing must believe that alien races are really tiny, if that's their spaceship.  Makes you wonder what we've been so afraid of, all this time.  If the aliens show up, waving around their itty-bitty laser pistols, we could just step on 'em.

And of course, there's a completely natural explanation for this thing.  It's what's called a "concretion" -- a symmetrical glob of sedimentary deposits that have become cemented together.  They can look pretty peculiar:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that doesn't mean they're evidence of aliens.

Also, if this was a "flying saucer," wouldn't it be made out of something other than rock?  But maybe this was a Stone Age spaceship.  Maybe instead of laser pistols, the little aliens inside brandished clubs and flint knives.

Of course, we could still step on 'em.

So that's our latest non-evidence for aliens out of Siberia.  Kind of a pity, really.  It would have been cool if it had been real.  However, I'd prefer it if such a discovery wasn't followed by what happened in The Tommyknockers.  Without giving away any more of the plot, let me remind you that it's a Stephen King novel.  So suffices to say that Bad Shit Happens.  So maybe we should all be glad that what the Russian coal miners discovered was just a big round rock.

Lunar triangle anomaly

The UFO-and-aliens crowd (and also the conspiracy theorists) currently have their knickers in a twist over an object that showed up on a photograph of the surface of the Moon on Google Moon.  The object certainly is interesting; it shows seven evenly-spaced dots arranged along two lines at what appears to be a perfect right angle.

Certainly not something that looks... natural.

Speculation about what the object could be is running rampant.  So far, I've seen the following ideas:

• the leading edge of a crashed, and partly buried, alien spacecraft;
• a portal to another dimension;
• a secret NASA lunar base (the spots are streetlights);
• a secret alien lunar base;
• a remote signaling device of extraterrestrial origin, à la 2001: A Space Odyssey;
• or one corner of a gigantic lunar pasta strainer.

Okay, I made the last one up.  But c'mon, people; it behooves us to remember that all we really have is a photograph with an odd image on it.  At the moment, we don't know what it is.  So endless speculation about what it is is kind of pointless, because we have exactly one (1) piece of data.

Things like this always remind me of what Neil deGrasse Tyson said, when asked in a talk if he "believed in UFOs:"

Remember what the "U" in "UFO" stands for.  There's a fascinating frailty of the human mind, that psychologists know all about; and it's called "Argument from Ignorance."  And this is how it goes, you ready?  Somebody sees lights flashing in the sky.  They've never seen it before.  They don't understand what it is.  They say, "A UFO!"  The "U" stands for "unidentified."  So they say, "I don't know what it is... it must be aliens from outer space, visiting from another planet."  Well... if you don't know what it is, that's where your conversation should stop.  You don't then say it must be anything.  

Now, I know that it's only human to speculate, but what's really important is that we keep in mind that it is speculation... and that of all of the speculation we engage in, we need to be most wary of answers that seem appealing to us.  The answer that seems appealing -- that it's a downed spaceship, if you're an aficionado of UFO lore -- is going to be the one you're the most likely to accept without question, that you're likely to overlook evidence and logic against. 

As a philosophy teacher of mine once said, "Beware of your pet theories.  They'll turn on you when you least expect it."

And of course, in this case, we do have a rational (non-alien-based) explanation for the image.  Ross Davidson, a digital image specialist at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne based web development firm OrangeBus, gives the following analysis of the strange image:

Basically it's similar to the thing you get in all those 'UFO videos' you see these days from people with digital cameras - when they use digital zoom too much, you get 'artifacts' as the missing data is recreated using an algorithm which create regular shapes simply because of the nature of digital.

As such a simple point of light becomes something like this.

If he rotated the camera the shape would rotate with it...

You can get similar things with still photos when you blow them up - the moon pic shows a 'triangle' because it's digital - made up of pixels.

If you look at the dark lines in the pic they all align in the same way - it's just a shadow which pretty much aligns with the pixels and when compressed/zoomed looks perfectly triangular.

So there's that.

Not, mind you, that I wouldn't love it if it did turn out to be a crashed spaceship.  If I had to pick one thing that I would love to have evidence of in my lifetime, it's extraterrestrial intelligence.  But thus far, I don't think this is it.  Does it deserve further investigation?  Of course.  Do I think it's a spaceship, or a lunar base, or even a giant pasta strainer?

Nope.  Not yet.

Remember what the "U" in "UFO" stands for.