Fun Fact of the Day #Cuatro: Apollo 13

 I was watching Apollo 13 the other day, just for kicks and it's a great Tom Hanks movie, when I noticed something rather startling. About an hour into the movie, right after we find out the astronauts need to shut off their engines, there's an angle on Tom Hanks and right behind him is the window into space. And a space ship flies by?! Not a rocket, a UFO (they have a uniform look, that's how I could tell, but we'll come back to that). This was really strange because you'd imagine the actual filming took place within the safety of a set in Los Angeles. However, the only set that was on the ground was the Mission Control room in Universal Studios. Even though the Houston Space Center offered their control room to Ron Howard, he decided to build his own from scratch as an exact replica.
  But back to the ship. The actual filming took place inside a custom-built space ship designed by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center called NASA's KC-135 Reduced Gravity Aircraft. The ship had to be custom built so the panels could be removed to reduce camera space restrictions. That way, the whole crew was able to fit comfortably inside and get the angles they needed. And guess what? They actually flew the ship into the highest stratosphere, those dare devils. Even though they were technically in space (barely), they were able to control the gravity in the ship. A good 90% of the movie shows zero gravity in the ship but they could only shoot them in 25 second intervals for various reasons, one of them being so no one got hurt by flying objects. This also means the cameraman was floating around with the actors during the takes.

  But I digress. If they really were filming in space, that means those strobing orbs with little indents floating outside the windows really did just happen to be there, but they're not noticeable enough to take away from what's happening. In one four-second shot there's about four of them clustered outside the window. They get dismissed as debris (that strobes?). The characters aren't going to stop and have a conversation regarding the UFOs because it would stop the movie dead, and they're also not going to acknowledge it because it would be the same thing as the real astronauts admitting they saw them, which is practically suicidal on NASA terms. There's also a chance no one saw them until the film was processed and put through editing because some ships are impossible to see without Infra-Red. But roll a camera and they're fairly visible.  So if you go back and watch the movie, it's pretty apparent which "debris" are strangely alive (some even change direction) and which ones aren't.