We first heard about the Tether incident when the Cosmic Conspiracies research team visited UFO Magazine's annual conference in Leeds in 2000. This ground breaking footage was taped by Martin Stubbs, a Canadian cable TV station manager and space enthusiast who had captured it from a NASA live feed. Over the years, this footage has become well known amongst the UFO community, but still goes largely unnoticed by most of the general public.
The Dropa Stones
The objects on the footage bare a striking resemblance to the 'Dropa Stones' which were discovered in 1938 by an archeological expedition led by Dr. Chi Pu Tei, who was a professor of archaeology at Beijing University, ventured into the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains, which are near to the Chinese-Tibetan border. It was not long before they chanced upon an ancient series of caves that had walls that were square and glazed, unlike any natural looking cave they had seen before. There, amongst the dust of the ancient cave, they discovered many neat rows of tombs with short 4 ft 4 inch skeletons buried within.
The skeletons were rather odd looking, with abnormally big heads, and small thin fragile bodies. A member of the team suggested that perhaps they might be the remains of an unknown species of mountain gorilla, but Dr Chi Pu Tei was said to respond 'who ever heard of apes burying one another?
Alongside the graves were hundreds of stone disks, which have become known as 'the Dropa stones.' The disks measured about nine inches in diameter, and each had a circle cut into the center and was etched with a spiral groove, making it look almost like an ancient LP record. The disks are believed to be around 10,000 to 12,000 years old. The spiral groove is actually composed of tiny hieroglyphics which remained undeciphered for 20 years until Dr Tsum Um Nui examined them at Beijing University in 1958.
Dr. Tsum Um Nui concluded that each groove actually consisted of a series of tiny hieroglyphs of unknown pattern and origin.
The rows of hieroglyphics were so small that a magnifying glass was needed to see them clearly. Many of the hieroglyphics had been worn away by erosion. When Dr. Tsum deciphered the symbols, they told the story of the crash-landing of the Dropa spaceship and the killing of most of the survivors by local people.
According to Tsum Um Nui, one of the lines of the hieroglyphs reads, "The Dropas came down from the clouds in their aircraft. Our men, women and children hid in the caves ten times before sunrise. When at last they understood the sign language of the Dropas, they realized that the newcomers had peaceful intentions . . . ." Another section expresses "regret" that the aliens' craft had crash-landed in such a remote and inaccessible mountain range and that there had been no way to building a new one to enable the Dropas to return to their own planet.
The most interesting footage of the event was taken by Shuttle Astronaut, Claude Nicollier, who used a hand-held black and white video camera which was designed to see 'near ultraviolet' objects (which are invisible to the human eye.) When the camera zoomed into the tether as it reached a distance of appromixately 80 miles from the Shuttle, a swarm of unidentified objects started to the surround the tether. The objects, which travelled in many directions, were of various sizes and some appeared to emit a pulsating light pattern. 
