Martyn Stubbs

Background

Martyn Stubbs is a Canadian filmmaker and former cable television station manager from Vancouver. With over 25 years of experience in television and film editing, Stubbs managed a major Vancouver cable TV station equipped with satellite transmission arrays and a full technical staff. His background in broadcast engineering positioned him uniquely to conduct an independent, systematic monitoring of NASA Space Shuttle missions during the mid-to-late 1990s.

The NASA Downlink Project

Between approximately 1995 and 2000, Stubbs used his television station's satellite array to intercept and record live video transmissions from NASA's Space Shuttle downlink. Over this five-year period, he accumulated approximately 2,500 hours of continuous or recorded transmissions from STS-48 through STS-80 missions. This was not passive receipt of public NASA video feeds; rather, Stubbs actively monitored the full digital transmission spectrum, capturing video and telemetry data at the raw signal level.

The footage documented digital video camera feeds from Space Shuttle orbiters during in-flight operations. Repeatedly throughout these transmissions, anomalous objects appeared in the footage—spherical, intelligently maneuvering entities positioned near or approaching the shuttle orbiters. Notable among Stubbs' archive is the STS-75 Tether Incident, a well-known case in which a cylindrical tethered satellite and associated anomalous objects were captured on multiple NASA camera angles.

Documentary Work and Public Release

Starting in March 2000, Stubbs began releasing portions of his NASA archive to the public in video documentary format. His flagship work, The Secret NASA Transmissions: The Smoking Gun (2001), became a landmark in UFO research. The documentary won the EBE Award and Best Film at the International UFO Congress Film Festival, establishing Stubbs' work as a serious contribution to visual evidence analysis in the UFO research community.

Following this initial release, Stubbs produced two additional major documentary works: UFO: The Greatest Story Ever Denied (2006) and UFO: The Greatest Story Ever Denied III – UFOs from Outer Space (2016). These documentaries expanded on the archive, providing detailed frame-by-frame analysis, astronaut testimony, and contextual information about the recorded phenomena.

NASA's Institutional Response

When NASA became aware that Stubbs had been systematically intercepting and recording its downlink transmissions for five years without authorization or detection, the agency responded by encrypting all subsequent Space Shuttle transmissions. This decision effectively terminated the type of independent monitoring that Stubbs had conducted and prevented future civilian researchers from accessing the raw digital streams. The encryption decision itself—which cost significant resources to implement across all shuttle operations—suggests that NASA took the existence of the Stubbs archive seriously rather than dismissing it as inconsequential.

Significance and Legacy

Stubbs' work represents a crucial bridge between government space operations documentation and independent UFO research. Unlike contactee testimonies or eyewitness accounts, Stubbs provided systematic, primary-source video evidence captured by NASA's own instrumentation and recorded with full technical chain-of-custody controls. The fact that the objects in his footage exhibit intelligent maneuvering, propulsion characteristics inconsistent with known orbital debris, and coordinated behavior around the Space Shuttle raises fundamental questions about the nature of objects in Earth orbit.

His archive predates the modern disclosure era by nearly two decades, yet it anticipated many of the UAP-in-space discussions that later emerged through the AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) and subsequent Congressional UAP disclosures. Stubbs demonstrated that systematic, non-classified documentation of anomalous aerial phenomena was possible, laying methodological groundwork for later researchers.