[Atlas Sneezed]

I found this the most persuasive post to refute the notion that the video showed the shuttle flying "sideways".

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/834013/posts?page=126#126

[mikegi]

Yep, that's the one that had me going "hmmmm". So much so that I went out at night with my Sony D8 camcorder to tape some lights with varying zoom and aperture settings. That experiment proved to me that the combination of zoom and aperture makes an out-of-focus point light look like the sideways shuttle image.

I guess the thing that made the supposed sideways shuttle look real was that the shape was reasonable and it had the correct colors (white on top and black underneath). Interestingly, the shuttle *did* rotate sideways before breaking up although it rotated the opposite direction from the bogus video.