On February 25, 1996, the Space Shuttle Columbia deployed an experimental tether into orbit. The experiment was called the Tethered Satellite System (TSS-1R) and it's purpose of this was to attempt to generate electricity by utilizing Earth's magnetic field. The Tether Satellite System circled the Earth at an altitude of 296 kilometers, placing the tether system within the rarefied electrically charged layer of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere. STS-75 mission scientist hoped to deploy the tether to a distance of 20.7 kilometres (12.9 mi). Over 19 kilometers of the tether were deployed before the tether broke. Although the experiment was not a success, approximately five hours of data were recorded.

One of the large objects that passed just behind the Tether:

The big white line you see here is the actual Tether, which is actually a long conducting wire which is highly reflective in the sunlight.

What really made "The Tether Incident" famous was the appearance of many spaceships clearly visible in the NASA footage. But why would those white round specks flying in front of the camera not be dust particles but instead be alien ships? Well, it took a little study by different people to come to that conclusion.

 As you can read in my article How Intelligent Beings the Universe Travel, David Sereda figured out that extraterrestrial ships can increase the spin energy of the mass of their ships to beyond the speed of light. The result is that they are only visible as a light sphere, especially in the ultra-violet spectrum. NASA must know this too, as it frequently uses UV cameras, as when it was filming the Tether employment. So what we are seeing objects showing up in the ultraviolet spectrum, and not necessarily in the visible spectrum.

Sereda also pointed out that the object in the Tether footage were pulsing. They also showed a spiral from the center outwards and a notch, which he explains, corresponds to the physics of this higher energy state (too complicated to explain here; but explained in his book Evidence, The Case for NASA UFOs).

The following picture a close-up of one of the objects in the Tether footage.

This is one of the large ships in a higher energy state. Notice the spiral from the center outwards, and the 'notch'. The notch is not a physical cutout. It is a small segment that does not send out light waves, thus appearing dark.

One past behind the Tether, and because the size of the Tether plus its distance from the camera was known, the estimated diameter of the object was about 2 to 3 miles.

One could easily say that it is all just dust particles floating around. But every inert object in space, once in movement, will continue in a straight line forever. In the video we see that these objects change course and speed. In the raw NASA footage it is difficult to see the details, and how they move about. However in the video to the right, the footage has been stabilized and the movement of the objects have been tracked, showing that some of the objects change directions, turn around, change velocity. Not exactly dust particles, but intelligently controlled vehicles.