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What we were seeing was a little bit like throwing the apple up in the air and seeing it blast off into space.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

Once while vacationing at my grandparent's house in Rajasthan, we were sleeping on the roof and I spotted an object hovering around in the sky - kind of a UFO. It totally spooked me out. I couldn't sleep for days after that.

I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA's Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

The blackness of space was a big shock to me. It is a deep, three-dimensional, oily blackness. You can feel the distance.

Well, the coolest thing I have seen so far, in terms of, like, me being an astronaut and seeing something unusual, was the rendezvous, the docking of a Progress spaceship.

A feeling that was possibly generated by experiences in my previous work on cosmic rays; more likely it was inborn and was the reason why, as a young man, I went into the field of cosmic rays.

I've seen lights in the sky, I've seen UFOs, I've even seen something on the ground that I can't explain, but I've never actually seen a being. I wish I had.

We gazed dreamily at the Milky Way and once in a while caught some shooting stars. Times like those gave me the opportunity to wonder and ask all those very basic questions. That sense of awe for the heavens started there.

I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire.