UFO's have been making the news again recently .....
And I don't mean aliens, I mean unidentified flying objects .... UFO's!!
What they are is not known, but not very likely to be alien powered craft, although they may well be extra-terrestrial in origin.
The first story was from December 2017, when a film allegedly taken by a US fighter pilot as a part of a programme called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), was released by the US Dept of Defence. The film was supposedly taken somewhere over San Diego way back in 2004.
Whilst only one object appears on one of the fighters gun cameras, the pilots reported seeing a number of them .... "There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the ASA" ... one of the pilots reportedly told the US media that the object in the film (and presumably the rest of the fleet), "Was not from this world".
But a little more recently, in November 2018 to be precise, the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) is undertaking an investigation following reports from a small number of aircraft on Friday 9 November of 'unusual air activity'. By this they mean when a British Airways pilot contacted Shannon air traffic control to inquire if there was military air activity in the area because there was something "moving so fast".
She stated that a "very bright light" seen, and that the object had come up along the left side of the aircraft before it "rapidly veered to the north" without seeming to be on collision course. She was backed up by a Virgin pilot nearby, who suggested it might be a meteor or another object re-entering the earth's atmosphere. He added that there were in fact "multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory" and confirmed that they were very bright. The pilot said he also saw "two bright lights" over to the right, which climbed away at "astronomical (it was like Mach 2) speed."
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And I don't mean aliens, I mean unidentified flying objects .... UFO's!!
What they are is not known, but not very likely to be alien powered craft, although they may well be extra-terrestrial in origin.
The first story was from December 2017, when a film allegedly taken by a US fighter pilot as a part of a programme called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), was released by the US Dept of Defence. The film was supposedly taken somewhere over San Diego way back in 2004.
But a little more recently, in November 2018 to be precise, the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) is undertaking an investigation following reports from a small number of aircraft on Friday 9 November of 'unusual air activity'. By this they mean when a British Airways pilot contacted Shannon air traffic control to inquire if there was military air activity in the area because there was something "moving so fast".
She stated that a "very bright light" seen, and that the object had come up along the left side of the aircraft before it "rapidly veered to the north" without seeming to be on collision course. She was backed up by a Virgin pilot nearby, who suggested it might be a meteor or another object re-entering the earth's atmosphere. He added that there were in fact "multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory" and confirmed that they were very bright. The pilot said he also saw "two bright lights" over to the right, which climbed away at "astronomical (it was like Mach 2) speed."
Meteors burning up in the atmosphere sounds like a good explanation for some of these sightings. They would explain both supersonic speeds and the bright lights.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of things entering our atmosphere, I've heard some comments about objects that were sent into the upper atmosphere, like lego men on ballons, which were retrieved back on Earth; some people asked why they didn't burn up on their way back down. These spectacular re-entries are reserved for orbiting objects and other (relatively) fast moving objects like meteors, not toys which floated up and fell uneventfully back down.
The same as Joe Kittinger, who holds the record for the longest free fall at around 4 minutes and 36 seconds when he jumped from 102,000 feet. Felix Baumgartner jumped from quite a bit higher, but he only had a free fall time around 4 minutes and 20 seconds. They both needed oxygen but not fireproof suits.
DeleteYes, good example. Objects can be floated into space but they require a lot of energy to get them into orbit - that energy needs to be propelled up there with it which requires more energy still, not to mention a heat shield to slow them back down afterwards, hence - big rockets with spectacular re-entries.
DeleteSteven Fry said that the heat is not due to the air friction as is commonly assumed, but its compression. Quite Interesting.
You can prove the compression fact yourself by bending a bit of metal back and forth. The point of compression i.e. the bend area, gets warm/hot.
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