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(meteorobs) Re: meteors in ufo reports
Ed Cannon said:
>One good place, in my opinion, to look for fireball
>reports (primarily but not exclusively North America)
>is this (Shhh!) U - F - O web site, as soon as it's
>updated to later than Nov. 15:
>
>http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html
He's absolutely right. Several years ago I looked over Peter Davenport's
ufo lists and noticed that about a third of the objects are obvious meteors,
another third probably are (having a flaw or some screwy aspect), while many
of the rest are reentries and bright stars/planets. A few are too cockeyed
to pass any judgement on.
One report had two low hovering objects seen W and NW on a December evening
-- sounds like Vega and Altair setting to me. People are unable to
recognize a star as a star when it is close to the horizon. Flashing colors
from violent star twinkling nail them almost every time. Sirius and Canopus
are the biggest offenders.
A similar reentry (like the Nov 2002 incident) over the NW states in 1997
caused a major uproar with the ufo crowd. Blithering nonsensical talk on
the radio went on for weeks afterwards. I did a time-wasting series of
exchanges with Peter D about it, along with the 1996 planes-over-Phoenix
incident -- he wasn't accepting any ID from me to save his life.
I saw a video of the latest entry on TV. But it was black-and-white. Why
no color?? Am still waiting to see a spectacular reentry myself. Have many
times seen small ones -- just a bit of debris causing an orange (always
orange), slow-moving, usually fragmenting with orange sparks, +3m to -1m
meteor lasting several seconds or more.
Norman
Norman W. McLeod III
Staff Advisor
American Meteor Society
Fort Myers, Florida
nmcleod@peganet.com
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