UFO Explained – KBBI
Fairbanks photographer Leslie Smallwood captured video of the luminous sphere on automated aurora cameras before 5 AM Tuesday March 29th.
UFO Spin: “And it seemed like it had something that was spinning inside it. When I zoomed in on it, and it’s a small tail…whitish tail.”
Smallwood says the foggy ball of light was far larger than a full moon and is seen on the video moving through the dark sky from the northeast to the southwest over a few minutes.
UFO Slow T2T: Smallwood: “Its not like it shot across the sky. It was like taking its time.”
Conde: “Much too slow for it to be a meteor.”
University of Alaska Fairbanks physics professor Mark Conde (CON-day) says video of the light ball was also recorded by a UAF all sky camera in Gakona. Speaking last week Conde said he wasn’t sure what to attribute the phenomenon to, but noted that the orb appeared gaseous.
UFO Gas T2T: Conde: “You know a glowing cloud of gas that was sunlit would look like that.” McDowell: “I am very confident that what people saw was the dumping of fuel from a Chinese rocket stage.”
Jonathan McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston, Massachusetts. McDowell says sightings of the orb in Alaska correspond with the flight of a Chinese satellite deployment rocket.
UFO China: “This rocket: the Longmarch 6A or Chang Zheng 6A was launched early on March 29th from China, placed 2 satellites in orbit, and calculating its orbital path, it passed over the Yukon area about 350 miles up, at exactly the time that this glow was seen in the Alaskan sky.”
McDowell says leftover rocket fuel was likely released into space where it froze, spread out and reflected sunlight.
UFO Huge: “And this cloud is probably hundreds of miles across, that’s why it looks so big.”
As to why rotating movement and a tail were observed, McDowell explains that to maintain a rocket’s orbit during the release of fuel, the space craft is put into a tumble.
UFO Tumble: “End over end while spewing out this fuel like a garden hose, and so you’ll get this sort of moving pattern.”
McDowell says rocket fuel dumps resulting in visible spheres of light occur fairly regularly in the lower 48 and elsewhere in the world. He says a similar glowing orb viewed over a large area of northern Siberia in 2017 was attributed to exhaust from ballistic missiles during test firings. ###
You can find the original story here.
This article has been archived for your research. Find the original article here.
