[meteorite-list] Strange Light Observed Over Canada

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:23:49 2004
Message-ID: <200303171922.LAA18028_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.chroniclejournal.com/story.shtml?id=16025

Strange light in sky a meteor . . . or was it?
By Kris Ketonen
The Chronicle-Journal (Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada)
March 11, 2003

A Lakehead University professor says the strange light seen in Thunder Bay's
skies Saturday was a meteor, but some residents believe there was more to
it.

Stephen Kissin, a geology professor at Lakehead and member of the Meteorites
and Impacts Advisory Committee to the Canadian Space Agency, said reports of
the ball of flame with the long, smokey trail are consistent with the many
meteors that crash to earth each year.

A Lydia Avenue resident - who wished to remain nameless - was one of the
witnesses to the night's astral event. She was sitting in her living room
between 7 and 8 p.m., and happened to glance out the west-facing main
windows. And that's when she saw it.

It was rectangular, she said, with an orange, with an orange glow. It moved
very fast as it streaked westward.

"It was too big to be a plane, that's why I noticed it," she said yesterday,
adding it also "moved too fast to be a plane."

The woman didn't hear the loud bang reported by residents near Finmark road,
but her television was on at the time, so the bang may have been drowned
out. The woman couldn't guess as to how high up the object was. The woman's
grandson also witnessed the flight, while her husband got a look at the
plume of smoke left behind it.

Kissin said the smoke was actually a dust trail. The woman said the dust
remained for about an hour, which Kissin said is possible, depending on the
wind.

"It sounds like it's an isolated meteor sighting," Kissin said. "It was
definitely down in the lower atmosphere if it's creating a sonic boom, and
leaving behind (a dust trail). That's certainly very typical."

However, the object's glow suggests it was still fairly high up.

Meteors usually travel between 20 and 80 kilometres per second, Kissin said.
The sighting indicates the meteor was a small one, he said, as a very large
one of many tonnes wouldn't have been slowed by the atmosphere and would
have crashed to earth in a matter of a few seconds.

"It wouldn't have been visible for very long," Kissin said. "But then, of
course, you'd hear a huge . . . impact somewhere."

It may be difficult to track the path of Saturday's sighting, Kissin said.

"You need to have people on both sides of the track," he said. "If it were
going east-west, you'd have to have people that were on the north side of it
and the south side of it in order to get an accurate fix."

A meteor shower wasn't responsible for the sighting, Kissin said. Meteor
showers are actually Earth passing through the tail of a comet, he said, and
the chunks of frozen gas seen travelling across the sky during a shower burn
up if they enter the atmosphere. There's little stony material in comets.

"Then you get all the UFO reports, because they look really weird," he said.
"You see these white things, and they really go fast across the sky. They
look weird."

Kissin is going to look into the incident. OPP investigated on the weekend,
but didn't turn up anything.

And at least one Thunder Bay resident still believes the Shabaqua Triangle
may have had something to do with it.

Yesterday, Bob Armstrong related a tale told to him by his late father Vic,
who used to be a conductor on a train that carried pulp wood from Graham
eastward to Thunder Bay. The route was inside the triangle, and they'd often
end up travelling at night, Bob, 68, said.

One night in the mid-1970s, Vic was riding in the caboose as the train
passed through the Raith flats, between Graham and Raith. Outside, he
noticed what he described as a fireball travelling alongside the train. It
was going about the same speed, but was some distance away.

Suddenly, the ball sped up and pulled away from the train, all before Vic
had a chance to wake up the slumbering brakeman.

When Vic returned to town, he told his son what happened. But he wondered
what the point of telling anyone else would be, since it's unlikely anyone
would believe him.

But Bob - who said he's heard of several such sightings in the area -
believed him.

"Dad wasn't the type to exaggerate," Bob said. "He told things as he saw
them."
Received on Mon 17 Mar 2003 02:22:36 PM PST