Fire in the sky

FADE IN: December 8, 2003. Finland. The following video appeared on a program titled Good Morning, Finland.



A translation of the dialogue can be found at Covert History.

CUT TO: December 30. A fiery something crashes near Praetoria, South Africa. Witness Leonie Ras, visiting her daughter, was startled by the sound of turbine engines.

She walked to the bedroom window and saw the clouds taking on a bright orange-red colour.

"Suddenly, a bright object plunged from the clouds to the earth, at a terrible speed, and hit the ground with an almighty bang."

"It looked like Haley's comet, round in the front and with an orange-red tail following behind."

CUT TO: January 4. Burning debris -- similar to that seen when the space shuttle Columbia met its tragic fate -- streaks across the Colorado sky. Debris is reported to have crashed in Wyoming.

NASA has identified the material as the remains of a Russian SL4 rocket, used to place a French satellite into orbit. And they believe that this event has no connection with the other mystery of the night:

On the same day, an unidentifiable piece of metallic debris plunges from the sky and crashes through the roof of a house in New Jersey. Also see here. Scientist Allan H. Treiman, of the Planetary Institute in Houston, says that the golden object does not resemble a meteor, since meteors usually acquire a smooth, black coating.

CUT TO: January 6. Shropshire, England. A retired policeman sees something burning in the night sky around 7:30 p.m.

Mr Lindop was watching TV at in his home at Moorhouse Close, Wellington, when he looked out of the window and saw a strange tubular object in the sky.

It was travelling at speed and issuing yellow and orange flames, but made no sound. He went outside to get a closer look with his wife Carol Ann and son Darran, and they saw it disappear towards Newport.

He said: “It was about 7.30pm when I saw it. It was a long, cylindrical thing, about 1,000ft up in the sky and it must have been travelling at more than 100mph.”I’ve never seen anything like it before and am completely lost to know what it is. It left me feeling quite uptight. It seemed to be on fire but it looked nothing like an aircraft and made no noise at all.

My take? Someone is testing something, presumably something unmanned. And the tests have not gone well.

The SL4 rocket seems a reasonable enough explanation for the Denver/Wyoming event, although I can recall no other instance of Russian rocket debris causing such a spectacle over the United States. My readers may have better memories on that score. Can anyone tell me what trajectory sends a discarded Russian booster rocket traveling south to north over the center of the United States? Could the mystery chunk that crashed through the roof in New Jersey have any connection?

It may well be that these similar events do not share similar explanations. Still, I think we must all admit that this confluence of reports is odd. Coincidence? Very possibly. But an odd coincidence.

UPDATE: In the original version of this piece, I stupidly neglected to note the year of the Finland event. Also, the path of the January 4 event was south to north, not north to south as I originally wrote. When you think about it, a route from the south is even odder for a Russian vehicle. The event also took place in the general vicinity of NORAD.

Forgive a little blue sky conjecture (so to speak), but I'm thinking now that we may be seeing the test of a missile defense system. Perhaps a new weapon causes incoming objects to break up rather than explode in a fireball...?