[continued]
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The particularly bizarre shapes associated with rocket plumes have a little-known history, since they would have been impossible prior to the
beginnings of rocket flight above the stratosphere. When they began appearing, and began being reported, nobody seemed to know how to categorize them
or where to report them. Fortunately, there were some chroniclers who were particularly interested in exactly such phenomena which didn’t seem to
fit into current paradigms.
Although spectacular videos have proliferated as personal pocketcams and automobile dashcams became more widely available, the basic rocket plume
apparition has been reported since the dawn of the Space Age in 1957. Because of its novelty and rarity, each apparition was generally
mischaracterized as a UFO event and as such entered that literary genre.
This report presents two dozen examples from the 1960s to the present…
satobs.org...
Such sightings have occurred all over the world, but they are not randomly distributed. Both specific launch site locations, and particular geographic
features, have created regional ‘hot spots’. Just as one example, it happens that most Japanese space probes launched from their rocket sites in
practically any direction will tend to criss-cross a region east of northern Argentina halfway through their first orbit of the Earth..
But it’s Russia, the nation that opened the Space Age, that has harvested the most abundant crop of space activity sightings. Because of purely
geographic considerations, people in Russia saw their country’s missile/rocket activity more frequently than in other countries where rockets were
usually fired out over open ocean [with few witnesses] for safety reasons.
In addition, soon after the beginning of the Space Age and at the height of the Cold War, Moscow developed and tested one particular kind of rocket
that used its last stage to dive back into the atmosphere carrying a dummy nuclear weapon. Unintentionally, the rocket plumes from that extraordinary
flight profile were widely observed – and misinterpreted – all across southern Russia in 1967-8 and became one of the greatest classic ‘UFO
flaps’ in world history.
Overview narrative:
www.debunker.com...
Detailed report:
satobs.org...
By 1977, twenty years into the ‘Space Age’, rocket launchings from a secret base north of Moscow had become almost ‘standard’ as instigators
of famous UFO events.
‘Petrozavodsk Jellyfish’ [Kosmos-955 satellite from Plesetsk], Sep 1977
www.jamesoberg.com...
In 1984, a Soviet sub-launched missile [from the White Sea] was seen from civilian airliners and from Finland [Sep 7, 1984]
www.nbcnews.com... and
www.jamesoberg.com/oberg_minsk%20pages.pdf and
www.jamesoberg.com...
In the same period, another geographic coincidence placed Soviet satellite boosters performing an orbit-raising burn halfway around the world from
their launch site, which happened to be over the southern Andes Mountains of South America – and under particular solar illumination conditions,
these sparked one of the biggest ‘UFO flaps’ in Latin American history.
satobs.org...
Such routine Russian launches were often observed by airline pilots, who could interpreted the apparition as incorrectly as anyone else [and
sometimes more, as will be explained later]. On January 28, 1994, the Progress-TM21 supply drone launch to a Russian space station was seen over
Kazakhstan and described by respected UFO researcher Richard Hall [in his book ‘The UFO Evidence”] as a “luminous UFO maneuvered erratically
near airliner” [ cited
www.nicap.org...], when the object actually flew a straight course hundreds of kilometers
away from the pilot. The actual rocket event is described here:
web.archive.org...://www.zipworld.com.au/~psmith/pilot-ufos.html#second
In those years, other space plume events were being observed and correctly interpreted by amateur astronomers, as described here: July 2002 [ASTRONOMY
magazine] – ‘Close encounters’ with satellites
www.jamesoberg.com...
And here : 1988, ‘Sky & Telescope”
www.jamesoberg.com...
CHINA PLAYS ITS ROLE
The same geographic and cultural features that had made the USSR a fertile breeding ground for rocket plume pseud-UFOs also applied to China.
China ‘sky spirals’ – help needed!
www.jamesoberg.com...
2010 – Did missile test spark China UFO reports?
www.nbcnews.com...
2000 – Chinese space activities spark UO reports
www.jamesoberg.com... and
web.archive.org...://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/space-expert-china-ufos-likely-from-this-world/19560026
Sometimes Chinese observers were spooked by missile tests in Russia:
Soviet ‘Space War Games’ Spark UFO panics across eastern Asia [june 18, 1982]
www.jamesoberg.com...
Sometimes Chinese launches spooked observers in other countries:
www.youtube.com...
although the man who first recorded that rocket fuel dump still insists it was an alien craft:
www.youtube.com...