Possible Crash in Kentucky

Very surprised that not very much information is coming out regarding this event! Anyone near try and do some digging and see what you can find that is credible. Thanks!

My mom is thinking of going and looking, but when I say it's wilderness, I mean it's true wilderness. It would likely be a 5x5 mile grid and total wild growth. My mom isn't capable of that. Unfortunately, SE Kentucky is one of the forgotten areas of the US, so the mass media isn't really covering this, so by weeks end, no one will care any more. Especially the locals. They care more about the moment and sadly how they are going to feed their families and/or habits.

Just a note, it's very possible a meteorite or satellite entered the atmosphere and became a fireball and burnt to next to nothing just before impact. Happens all the time. It could even have been big and exploded due to atmospheric resistance, causing the boom and the site of two things colliding, then burning up. Could also have been an object that caused a sonic boom. I want to know more about the alleged collision event witnessed. It's very believable that someone heard a boom and saw two fireballs, so I think it's possible something broke apart and the witness got it mixed up. If there are more that say there was a collision, then that's different.

Originally posted by DocEmrick
reply to post by JoeGuitar

 

Yeah, but they would have found an impact crater.

I'm trying to dig up all the fireball stories that happened this year.

I remember 2 or 3 of them making national news, one of them happened in Vegas if I recall correctly.

This is probably the same phenomena. I wouldn't rule out a meteor, but with no impact site, crash, or pieces found - this makes it similar to the other fireball cases. Now the question is, what the hell are these fireballs scorching through our atmosphere?

You bring up a very good question.

I personally witnessed my first and only UFO sighting last year and it had "fireball" qualities,it got me to start my own digging of cases involving spherical reddish/orange,fireball UFO's.

To my surprise I found many reported cases with similarities from my home state within a couple months alone, not to mention world-wide sightings reported that contained elements of my own experience.

I know you ask what these so called fireballs scorching through our atmosphere could actually be and to that I would suggest that a majority are most likely known natural phenomena.

In the same breath I also believe we are still left with many cases that fall into the realm of the 'unknown' and definitively represent genuine UFO's.

I will add that my experience with what I witnessed looked to have "intelligence",it was not like seeing a streaking star,meteor or plane.I had a very good viewpoint and would approximate the object to be only 150-200 ' away,about 20' off the ground referencing the UFO being close to a telephone pole it was about 5 feet above the telephone pole.

Two other people were with me,one being my mother whom is highly skeptical,made a believer of her after our sighting,that's for sure.

Originally posted by DocEmrick
In the Topix thread, someone brought up a good point.

If it was a fireball, this isn't the first. These have been occurring at increasing frequencies for the past year.


Get ready...

Fireballs and meteorites have been occurring since long before you or I were around.

That said, there is no hard evidence that this was a fireball/meteorite, although it's certainly a good possibility.

Likewise, there are other things that can cause booms, and to say all booms that people hear must be due to meteorites would be jumping to conclusions IMO.

Last but not least, you said "occurring at increasing frequencies for the past year".

And that is based on what? Your experience based on "the last year (or two)"? If it is, I don't see too much evidence of it in your profile.

This November marked 14 years I have been observing and studying meteors and fireballs in particular, yet I must be totally mistaken, along with all of the many thousands of amateur and professional astronomers.

None of us have detected this dramatic increase in fireballs that a total newbie to the subject is bound to notice after carefully studying all the data available, and taking account all the factors which might influence how people report fireballs. I guess we should all give up?

Did you ever consider that, coming to a place like ATS, where we gather together reports of mostly odd stuff from far and wide, you might just be shocked by how often they do (and always have) occurred, and in my experience more often than most people realize?

Yes there are more reports of fireballs each year, but that can easily put down to more people reporting them, and "improvements" in news gathering. There is no evidence that we are seeing any abnormal increase in fireballs. You are I'm guessing aware that there are variations in the rate throughout the year, as well as the occasional "blip", since they are partly random in nature.

Anyway, the point is, every year at least someone says "rates are going up". Well if that was true, we should be having meteorite dropping fireballs over every major city almost every day by now!

Do we?

Originally posted by DocEmrick
reply to post by JoeGuitar

 

Yeah, but they would have found an impact crater.

I'm trying to dig up all the fireball stories that happened this year.

I remember 2 or 3 of them making national news, one of them happened in Vegas if I recall correctly.

This is probably the same phenomena. I wouldn't rule out a meteor, but with no impact site, crash, or pieces found - this makes it similar to the other fireball cases. Now the question is, what the hell are these fireballs scorching through our atmosphere?

Actually, most meteorite dropping/boom making fireballs do not produce craters as such. The booms come from the meteorite/s dropping through the atmosphere. Our atmosphere is actually very efficient at slowing down even surprisingly large objects. It is in fact very rare for meteorites to be large enough to make a sizable crater. The fast majority fall relatively harmlessly to the ground, the original body having disintegrated at high altitude.

Another destructive process which may operate against the fall of a meteorite is fragmentation of the meteoroid. The peak pressures these bodies can stand as derived from large bodies such as the recovered meteorites were found to be about 106N/m². This is much less than the crusting stress of about 108N/m² found in laboratory measurements. The reason may be in the earlier history of the meteorite parent bodies. Obviously, a very large fraction of meteoroids undergo a breakup when entering the atmosphere. This was visually observed in the past, but becomes very obvious from fireball photographs such as the Lost City images (McCrosky et al., 1971) and other meteor images (Babadzhanov, 1968)), as well as the video recordings taken of the Peekskill meteorite fall on October 9, 1992 (Brown et al., 1994).

Source: The International Meteor Organization

How fast are meteorites traveling when they reach the ground?

Meteoroids enter the earth’s atmosphere at very high speeds, ranging from 11 km/sec to 72 km/sec (25,000 mph to 160,000 mph). However, similar to firing a bullet into water, the meteoroid will rapidly decelerate as it penetrates into increasingly denser portions of the atmosphere. This is especially true in the lower layers, since 90 % of the earth’s atmospheric mass lies below 12 km (7 miles / 39,000 ft) of height.

At the same time, the meteoroid will also rapidly lose mass due to ablation. In this process, the outer layer of the meteoroid is continuously vaporized and stripped away due to high speed collision with air molecules. Particles from dust size to a few kilograms mass are usually completely consumed in the atmosphere.

Due to atmospheric drag, most meteorites, ranging from a few kilograms up to about 8 tons (7,000 kg), will lose all of their cosmic velocity while still several miles up. At that point, called the retardation point, the meteorite begins to accelerate again, under the influence of the Earth’s gravity, at the familiar 9.8 meters per second squared. The meteorite then quickly reaches its terminal velocity of 200 to 400 miles per hour (90 to 180 meters per second). The terminal velocity occurs at the point where the acceleration due to gravity is exactly offset by the deceleration due to atmospheric drag.

Meteoroids of more than about 10 tons (9,000 kg) will retain a portion of their original speed, or cosmic velocity, all the way to the surface. A 10-ton meteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere perpendicular to the surface will retain about 6% of its cosmic velocity on arrival at the surface. For example, if the meteoroid started at 25 miles per second (40 km/s) it would (if it survived its atmospheric passage intact) arrive at the surface still moving at 1.5 miles per second (2.4 km/s), packing (after considerable mass loss due to ablation) some 13 gigajoules of kinetic energy.

On the very large end of the scale, a meteoroid of 1000 tons (9 x 10^5 kg) would retain about 70% of its cosmic velocity, and bodies of over 100,000 tons or so will cut through the atmosphere as if it were not even there. Luckily, such events are extraordinarily rare.

Continued in the next post...

Continued from previous post.

All this speed in atmospheric flight puts great pressure on the body of a meteoroid. Larger meteoroids, particularly the stone variety, tend to break up between 7 and 17 miles (11 to 27 km) above the surface due to the forces induced by atmospheric drag, and perhaps also due to thermal stress. A meteoroid which disintegrates tends to immediately lose the balance of its cosmic velocity because of the lessened momentum of the remaining fragments. The fragments then fall on ballistic paths, arcing steeply toward the earth. The fragments will strike the earth in a roughly elliptical pattern (called a distribution, or dispersion ellipse) a few miles long, with the major axis of the ellipse being oriented in the same direction as the original track of the meteoroid. The larger fragments, because of their greater momentum, tend to impact further down the ellipse than the smaller ones. These types of falls account for the “showers of stones” that have been occasionally recorded in history. Additionally, if one meteorite is found in a particular area, the chances are favorable for there being others as well.

Source: The American Meteor Society

reply to post by Alien Abduct


theres a coverup afoot

Originally posted by C.H.U.D.

Originally posted by DocEmrick
In the Topix thread, someone brought up a good point.

If it was a fireball, this isn't the first. These have been occurring at increasing frequencies for the past year.


Get ready...

Fireballs and meteorites have been occurring since long before you or I were around.

That said, there is no hard evidence that this was a fireball/meteorite, although it's certainly a good possibility.

I wouldn't go that far, exactly. According to a local meteorologist, there IS hard evidence to support a possible meteor strike. I am, in no way, an expert on this topic so I will yield to the rest of you:

www.wkyt.com...

reply to post by JoeGuitar


I was looking at that meteorologist's explanation a bit yesterday. A meteorite seems like the most plausible explanation, however, there are some inconsistencies with his references.

For one thing, the video he posted lists the time as 20111211 07:06:12 UTC - unless I am mistaken isn't that 2:06 AM Eastern time on the 11th? But the incident occurred sometime around 9-10 PM on the night of the 11th? Additionally, the flash shown on the video doesn't even travel through the entire frame, it looks like a meteor that simply burned up in the atmosphere on short order, to my eyes anyway.

Also, the first image is completely unreadable to me, I cannot determine what he is trying to show with that one, are the blue lines supposed to be meteor paths? Likewise with the second image, I see no reference to the actual time that graph is taken from. If anyone knows where the source of the images are or can assist in deciphering them it would be appreciated.

It is odd that he would create that explanation and then use a video from the wrong time?

Originally posted by JoeGuitar

I wouldn't go that far, exactly. According to a local meteorologist, there IS hard evidence to support a possible meteor strike. I am, in no way, an expert on this topic so I will yield to the rest of you:

www.wkyt.com...

Thanks for the link. I had a look at the clip, and it certainly looks like a meteor, but it does not look like a meteor that would be likely to drop meteorites in my experience. It's moving too fast basically. Meteoroids that hit the atmosphere too fast don't stand much of a chance - they either vaporise almost immediately or disintergrate (followed by the pieces vapourising).

I would not call that hard evidence, at least just yet. If another camera caught the same meteor, it would be possible to triangulate the meteor and work out how deep into the atmosphere the meteoroid penetrated. We may never know for sure what it was, or if the meteor in the footage was responsible for what people heard/felt.

Even if there are "rocks on the ground" there is no guarantee that they will be found.

One other word of caution: a meteorologist is someone who studies the weather, not meteors, so I would be wary of what he said in regards to meteors. I have often heard misleading information from so called "experts", even some astronomers who don't specialise in meteors.

reply to post by UdonNiedtuno


I'm having a hard time interpereting the second graphic on that page, but the first is simply showing the drection the meteor was traveling in relation to the ground.

I think you are also right about the timing not matching.

We should all be careful about jumping to conclusions here, since fireballs and meteors are quite frequent, especially with the peak of the Geminids. Sorting out what may have been the cause could be quite tricky.

reply to post by C.H.U.D.


Excellent post and I can't disagree with anything you've said. I love a good mystery but not as much as I love the solution to one. The local "chatter" has quieted down a bit on this one. It seems that this is resulting in lots of head scratching and shrugging.

reply to post by JoeGuitar


Thanks. Head scratching and shrugging comes with the territory. With cases like this witness reports will often conflict, and media reporting is often confusing and/or misleading. Add to that all the uninformed speculation we get on a forum like this, a fireball rich annual meteor shower like the Geminids, and it's easy for the most relavent details of the case to be drowned out by all the noise.

Anyway, to get back to the case at hand, I've been doing a little digging... but I still don't seem to be able to find any reports of what time the booms were heard. I don't suppose anyone else has come across any timings?

What I did find, was what appears to be a report of another fireball the following night (the 12th) which seems to fit the geographical area, and was captured/triangulated by multiple cameras.

For a map of the meteor's path over the ground click here.

The end point of the meteor was at 31km altitude, which is low enough so that booms would have been heard, and indeed there is at least one report from someone who saw the meteor and heard booms shortly afterwards.

12DEC2011 Warren Morrison Ontario,Canada 18:05 EST 4 or 5 seconds (approx.) Flash of bright light around me got my attention, first seen near zenith, moved vertically downwards, azimuth approximately 14 degrees, passed between alpha and beta Cassiopeiae, vanished at about altitude 50 degrees green, fragmenting, heard sound like thunder (a single boom) lasting one or two seconds, about three minutes later Bright enough to light up ground around me, perhaps as bright as half moon Broke into 5 to 10 pieces near end of trail Vertical descent from near zenith, azimuth about 14 degrees

Source: lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com

It is most likely totally unrelated, but an interesting coincidence none the less. The footage is also worth looking at for reference - since the cameras are all at diferent locations you can see how perspective influences the apparent speed and direction.

FWIW it's likely that nothing survived from the event on the 12th, and that was a much more likely looking candidate for a meteorite fall compared to the footage in the link a couple of posts back.

One other thing I noticed whilst reviewing some of the links posted earlier in this thread was this:

After the explosion, lines appeared in the sky that some believed to be the contrails from an airplane.

“In the sky you could see like crisscrossed, like something had collided up there,” she said.

Read more: Hazard Herald (KY) - UPDATE Fire in abandoned mine likely cause of explosion

Source: Hazard Herald (KY)

which is interesting since the persistent or dust train left by a fireball fits this description to a T. They can resemble a contrail at first, but unlike a contrail meteor trains start to distort immediately, and within a few seconds they look completely twisted and "messed up", just like you might expect if a mid-air collision had occurred.

That is because our atmosphere has layers a bit like an onion, each layer having different wind direction, so when something plunges down through those layers (or upwards in the case of rockets), it's rapidly ripped apart by the very strong winds at high altitude.

It's easy to see why people may have reported a possible mid-air plane crash, after having seen a bright light/flash, and running outside to find a scene that looks a bit like this photo of the train left by a bright fireball:


source

Another (perhaps even better) example here of the train left when asteroid 2008 TC3 hit our atmosphere: www.universetoday.com...

Long time lurker here at ATS, first time poster and literally made an account purely to chime in on this one. I live in SE Ky and I believe I may have actually witnessed whats being discussed in this thread. Although I hastily read over some post skimmed and completely skipped others, (damn ADD), I thought I would share what I saw on the night in question. I was standing under the rear side of my carport smoking a cigarette when a flash of light caught my eye. I looked up and, in a downard right path, and saw a large blue fireball, with lots of smoke coming off of it. I'm awful at estimating distance but from where I was the "fireball" looked to be about the size of a half dollar coin. It was only there a few seconds as it dipped behind the mountains right above a small gap, and seemed to be travelling in a south by southwest direction. I've seen a few meteors/meteorites in my brief 26years of existence, but this one seemed odd to me. It seemed to me like the "fireball" hadnt entered the atmosphere and caught fire, but rather was already inside the atmosphere when it burst into flame. Purely specualation on my part. I didn't really hear anything, but there is a coal mine very near where I live that was actively blasting that day/night, and the roar of the machinery can be heard throught the night outside.