Police dashcam catches meteor or possible ufo?, page 3

Originally posted by jhn7537

Originally posted by randyvs
reply to post by jhn7537

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Where's the tail ? Nothing comes thru the atmosphere without leaving a tail. No meteor.

edit on 4-2-2012 by randyvs because: (no reason given)

The real question is why is this thread getting no love??? We have thousands of legitimate resources here on ATS and were getting no attention whats so ever with this LEGITIMATE sighting.... is this a meteroite? a UFO? a fallen satelite??? I DUNNO, but i do know this topic should be researched...

Not all meteors have a visible tail, as I said before.

Do all the meteors in this meteor compilation have tails?


There is also no evidence that it impacted earth at any significant velocity. Most (even large meteoroids/asteroids) don't - they usually break up at high altitude and then spend a significant amount of time falling, eventually reaching the ground at "free-fall velocity".

You may not be aware of it, but many experienced meteor astronomers have been poring over this event (events like this are big news in the meteor observing community), and all agree that this was indeed a meteor that possibly dropped meteorites on the ground.

Whilst you may not agree that it looks like a meteor, lets be honest, who is going to know what a meteor looks like better - you, or someone who actually spends most of their spare time studying the subject and observing meteors?

Originally posted by randyvs
reply to post by jhn7537

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Where's the tail ? Nothing comes thru the atmosphere without leaving a tail. No meteor.

edit on 4-2-2012 by randyvs because: (no reason given)

the vid shows it never entered the atmosphere that's why no trail
and. You and people talking about being too slow watch this vid
nothing out of the ordinary with this video its a meteor

Originally posted by 3xil3
the vid shows it never entered the atmosphere that's why no trail
and. You and people talking about being too slow watch this vid
nothing out of the ordinary with this video its a meteor

A meteor by definition is a meteoroid that has entered our atmosphere.

Without our atmosphere there can be no meteor, since a meteor is only luminous (ie visible) because of collisions with atmospheric air molecules.

Meteoroids are impossible to see outside our atmosphere simply because they are too small, and with out the light generated by collisions with air molecules we don't see them.

If I could remind you, I posted this earlier on in this thread:

Originally posted by C.H.U.D.

No not necessarily. Keep in mind that the tail can be much less bright than the head of the meteor itself. A camera could easily pick up a meteor but not the tail, even if there was a tail visible to the naked eye.

To expand on that a little. Most cameras will automatically adjust their aperture in order to try and keep the scene the camera is filming from becoming over or under exposed. A meteor presents a problem for the camera in this respect since the head of the meteor can be hundreds of times brighter than the tail.

This kind of difference in brightness is impossible for any camera to handle, and because of this the camera will try to adjust it's aperture in order to find the best compromise between over exposing the brighter parts of the scene (the meteor head), and under exposing the darker parts of the scene (the sky, the tail, etc).

However, because of the extreme difference in brightness between the meteor head/other elements of the scene being filmed, and the limited range of brightness (or "dynamic-range") that today's cameras usually have, the aperture setting the camera picks will be too small to reveal any tail whilst not letting the head get too over exposed - it will be over exposed or "blown-out" anyway because of the sheer difference in brightness between the head of the meteor and the rest of the scene.

There are also many eye witness reports of a meteor with a tail:

Josh DeGroote Denton, TX United States
"Blue, Orange, Red tail"

Dylan Hinman Oklahoma City, OK USA
"bright green w/green orange tail very low flying"

Sylvie and Elise Higgins Dripping Springs, TX
"Solid with trail behind"

Amy S Temple, Tx USA
"White and orange with a Green tail"

Yanick Bowles oklahoma city
"red with green tale"

Madeline Dripping Springs, Tx, United States
"Meteor had a trail of fire that sputtered."

Gayle Gamil Plano Texas 75093
"round w/Red orange long tail"

There are lots more reports like that at the source I linked to above. Whilst not all the reports mention a tail, the majority do, so I see no reason to doubt that it had one.

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

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The same meteor can have a tail at one point of its atmospheric entry, and not have at tail at another point.

The famous Peekskill meteorite in 1992, which was seen from North Carolina, Virginia, then Ohio, then through Pennsylvania, before coming to rest in a parked car in Peekskill, New York did not have a tail when first seen, but had a tail later in its flight.

I actually saw this meteor in Pennsylvania as I was driving home that evening (I watched it fly over the horizon), and when I saw it, it had a broken-line tail -- i.e. sometimes had a tail and sometimes did not.

Here are 16 videos of the Peekskill Meteorite. These are all videos of the same meteor, but it looks different in each video. Most have it with a tail, but at least one does not (the video from Fayetteville, NC).

fireball.meteorite.free.fr...

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

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I couldn't agree more.

The reason the Peekskill fireball hat no tail to begin with, is almost certainly because of it's low angle of entry. At higher altitudes there is less atmosphere, therefore fewer collisions between atmospheric air molecules and the meteoroid, resulting in less ionized (glowing) gas which is what makes the tail.

Robert Lunsford (Operations Manager and Journal Editor of the American Meteor Society) writes the following in reply to another observer who saw a meteor with no tail

Jason and All,

It sounds as if you witnessed a Perseid "Earthgrazer". This occurs when the
radiant lies near the horizon. At this time of night a Perseid meteor enters
the Earth's atmosphere at a shallow angle, allowing it to last much longer
than usual. They often appear as just "dot's" with no visible tail or train.
As the night progresses, Perseids enter the atmosphere at a steeper angle
and then reach the thicker portions of the atmosphere. It is then that they
appear as "normal' meteors with sub-second durations.

I hope this helps!

Robert Lunsford

Source: METEOROBS (The Meteor Observing mailing list)

I'd agree with that too - most earthgrazers I can remember seeing have not had any tail.

reply to post by Darkstar12

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10/10

Good to see that a few people on here at least have their facts straight.

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