Glowing whale-sized object falls from sky into Connecticut lake.

reply to post by GunzCoty


So far all I am hearing is that they did have divers in the lake, but that is all i heard so far.
If i had the time i would take a drive up there.

Originally posted by defcon5
reply to post by theiceone

 

Yes, it's normal to call off a search like that pretty quickly. Once someone with some astronomy experience hears their testimony, they'll know pretty quickly that it was a green bolide.
Searches are expensive.

edit on 4/14/2012 by defcon5 because: (no reason given)

I hear what your saying.
But you stated that the Bolide that you observed was located about 100 miles north of you. And it was found to have hit a trailer. Are there any reports of where this Bolide landed?

I just hope for two things;

1- the lake in question is not a drinking-water/reservoir.

2- whatever it is I hope it's not toxic.

reply to post by loveguy


All i can say is I will not be fishing there any time soon.

No one seems to care much i guess. I'm still trying to find out more.

I'm still questioning whether it really landed in the lake, or the one witness saw it heading directly away from him and towards the horizon, which means it would appear to him that it was headed straight down.

If the lake was in front of him, then it could appear that it was heading straight down towards the lake, when actually it was simply heading over the horizon. If it was a meteor, it could have landed (if there was anything left of it to land) a few hundred miles away.

reply to post by GunzCoty


By all means, feel free to waste your own time on a wild goose chase.

Just because someone said they saw something happen, does not mean that it actually did happen.

Watch the following video:


Did you see the ball go up but not come down?

If you did, then you just saw something that did not take place - watch the clip again!

In the trick, the magician throws a ball into the air twice and catches it. On the third, fake throw, the ball seems to disappear into the air even though it never leaves his hand. Most of the students watching the trick were fooled by the magician looking up on the third throw - 68% perceived the ball as leaving his hand.

Source: newscientist.com

In the same way, if a person sees "something glowing" in the sky that appears to be "crashing to earth", a common comment that is often written by a witness reporting a relatively bright meteor(or words to that effect), what would they be expecting to see happen next?

If you go back to the experiment above, I highlighted the important bit - 68% perceived the ball as leaving his hand. These are not stupid, or ignorant people, yet 68% saw something happen that did not happen, which is at least partly due to misleading visual cues (the magician's gaze). Meteors are notorious for misleading visual cues, just as Soylent Green Is People, and defcon5 pointed out.

It happens all the time - just last month there was a large meteor that was seen by many people in my neck of the woods. It was obviously a meteor (the reports, the footage, and the photographs were all carefully analyzed by experts), but a few reported thinking they saw an aircraft or "something" on fire. Some even said they saw it land, but as usually happens, that was debunked by the fact others further "down" the meteor's path saw it carrying on passed them.

So go ahead and investigate, but I think you'll be wasting your time, just like thousands of others before you who failed to take into account what meteorite hunters and researchers have known for well over 100 years.

Like I said, just trying to save you chasing the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Edit to add: Soylent Green Is People posted while I was still writing my reply, and made very valid points. Appearances can often be deceiving.

reply to post by FireballStorm


Two things.
#1 You forgot to add a person on the other side of the magician. (two people from different places seen the same thing.)
#2 The fact is the ball is real.


Oh and I found out more people seen it as well, but are not going to say anything about it because of the "nature" of it.
And the divers are the ones that are wasting there time on a wild goose chase.

See the point you are missing is it was triangulated by the state police and the eye witness. And it was the "size of a whale". Now I'm from here I have been to Bantam lake many times, so i have a better idea of what they are saying.

Originally posted by GunzCoty
reply to post by loveguy

 

All i can say is I will not be fishing there any time soon.

No one seems to care much i guess. I'm still trying to find out more.

Thank you for your diligences in trying to find us answers..

I would think a meteor falling into a lake would have made a Big Slash with the locals.
Maybe it was just passing over head at the right angle for them to think it did.
Or it slowed and made a soft landing ( if it landed at all ) and did a little harvesting

reply to post by GunzCoty


What does

but are not going anything about because of the "nature" of it.

Mean,,,,
Are you saying ,, You understand these people and you believe them.

reply to post by guohua


I mean they don't want to say anything because they don't want to look like "nut jobs". (so I'm told)

Originally posted by GunzCoty
reply to post by guohua

 

I mean they don't want to say anything because they don't want to look like "nut jobs". (so I'm told)

Thank You,,, That is Very Interesting,,,, Nut Jobs,,,, So, I have to assume they did see something,, Fantastic!

__________________

Could all the fireball sightings be related ?
fireballs sightings

__________________

Originally posted by Violater1
I hear what your saying.
But you stated that the Bolide that you observed was located about 100 miles north of you. And it was found to have hit a trailer. Are there any reports of where this Bolide landed?

It most likely went into the Atlantic ocean.
We see them down here in Florida a LOT. I've personally seen nearly ten of them, in all colors: red, blue, green, white, and yellow. No one bothers to search for them here because we know that they fell into either the Gulf or Atlantic. I saw one in 98, during the Leonids, that was observed from all the way up into the middle of the US, over thousands of miles. The problem is that over those distances the curve of the earth interferes with you telling where it fell.

Originally posted by GunzCoty
Two things.
#1 You forgot to add a person on the other side of the magician. (two people from different places seen the same thing.)

Two things.
#1 both people said different things although they may have seen the same object, and both claimed to see it land - one specifically reported "a large object falling out of the sky in Litchfield, Conn. -- a green, glowing, whale-sized object that plunged into Litchfield Lake", whilst the other was more vague saying "that something fell out of the sky and landed near Bantam or Morris.

#2 Since a meteor can be many hundreds of km away, to get to "the other side of the magician" would need a distance separation of at least a few tens of km. In this case the witnesses were perhaps 5-10 km apart.

Originally posted by GunzCoty
#2 The fact is the ball is real.

So are bright meteors that confuse and astound people in equal measure

Originally posted by GunzCoty
See the point you are missing is it was triangulated by the state police and the eye witness. And it was the "size of a whale".

Again, because of the distance of a meteor, triangulation won't make much sense if the witnesses were only a few km away from each other, and it certainly would not be much use to determine the true size (not sure if that was what you were implying?).

The true size of an unknown object or light, at an unknown distance, is impossible to determine (See my thread here: How good are we at estimating the distance and altitude of UFOs?), so when someone says they saw what looked like a meteor, but was "the size of whale", from past experience people who see bright meteors describe them as being close and/or large in size., when we know they are not.

We do know that people mistakenly use brightness as a visual "size cue", so when a brighter than "normal" meteor is observed, without any other useful visual cues to go on, bright (and meteors can be dazzlingly bright) can easily be mistaken for being either close or large in size, or some combination of the two.


Interestingly another meteor was widely seen in neighboring states that same evening, Whilst no one reported seeing anything land or crash, similar pasterns of "confusion" are obvious from reports.


From Manalapan, NJ:

We actually were shocked at first, but once my sis ter and I both verified what we saw, we felt like going back to see if there was a fire in the field where it was headed. At first there was one ball but immediately it turned into two balls with a glowing training trail behind. .

Source: The American Meteor Society


From Massapequa, NY:

Although there is no way to give you dimensions, t his object was large in the sky. I've seen shooting stars before and this was much bigger than that. It was a glowing green ball with a very short train. After the object disappeared, there was no remaining train.

Source: The American Meteor Society

The point I'm trying to make here is that this is a well studied phenomenon, and it occurs all the time - bright meteors and fireballs are more common and brighter than many people assume.

This case is no different to all the others in many respects.

reply to post by FireballStorm


But if it was a meteor and it was really far away then a "whale size" meteor would be much much bigger then they seen, no?
And if it was a meteor that big; I think it would be world news as the meteor that almost killed off humans.

Face it a meteor that is whale size would kill allot of people, but if its as far away as you are suggesting then it would be an "ELE meteor"

ETA: And some of the people here say that there was no way it was a meteor. (there opinion)
But would it not be in the paper and the news that it was a meteor?

Then again who am I to ask about the local news when i found out from ATS

reply to post by theiceone


unless it was a controlled landing

Originally posted by GunzCoty
reply to post by FireballStorm

 

But if it was a meteor and it was really far away then a "whale size" meteor would be much much bigger then they seen, no?
And if it was a meteor that big; I think it would be world news as the meteor that almost killed off humans.

Face it a meteor that is whale size would kill allot of people, but if its as far away as you are suggesting then it would be an "ELE meteor"...

Look at the meteor in this video (I posted this a couple pages back). It's a video compilation of a bunch of different videos of a single 1992 meteor known as the Peekskill meteor, because it landed in Peekskill, New York, after hitting the back of a parked car:

please excuse the music. It's a good video, except for the useless music


The meteor in this video looks huge -- I'd call it whale-sized -- but these vidoes are from over 500 miles away from where it came to rest in Peekskill. And the only piece they found of this meteor is not even 1 foot in diameter, as seen in this picture of the meteor and the car it hit (which are now a sort of museum display):



I still think it is very possible that the witness saw a fireball meteor flying away from him, towards the horizon, so it looked like it was heading "downward" when it was really just heading away from him. From his vantage point, the fireball meteor could have only appeared to be heading down to the lake, but really not landing anywhere near him, and it could have appeared to be as big as a whale at the time.

Nothing to see folks, it's been positively identified now.

The 'glowing whale-sized object' is nothing but Newt Gingrichs' ego falling down from the stratosphere.

Make sure to keep your wives away from the crash site.

Originally posted by GunzCoty
But if it was a meteor and it was really far away then a "whale size" meteor would be much much bigger then they seen, no?

You might think so, but that's not the case.

This ties into the point I made earlier - people make the mistake of interpreting/equating brightness as/with size.

It's a subconscious mistake that is made because most things that we encounter (ie on the ground and at close range) obey this rule - "a bright light is either something big or something close"

With bright meteors however, this rule completely breaks down, primarily because people usually don't know or understand how bright a meteor can be, even at a great distance.

Since meteors hit the atmosphere at extreme speeds by anyone's standards (between 10 and 73 km/s) that gives even a small meteoroid lots of kinetic energy, and we see much of this energy transformed into light when we see a meteor streaking through the sky.

To give you an idea just how much energy is released, a one meter wide rock hitting the atmosphere at these kinds of speeds will release as much energy as a small nuclear weapon. On a smaller scale, a rock the size of an orange could easily cause a fireball that could equal or exceed the moon in brightness.

Originally posted by GunzCoty
And if it was a meteor that big; I think it would be world news as the meteor that almost killed off humans.

Face it a meteor that is whale size would kill allot of people, but if its as far away as you are suggesting then it would be an "ELE meteor"

Once again, not the case (if I understand you correctly), but it is a common misconception, which probably contributes to why people reject meteor as a possibility when they see an event like the one we are talking about - "if it was a meteor, and that close/big, we'd all be dead now or at least have heard about it on...".

For example, in 2009 a brilliant fireball was seen by thousands of people in South Africa, and caught on camera.



This one was much brighter than the case we are talking about here (it was at least the brightness of the sun at noon - around -26/27 magnitude), and it was estimated to be around the size of a house before it hit the atmosphere.

No one was harmed, but there was probably quite a lot of underwear hanging on washing lines the following day.

This was one of the larger fireballs in recent years, but even so, it was effectively stopped dead in it's tracks by our atmosphere. Most extra terrestrial material is actually relatively fragile, and when it hit's that atmosphere at hypersonic-speeds it often disintegrates, which releases huge quantities of energy/light in a very short space of time.

Anything that makes it down to below around 50km, hits much thicker atmosphere, which rapidly slows even large objects. It's not uncommon for objects to break up here if they have not already, and below 20-30km altitude it's extremely rare for an object to be going fast enough that it is still luminous. Most meteorites that are found, have fallen to the ground relatively harmlessly, traveling the last 20/30/40/50 km without enough speed to emit any light, so they fall to the ground unseen.

Check out this page for more info:
The American Meteor Society Fireball FAQs

If it had been a real meteor, and as close as the witness said it was, and the actual size of the object was 20m, and it had still been glowing when it hit the lake, there probably wouldn't be much lake left, and the blast would have been noticed 10's of km away.

Originally posted by GunzCoty
ETA: And some of the people here say that there was no way it was a meteor. (there opinion)

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but how many of those opinions are based on actual experience in the field of study in question or actual direct experience.

The people here who have direct experience. seem to all agree that it was probably a meteor/fireball, including myself.

Granted there is no footage, so we only have some quite vague reports to go on, but what little we do have fits very well with what we expect from a bright meteor, including the reactions of the witnesses.

We will likely never know with a 100% certainty what it was, but there is nothing to suggest that it was not a meteor (if you take into account all the points that have been made).

Originally posted by GunzCoty
But would it not be in the paper and the news that it was a meteor?

You mean "would they always state that it was a meteor if it was one"?

Not necessarily.

It depends on the paper/reporter, but most are not clued up on meteor science, and don't think or bother to try and find someone who really is, in my experience. In a case like this, the reporter or even the authorities may not even spot that there is an "astronomy connection" since the reports seem more consistent with more terrestrial explanations (like a plane crash) to the untrained eye.

To add to that, meteors are not really considered to be "big news" unless scores of people see one. Most fireball class meteors that occur never make the news. If all of them did, you would hear about them every single day without fail

Perhaps that's one of the reasons that most people assume fireballs are hard to see, but they are not, as long as you are willing to spend a night or two at a good observing site (with open views all round), tucked up in a sleeping bag and looking up at the stars.

Why not see some for yourself and make up your own mind based on what you see with your own eyes (keeping in mind that we have only scratched the surface in regards to the strange things meteors will sometimes do)?

It helps if you pick the right time of year - ideally you want to observe from a totally light pollution free observing site, during the peak of a meteor shower, such as the Lyrids this coming weekend, although the Perseids on the 12/13 and 13/14 August would be my personal recommendation if you want to have a better chance of catching some fireballs, and perhaps even see some of the weird tricks meteors play on the eyes.

I'll be out there looking too, and hoping one of my cameras catches a fireball, or even better a UFO (haven't managed to catch one yet, but I'm just getting started with a "more advanced" setup).

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


I have yet to see a meteor live or video that did not look like a meteor, yet that is just me.
Would the state police not know what a meteor is? Maybe he never seen one or ...well who knows?

I see what you're saying, but from what I'm hearing around here it seems people don't think it was a meteor.
Who knows?