Satellites Or UFOS Over San Jose?

Saw this on one of the local stations thought I'd wait till they put the video and story up. They also have a video up (although not that long or great).

Satellites or UFOS Over San Jose?

The appearance of at least two fast-moving shining objects in the weekend daytime sky over San Jose has local residents wondering if they were UFOs.

They are saying they are probably satellites.

[edit on 9-6-2008 by ATruGod]

I've never seen a satellite in the daytime. How does that work?

They claimed that when the solar panels are opened its possible the satellite could be seen in the daylight.

But then you'd think that sightings of this sort would be common....or are they?

Thought I saw some slight direction change in there. Might have just been the camera mvement or whatnaot. Not really buying the satalite route. Hard to say what exactly.

Hiyah Atrugod,

I was just getting ready to post this, if no one else had, good catch! I didn't know you could see satellites during the day and this didn't look like a satellite to me, it looked like something falling from the atmosphere to me, space junk maybe?

The article says the guy who filmed them said they were "racing across the sky" to me it looks like they were falling from the sky...anyone else? The article also describes them as triangle shaped pieces of metal...I didn't see that...but he might have been able to zoom in on his camera I guess.

(Please note: the contents of this post may be construed as being somewhat sarcastic)

Sarcastic on...

Well...

A couple of things to consider..

Ask yourself how many satellites are actually in orbit not counting the Geostationary ones.

(we are not really interested in those since they are stationary relative to a ground based observer and take 24 hours to make one orbit, LEO's on the other hand take around 90 minutes and so orbit the planet about 16 times a day...)

You'll find that there are approx 4000+ as guesstimated by our pals at nasa.

If you want to count them yourself go here
and report back to us once you've finished.

Following our previous logic, thats only about 32000 chances (4000 by 16 /2) of seeing one per day in the bright shiny sun which is about Mag neg 27....

Now...

Satellites from the ground...

Wait untill it's daylight, go outside, look up.

Wait for about three hours and then come back and tell us how many of those 4000+ you managed to count (since you have just given every one of them two chances to orbit the entire planet).

(Send Springer your answers printed on the back of a baked trout if you can catch more than 1, he'll love you for it.. and remember, photographic evidence only please.)

Thank you.

Sarcastic off..
This aside, I apologise, I simply loathe this kind of presumption.

There is a way to see satellites during the day but it is rare.

It's called a satellite flare.

It has nothing to do with the solar pannels which you may agree, tend not to be much use unless they are pointing towards the sun, and hence not likley to reflect into the nearest handycam.

Flares exist when something like the antenna of an LEO satellite manage's to hit an angle where it its possible for it to relect light towards the surface of the earth, this results in a brief 'flare' of light, lasting only a couple of seconds, which is just visible to the naked eye during the day at its very, very best.

Example animation here.

It is rather doubtful that you could track not one, but two, of them all the way over from horizon to horizon with the naked eye during the day.

If we knew the time date and location of the video it would be trivial to determine exactly which satellites were orbiting at that time, alas, it appears that is much too complicated a thing to do for the commentators..

FYI.

Above oakland hills on sunday the 9th june at 3 pm there were the following satellites.

Iridium 86 at 2.41pm (mag 2.6)
Iridium 50 at 2.50pm (mag 2.8)
Iridium 56 at 2.59pm (mag 2.8)
Iridium 52 at 3.07pm (mag 2.56)
Rosat at 3.07 pm (mag 2)
ATV-1 and the ISS (tied) from 3.09 to 3.16 maxing at magnitude 1.15 according to my machines

and after that a few others...

Etc...

Unfortunately all we have is media garbage and I personally have never seen a satellite orbit across the sky with the same continuous luminosity as daylight clouds.

Never mind two of them on the same day..

Cheers.


[edit on 9-6-2008 by Absence of Self]

reply to post by Absence of Self


Thanks Absence of Self! Sarcastic or not, thanks for helping those of us out who truly didn't know about satellites in the daytime I have seen them at night as most have and I knew these were not satellites, but not 100% sure.

You can sing Yankee Doodle Dandee "nekid" and be sarcastic doing it, as long as you give me more info, as you did

So thank you for enlightening me

Satellites schmatelites, if that video is in real time which it appears to be judging by the clouds, the UFOS were traveling much faster than any satellite I have ever seen which was only at night mind you. Note to our government-We already know about the UFOS and the "visitors" please stop patronizing us by denying their existence and calling them swamp gas/mass hallucinations/Venus/Mars/Jupiter/lens flare/flares/ball lightning,satellites etc.

I once saw a really cool huge ball lighting formation float over our car, it had a strange red light in the midst of it which I thought was strange, but I guessed it was swamp gas, but after my mom passed me the crack pipe and I took another hit, I saw a little green alien wink at me through an open port hole, although my mom thought he was kinda magenta in color, and possibly it was Mars, cause you know it's supposed to be red, but maybe the commercial jetliner flying overhead dropped some flares, I was so confused, so I took another hit from the crack pipe and saw it was really Skylab which had never actually crashed but was upgraded to be able to swoop down close to earth and glide at very slow speeds to take close up surveillance pictures for the black ops, and then the strangest thing happened, the thing rotated in mid air and slowly landed on the ground turning out all of the lights so it could no longer be seen. Man what a long strange trip it's been.