skippy the bush kangaroo: One UFO Mystery Solved...

Thursday, June 30, 2011

One UFO Mystery Solved...

Last night, I left the apartment a little after 11 PM for the supermarket. On the way, I noticed an orange light in the eastern part of the sky that seemed to be flying my way; it was slowly getting brighter as it moved. I thought it was a passenger jet at first, since I see a couple dozen or so of those every day.

Well, it wasn't. The next thing I saw was a dim stream of sparks shooting out from behind the object, after which it began changing its trajectory. It seemed to stop in mid-air for a few seconds, and then it looked to be drifting away from my general direction. The orange light grew dimmer, and then faded away altogether.

Judging from what I'd seen, my best guess was that it was a military plane doing some night time maneuvers at a high elevation. The military has a pretty strong presence in Virginia, and I've seen planes flying at high altitudes in arcs similar to what I saw last night during daylight hours. But I didn't know for sure what I'd seen, so I called it a UFO and proceeded on to the supermarket.

This afternoon, I found out what it was. It wasn't a plane, it was a rocket:

An U.S. Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket carrying the Department of Defense Operationally Responsive Space office’s ORS-1 satellite was successfully launched at 11:09 p.m. EDT today from NASA’s Launch Range at the Wallops Flight Facility and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia...

Wallops Island is east of Richmond, on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay, and I was indeed headed east when I saw that thing in the sky. So what looked like forwards to backwards motion to me at the time was actually upwards to downwards. It never occurred to me that what I saw was a rocket, but it makes a lot more sense than a plane. Call it an IFO.

You learn something new each day...

Labels: life, ufo