Fire in the SkyS


Attention

Cover-up? Columbus, Georgia shakes after loud boom blamed on planes

Ben Wright
Ledger-Enquirer
Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:00 UTC
A military aircraft flying over Columbus apparently broke the sound barrier Tuesday afternoon with a thunderous boom, setting off cars alarms and sending people out into the streets.

The loudest sound ever heard by some residents rocked the city shortly before 5 p.m. It was heard at the airport, north to Midland, west to Phenix City and east to the Fort Benning reservation.

A sonic boom is created when an object is traveling through the air faster than the speed of sound. Breaking the sound barrier is only possible with a military aircraft.


Comment: One would think after the amount of media coverage given to the Russian meteor in 2013 that reporters and people would realize another possible source of objects breaking the sound barrier!

This was an extreme boom and it is doubtful the boom was caused by a sonic boom from aircraft given the information provided in this article. A reader of another article about the boom commented:
I don't buy the 'routine testing' soundbyte either. We have lived here for many years, and we've never heard anything like that since we came to Columbus. Even an M1A1 Abrams, or a Paladin aren't as loud as what we heard today, ubless you're very close to them. I also thought there was an FAA regulation against making sonic booms like that over cities...unless there was a darn good reason. GA Air Nat'. Guard routine testing should normally not be done over cities-whatever their website says.
Looks like the military aircraft sonic boom excuse is being given in this case as a means to cover-up the increasing frequency of meteors entering and exploding in the atmosphere. Can't have people waking up and realizing their leaders are powerless to protect them.

Here is a video of the Russian meteor as a reminder:




Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said there were some military flights in the area but not supersonic. "We are aware that military flight activity was underway over the area, but we don't know about any supersonic flights," she said.

Shortly after the boom, a Columbus patrolman near the airport said two aircraft flying over broke the sound barrier, but Police Lt. J.F. Ross said nothing had been confirmed in connection with the loud noise.
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Fireball

NASA all-sky camera captures 253 fireballs on September 13


spaceweather.com
Sat, 13 Sep 2014 17:51 UTC
Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics.

On Sep. 13, 2014, the network reported 253 fireballs.
(250 sporadics, 3)

Image
© Unknown
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Fireball 2

Fireball streaked across Mid-Atlantic sky Sunday evening


newsworks
Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00 UTC
Image
This disintegration of this bright fireball lit up the sky of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania on September 2014
If you saw a bright object race across sky around 11 p.m. Sunday, you're not alone.

Social media exploded with reports of a fireball streaking across the sky.

A fireball is another term for a very bright meteor, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS).

"Incredibly bright #meteor even at apparently low altitude just fell over #DC. Wonderful moment!" tweeted photojournalist William B. Plowman from Washington, D.C.

Comment: More footage of same.



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Fireball 5

Meteor streaks across Vancouver skies


The Huffington Post B.C.
Sun, 14 Sep 2014 01:38 UTC
A fireball mesmerized people in parts of B.C., Washington and Oregon on Saturday night.

Jen Pickard was fortunate enough to snap a photo of the tail end of what's believed to be a meteor. She and her friend were paddling in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island after watching the sun set, when a "huge ball of fire flew by" at about 8:20 p.m.

"It was yellowish blue and flew in an arc," Pickard wrote in an email to The Huffington Post B.C. She described the 45-second streak like a shooting star but much larger and closer.
Vancouver Meteor_1
© Jen Pickard/Ruth Stefanek
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Fireball 2

Incredible video of comet fragment passing over California

MrMBB333
Fire in the Sky News
Fri, 12 Sep 2014 12:41 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The following video is from Time To Wake Up News facebook page, the original video of the fireball was posted by Landon Miller who works at KTVN TV and can be found here.

Video of 'fireball' witnessed over California! 9/12/2014 @ 6am Pacific.


Comment: See also: Thousands of people in California lose power after truck crash and meteor flash

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Comet 2

Large fireball observed over Colorado

Afza Fathima
International Business Times
Fri, 05 Sep 2014 19:45 UTC
Image
© Reuters / Doug MurrayA Perseid meteor streaks towards the horizon during the annual Persied meteor shower in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, August 12, 2008. Perseids meteors are bits of debris left by the comet Swift-Tuttle which burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
On Tuesday, Sep. 2, a lot of people in Colorado said they saw a fireball streak across the sky at about 10.30 p.m.

Director of the Sommers-Bausch Observatory at the University of Colorado, Seth Hornstein, said that the bright ones were rare and they see only three or so of them that get significantly brighter every year.

A man sent an email to 9news stating that he and several members of his family had seen the fireball from their home. Reports on sightings can be done on the website of the American Meteor Society and these reports showed that the family wasn't the only one.

The website shows that people from eighteen different cities near Colorado like Fountain, Evergreen, Boulder, Pueblo, Estes Park Littleton, Aurora and Arvada had also seen the meteor.

Hornstein said that the meteor was approximately the size of a sports ball, either a baseball or a volleyball. Though that doesn't seem like it is too big, he explained that usually the size of the fireball would be the size of a pebble or a grain of sand.
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Fireball

Huge and remarkably bright fireball seen over Bosnia


klix.ba
Sat, 13 Sep 2014 15:40 UTC
At 02:54 past midnight a remarkably bright fireball flew over Bosnia and Herzegovina which was recorded by cameras of BiH meteor network jointly run by Astronomical Society Orion and Federal Hydrometeorological Institute from Sarajevo.

Image
© Unknown
Despite the bad weather, three meteor network cameras (Sarajevo, Gradačac and Pelješac) have registered this phenomenon.

The fireball could be seen for over six seconds before it broke down into five pieces. There is a strong possibility that parts of this celestial body fell north of Gradačac, on the border with Croatia.
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Fireball 5

Mysterious bright light over Bay Area skies may have been a meteor

Riya Bhattacharjee and Jodi Hernandez
NBC Bay Area
Fri, 12 Sep 2014 12:09 UTC
Meteor
© NBC Bay AreaThis is the image Chabot astronomers used to determine the strange light seen over the Bay Area was in fact a meteor.
The Chabot Space and Science Center says that the mysterious streak of light that lit up Bay Area skies early Friday morning may have been a meteor.

Bay Area residents -- and even some in Southern California -- reported seeing a mysterious phenomena involving a streak of light, but nobody could figure out what it was for a while.

Comet? White glow? Strange streak in the sky? Bright orange light? Aliens? UFO? -- the rumors kept flying in.

National Weather Forecaster Bob Benjamin told SFGate that he has no idea what it was. "There's, as far as I know, no meteorological phenomena associated with that," he said.
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Sun

'Extreme' X-1 class solar storm heading towards Earth!


News Corp Australia
Thu, 11 Sep 2014 18:24 UTC
Image
© UnknownSolar storm ... A space weather projection of where the solar storm may strike.
We don't yet know when or where the highly charged ejecta from a solar eruption yesterday will hit Earth, but we know it will. The flare, rated X-1 on the solar weather forecaster's scale, is rated "extreme" - but only just.
Wide swatch CME now visible in updated LASCO C3 imagery. More to come. pic.twitter.com/FxxP9RHTFh
- SolarHam (@SolarHam) September 10, 2014
Forecasters don't yet know when the solar storm - which erupted from the Sun's surface late Wednesday - will arrive here or which part of the planet will be facing the brunt of the effects. It could arrive as early as this afternoon Australian time, or may take a few days.
Major X1.6 solar flare observed around region 2158. A fast moving CME likely associated and possibly Earth directed.pic.twitter.com/DsKsrZ74DI
- SolarHam (@SolarHam) September 10, 2014
Scientists will have a better idea after they get more satellite data. Solar flares in the "extreme" scale can cause geomagnetic storms capable of bringing down power grids, damaging satellites and disrupting radio transmissions. More often, the only effect is to brighten the auroras over the north and southern hemispheres.
Sailing through an #Aurora into #Sunrise. #SpaceVine#Timelapse. https://t.co/y5xGBLxWtQ
- Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) September 9, 2014
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Fireball 5

Shock asteroid warning: Earth faces 100 years of killer strikes beginning in 2017 - or maybe even earlier?

Nathan Rao
Daily Express, UK
Fri, 05 Sep 2014 20:24 UTC

Comment: In light of readers' feedback regarding the following article, a few comments:

The 'science' in this article isn't really defensible. It's the 'newsworthiness' of the story that stands out for SOTT.net, just the fact that ANY kind of space threat scenario is being publicized.

A couple of possibilities as to what is going on here:

The author is 'leaking info' which, though not scientifically accurate, gets that message out there that 'something wicked this way comes'.

Alternatively, the author is writing deliberately rubbish stuff that can easily be debunked, thereby debunking anyone by association who notices that something is definitely 'up'.

Maybe a bit of both is at work; maybe something else entirely. Journalistic standards aren't exactly what they might once have been, so this could simply have been a rush-job to meet the deadline for a 'sensational' story.

But consider this: while the UK's Daily Express is 'tabloid trash', it's also owned by a media baron, a British media baron, no less, who are notoriously good at 'info-crafting'. As such, most, if not all, of its content, like all MSM, is pretty carefully vetted. If you get to hear about something, then there's generally a political reason why you're getting to hear about it.

So, SOTT.net is re-posting this article - for posterity's sake if nothing else - to take note of the fact that a British media outlet has just alerted sizeable numbers of people to the reality of imminent cosmic threat, whether intentionally, as part of a 'tar-baby' maneuver, or otherwise.

The bottom line is that the planet today - in contrast with a decade ago - IS being peppered with more and more space rocks, and more and more people are starting to take notice.

The article itself may be 'noise' - and most, unaware of the extent of the space threat, would be correct to dismiss it - but we happen to know for a fact that there is a 'signal' behind it.


Image
© GETTYExperts predict that asteroids are to pepper the planet from 2017
Asteroids could rain down on the earth for 100 years, shocked experts have just warned.

A previously unknown asteroid belt has been located in deep space and is now hurtling towards our part of the solar system.

It means a 'global killer' could collide with Earth as soon as 2020, wiping out life as we know it and changing the climate for millennia.

The terrifying predictions came as NASA revealed disturbing new data showing 400 impacts are expected between 2017 and 2113, based on new observational data of objects seen in space over the past 60 days.

Most will have a maximum diameter of around 100 metres - the size of seven double decker buses - and the potential to cause significant damage.

Comment: The above article has since been 'debunked' here.

What its critics don't realize is that the cosmic situation is probably even more dire than sketched out by Nathan Rao.

Regular readers will be familiar with Laura Knight-Jadczyk's investigations into the planet's repeated close encounters with comet clusters down through history...

Comets and Catastrophe

The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes

Comets and the Horns of Moses

... which are timely in light of the significant increase in meteor fireballs in recent years. Here are just a couple of recent hits, both coming around the same time that 'harmless' Asteroid 2014 RC made its 'fly-by' last Sunday September 7th: Rao's article is an easy target. He's right to sound the alarm, though he did so for the wrong reasons: indeed the probability of direct-hit impacts from larger bodies in our near-to-medium future is probably mathematically small. The point that both Rao and his critics miss, however, is that with more objects comes more finer material - lots of it, including the threat of comet-borne viruses. These alone can have catastrophic climate change effects for people and planet. Forget an extinction-level asteroid 200 years from now: the danger from civilization-ending cosmic catastrophe is present now.

Another reason why Rao's article is an easy target is because he made the mistake of homing in on specific space rocks. There is NO WAY TO TELL what might hit, and when. The world's observatories were focused on 2012 DA14 when, 6 hours before its scheduled fly-by, another large rock - from another direction - arrived out of nowhere to explode over Chelyabinsk, Russia!

The take-home point is that - based on multiple data points - the overall level of cometary debris in the inner solar system has massively increased in recent decades, and especially since the early 2000s. As Pierre Lescaudron wrote in his recently published 'Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection':
There has been a significant increase in the discovery of asteroids in recent decades. In 1980, there were 9,000 known asteroids in the solar system. By 2000, there were 86,000. By 2007, there were 380,000. As of 2013, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center had data on 1.1 million asteroids.

Of the 1.1 million asteroids known in 2013, NASA announced the discovery of the 10,000th NEO - Near Earth Objects on Earth-crossing orbits - in June 2013. An alarming number especially when we know that most NEOs are discovered just as they fly past Earth, and very often inside lunar distance. Other estimates place between 100,000 and 1,000,000 more undiscovered NEOs on similar Earth-crossing orbits, increasing the current estimated total range of asteroids in the solar system to 100 million.

The number of discovered comets has also increased in recent years. While newly discovered comets were virtually nil at the beginning of the 1990s (for example, only one comet was discovered in 1995, namely 1995 O1 Hale-Bopp), by 2000 over 150 new comets were being discovered per year, a figure that increased to 265 by 2009. Note that the figures between 2009 and 2013 are not yet finalized. Once updated, I fully expect the final count for those years to be higher than the current count.

Rather appropriately, 2013 was declared the 'Year of the Comets', with a high number of active comets in the Sun's vicinity. By November 21st, 17 comets were visible with a small telescope, of which five exhibited a magnitude between +4 and +7.5 - meaning they could be seen with binoculars - and two of which (ISON and Encke) could be seen with the naked eye.

Remember, these are only the identified comets, bright enough to be observed at a long distance. Most 'comets' remain invisible (as 'asteroids') until they start glowing as a result of the heliosphere-induced electric stress they experience when they enter the solar system. If the exceptional fireball events in 2013 were anything to go by, 2014 may have even more celestial surprises in store for us.


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