An English schoolgirl has filmed a dancing fireball in the skies over her Northampton home.Katie Real, 11, spotted the mysterious glowing orb performing loops across the sky from her window on Saturday evening local time.
© SWNSThe dancing fireball was spotted in the skies above Northampton
A quick-thinking Katie used her laptop to film the unidentified flying object as it ducked and weaved through the clouds before disappearing behind a veil of trees.
In the background her spellbound siblings can be heard debating over what it is.
"Initially we thought it could be a plane on fire but it appeared to be dancing across the sky," Katie's mum 30-year-old Fiona Fearon told the
Daily Star.
"It was an amazing sight. It looked like a ball of fire moving around in the sky."
Curious to find out more, Ms Fearon called the local airfield - but they told her it had nothing to do with them.
"I've read about these strange lights appearing during thunder storms called ball lightning but there was not lightning on Saturday night so it's a mystery," she said.
Comment: In the article
'The invisible hand of the Cosmic Trickster: High strangeness and the paranormal nature of the UFO phenomenon' we find the following bit of information:
Another interesting example is meteorites that refuse to follow the expected trajectory.
The Mystery Behind the Green Fireball Phenomenon
The green fireball phenomenon came to prevalence in the late 1940s, and no one in the scientific world knew what to make of it. The fireballs would shoot through the atmosphere, usually in the vicinity of highly classified nuclear facilities like Los Alamos or the Sandia National Laboratory, where atomic bombs were assembled. At the time, these were some of the most sensitive and top-secret locations in the United States.
Around a dozen green fireballs were reportedly spotted on one occasion, all of them in the airspace of New Mexico, home of both Los Alamos and Sandia. The fireballs were at first mistaken for green flares, but their large size and brilliance soon showed such speculation to be false.
Attempts to explain away green fireballs as meteors didn't fit the facts. For one, green fireballs generally flew on a more horizontal course, while meteors invariably plunged down into the Earth's atmosphere. In some of the later cases it's said that the green fireballs began to fall along vertical trajectories before disappearing.
With the increase of fireballs all around the world, I have to wonder if we may soon observe such "deviations off course" on a daily basis.
And, indeed, the case in point fits the pattern. Interestingly enough, Northampton appears to be quite a popular place for various strange and unexplained phenomena, including being plagued by "mysterious"
explosions and bangs, that are a signature of a meteorite/cometary fragment overhead explosion. Here is a list of some other "out of the ordinary" cases that happened in the area:
UK Housewife: I saw UFO out of bedroom window
Tornadoes cause damage in Britain
England: White lights seen amongst planes flying across the sky
England: Two witnesses see a 'ball of orange fire' traveling at speed change course twice, then went behind a cloud
England: Witness sees a white pulsating light disappear and reappear and later a laser beam from the sky
England: Wootton, Northampton - Ball of Fire Spotted
England: Brixworth, Northampton - Six Orange Orbs
England: Northampton - Intensely Brilliant Silver Light in the Sky
England: Witness sees orange lights, bigger than a plane, speeding across the sky
More Mystery lights spotted in UK skies
Yet another European river turns 'blood' red overnight, this time in Northampton, UK
Not funny: Creepy clown lingers on streets of Northampton in middle of the night
Looks like a plane doing aerobatics to me with its smoke on in the evening sun. The Red Arrows perhaps?