Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

Australia: Perth, Western Australia - A Large Bright Light and a Fireball

John Hayes
UFOINFO
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:48 UTC
Posted: June 15, 2009

Date: May 23, 2009
Time: Approx: 6:00 a.m.
Number of witnesses: 2
Number of Objects: 1
Shape of Objects: Round

Full Description of Event/Sighting: Saw what looked like a really large bright star in the sky. We were looking in a easterly direction. My husband left and I continued to look up at the bright light. It suddenly started to fade away like it was something flying away.

We also saw a meteor or something enter the atmosphere around the time of the Lyrid meteor shower. It has a fireball tail. We both saw it. It was around 3:00am in the morning on I think the 22 April 2009. These are most probably both natural phenomenon?
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Meteor

Meteor shower sparks coastal alerts along English Channel


Press Association
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:37 UTC
Image
Reports of strange lights in the English Channel overnight have been put down to a meteor shower, coastguards said.

Calls were made to stations from Hampshire down to Brixham in Devon and across to Jersey and France at about 9.30pm on Monday, with people saying they were seeing white and green flares in the sky.

A Solent Coastguard spokesman said: "There were reports of flares all down the coast which went on for about half an hour but there was a forecast for a meteor shower."
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Meteor

Air France Flight 447: First bodies had minimal clothing, no burns

Andrea James:
blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace
Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:13 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Brazil's Air ForceNavy sailors recover debris of the missing Air France Flight 447 from the Atlantic Ocean on June 9.
Beyond an increasing body count, little new information emerged on Friday from official sources regarding the crash of Air France Flight 447.

(By official sources, I mean the Brazilian military's official bulletins, France's investigations unit BEA, Air France and Airbus.)

Brazilian military searchers pulled three more bodies out of the ocean on Thursday night, bringing the total body count to 44. The French Navy has also found an undisclosed number of bodies, according to Brazilian military bulletins.
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Blackbox

Air France plane crash: six more bodies found


The Guardian
Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:41 UTC
Six more bodies have been recovered from the Atlantic Ocean where an Air France jet crashed killing 216 passengers, Brazilian officials said yesterday, bringing to 50 the number of bodies found since the crash on May 31.

Almost two weeks after the crash, Brazil's military said the search is becoming increasingly difficult, and a they gave a tentative date of 25 June to halt their efforts. The bodies were found on the same day that wreckage from the crash was found washed ashore in Brazil.

The wreckage included two plane seats, oxygen masks, water bottles, and several parts of the Airbus A330's structure.

The plane's black boxes - which have yet to be located and whose emergency beacons begin to fade after 30 days - along with debris and bodies from the jet, all contain crucial clues as to how and why Air France Flight 447 went down en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
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Meteor

Best of the Web: 14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite


The Telegraph
Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:04 UTC
Gerrit Blank
© unknownGerrit Blank survived a direct hit by a meteorite as it hurtled to Earth at more than 30,000 mph
A schoolboy has survived a direct hit by a meteorite after it fell to earth at 30,000mph.

Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw "ball of light" heading straight towards him from the sky.

A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.

The teenager survived the strike, the chances of which are just 1 in a million - but with a nasty three-inch long scar on his hand.

Comment: Actually, these incidents are not as rare as we are made to believe. From our Comets and Catastrophe installment, read: Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

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Meteor

Germany: Meteor Hits Boy on Way to School


The Local
Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:26 UTC
A pebble-sized meteorite crashed and burned into Earth, grazing 14-year-old Gerritt Blank while on his way to catch the school bus.

Meter
© Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
"At first, I only saw a big, white ball of light. Then, my hand hurt, and then it slammed into the street," he told daily Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. "After I saw the white light, I felt something on my hand."

The result was a 10-centimetre burn on the back of his left hand, but Blank knew something special had happened to him.

"I thought the meteor struck me, but it could also be a result from the heat as it went by me," he said.

After the intial shock, Blank looked at the glowing rock that left a sizable crater in Brakeler Wald Street. He then took the iced tea from his school lunch and doused his glowing pebble and took it to school with him.

"At school, I told the story. My classmates believed me," he said. His parents didn't get to hear the story until the end of the school day.
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Hourglass

Flashback Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales

Robert Roy Britt
Space
Tue, 13 Nov 2001 18:25 UTC
"...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup."

-- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C.
If you are fortunate enough to see the storm of shooting stars predicted for the Nov. 18 peak of the Leonid meteor shower, you'll be watching a similar but considerably less powerful version of events which some scientists say brought down the world's first civilizations.

The root of both: debris from a disintegrating comet.

Biblical stories, apocalyptic visions, ancient art and scientific data all seem to intersect at around 2350 B.C., when one or more catastrophic events wiped out several advanced societies in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Increasingly, some scientists suspect comets and their associated meteor storms were the cause. History and culture provide clues: Icons and myths surrounding the alleged cataclysms persist in cults and religions today and even fuel terrorism.
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Fireball 5

Flashback When Meteors Explode: Full Account of a Wild Chicago Night

Robert Roy Britt
Space
Mon, 19 Apr 2004 18:07 UTC
You might think meteor expert Steven Simon knew exactly what was happening one evening when the skies over his home were lit up by an exploding, 2,000-pound space rock bigger than a refrigerator. But it was only the next day, when nearby residents brought him chunks of the extraterrestrial visitor that had landed in the street and punched through their roofs, that Simon began to understand the true nature of the frightening event.

Now after a year of study, the University of Chicago researcher has helped produce a full account of the giant rock that tore through the atmosphere at 54 times the speed of sound.

Simon was in his Park Forest home about 30 miles south of Chicago with the drapes drawn near midnight on March 26, 2003.

"I saw the flash, and although it lasted longer than a lightning flash, that's what I thought it was," he told SPACE.com last week. "I knew it had rained that night, and thought maybe it was multiple flashes, perhaps diffused by the clouds."
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Red Flag

Air France crash killed two prominent illegal arms foes

John Byrne
The Raw Story
Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:19 UTC
The puzzling crash of Air France's Flight 447 killed two of the world's "most prominent" illegal arms trade and international drug trafficking foes, according to a little-noticed report.

In a revelation sure to fuel conspiracy theories over the plane's demise, the report reveals that two key figures in the neverending internecine battle against global arms and drug trafficking perished when the plane abruptly fell out of the sky. Both were particularly active in efforts to stem illegal arms trading in Latin America.
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Newspaper

Air France crash: Investigators recover 29 bodies in total


The Telegraph
Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:59 UTC
Air France A330
© Agence France-Presse/GettyDivers recovering a huge part of the rudder of the Air France A330 aircraft lost in midflight over the Atlantic ocean
Investigators have found eight more bodies in the Atlantic Ocean, bringing the total recovered from Air France flight 447 to 29.

Search crews also recovered the vertical stabiliser from the tail section of the airliner, according to Air Force Col. Henry Munhoz, a spokesman for the Brazilian airforce.

The discoveries of debris and the bodies are all helping searchers narrow their hunt for the jet's black boxes, perhaps investigators' best hope of learning what happened to the flight. The data and voice recorders are located in the fuselage near the tail section of the jet.

William Waldock, who teaches air crash investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said that does not mean the black boxes will necessarily be located near where the debris was recovered, "but finding the tail narrows down the area even further."
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