Fire in the Sky
John Masanauskas
Herald SunWed, 28 Mar 2007 13:07 UTC
A jetliner flying across the Pacific has had a close encounter with space junk from a Russian satellite.
The captain of a LAN Chile Airbus A340 flying to Auckland was shocked to see the flaming debris less than 10km from his craft.
New Zealand air traffic control authorities said the space junk posed a major safety risk and would be investigated.
(shortened Babelfish translation)
Mannheim - a large meteor on Monday evening in the clear sky between South Germany and Lower Saxony triggered "UFO" alarm in some observers
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| ©Volksfreund
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| A similar meteor recorded over Munich in 2006
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It's not every day you see a meteor streaking across the sky. For some Torontonians, the sight of a green fireball on Sunday night was a surprisingly big event. Some were scared. Some were enchanted. Some braced for impact and some called the cops. However, as Constable Laurie Perks of the York Regional Police curtly puts it, space debris "is not a police matter. It's an outer-space matter."
The meteor, of a particularly bright type known as a bolide or fireball, prompted many locals to flights of fancy. "I wasn't sure if I was seeing stuff," admits Mike Mazeika, who saw the meteor from a ninth-floor apartment in North York. "It was so big and it lasted so long." He describes the green- and orange-tinged fireball as being "bigger than a plane," maybe "the size of a building" and adds that the sight of it literally froze him in his tracks.
Comment: The Globe and Mail is considered to be 'Canada's newspaper of record', so when it is forced to acknowledge a meteor display, you know things are getting exciting up there in the heavens. Of course, that the meteor went over Toronto helps. The sighting wasn't limited to the boondocks where it doesn't count as national news.
KITCHENER, Ontario - Was it a planet? A plane? A meteorite? Little green men?
Whatever it was, residents across Waterloo Region saw something unusual in the night's sky yesterday. Around 8 p.m., the calls started coming into police stations, describing a fiery display streaking across the horizon.
Some, worried they were witnessing a falling airplane, phoned authorities, who set off on a search and rescue that turned up nothing. Local airports reported no downed planes last night.
Strange lights in the night sky have prompted readers of the Somerset
County Gazette to question the existence of UFOs.
At about 10pm on Monday night, sightings of a strange glow in the sky was reported by Fay Boyd of Kingston St Mary, Richard Fowle of Cheddon Road in Taunton, and his son Edward.
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| ©Richard Fowle
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| A Gazette reader comments: "This fascinating occurrence could be the rare phenomenon known as the Zodiacal Light, a ghostly cone of illumination caused by the reflection of the Sun's light from millions of tiny particles in the plane of the Earth's, and Venus' orbits. It's visible just after twilight, a vast faint triangular glow rising from Venus upward into the constellation of Aries. If it is the Zodiacal Light it'll be visible until about March 20 towards the west."
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What Richard Yip-Chuck saw fall into a farmer's field Sunday evening looked like a long, white ball with orange sparks shooting off the back.
The Holland Landing resident was driving along Hwy. 7 with his wife, Ele, and sons Kyle, 12, and 10-year-old Dylan, when they saw what looked like a fireball plummet to earth.
"There were sparks coming out of the back," Mr. Yip-Chuck said. "It was wild."
WOLVERINE - Despite the rumors, Monday's decision to cancel classes at Wolverine Community Schools was not because of a Sunday night meteor shower.
School Supt. Susan Denise said the closure was due to a number of icy back roads, nothing quite as spectacular as meteors falling from the sky.
Comment: This one gets my vote for best headline of the week.
Cindy Sherman considers herself a rational person.
That's why she didn't assume that what she saw in the sky Sunday night was a UFO. But she saw something unusual, that much she knows.
The Elyria resident said she was traveling north on Route 57 in Grafton she saw something that was bright white streaking across the sky faster than any plane. The bright white orb then turned dark, and it was trailed by a tail of orange, red and yellow flames.
And then, poof, it was gone, Sherman said.
As it turns out, Sherman wasn't the only one peering skyward Sunday night.
GREG MERCER AND RYAN CUREATZ
The RecordTue, 13 Mar 2007 16:20 UTC
If you're bracing for little men in flying saucers, you can probably relax.
Astronomers say the colourful, bright object that captured attention as it burned across the night sky Sunday was more than likely a very rare meteor event.
Comment: Ho hum. Just another mammouth meteor falling through the skies. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Christian Cotroneo
The StarTue, 13 Mar 2007 10:39 UTC
Cynthia Crowther had just lit a cigarette outside her Newmarket home when the sky suddenly caught fire.
"Oh my God, I think I just saw a plane crash," she declared to her husband, running inside.
A ball of light, seething white, had careened overhead, spitting out dazzling debris.
Comment: The Globe and Mail is considered to be 'Canada's newspaper of record', so when it is forced to acknowledge a meteor display, you know things are getting exciting up there in the heavens. Of course, that the meteor went over Toronto helps. The sighting wasn't limited to the boondocks where it doesn't count as national news.