This looks to me just like any old contrail, illuminated by a low/setting sun. You can clearly see twin trails as would be caused by twin jet engines. I regularly see trails like this in the evening when looking west, and yet this story seems to be all over the media. Anyone got a reliable debunking? (The fires are presumably unrelated - I’m pretty sure meteorites aren’t hot enough to start fires when they land.)
Edit: I should add that the video turned out to have been shot around 4.30pm not 2pm, and 10 days earlier than previously thought.
Here’s a slightly clearer picture and some pretty good video. I see no visible aircraft in front and a bit of ‘wobble’ to the streaks, something I’d expect from a disintegrating meteor fragment (perhaps even space junk) but not necessarily a jet contrail. Sure looks real to me.
Not necessarily - the video is pretty fuzzy, and I’ve seen lots of such trails where the brightness of the trails hides the aircraft (especially if it’s travelling away from you).
Example (not at sunset, but the plane is near-invisible)
Not necessarily - the video is pretty fuzzy, and I’ve seen lots of such trails where the brightness of the trails hides the aircraft (especially if it’s travelling away from you).
Example (not at sunset, but the plane is near-invisible)
Some more examples in some of the pics low down on this page.
The “wobbles” are identical in each of the two contrail - consistent with an aircraft laying down straight, parallel contrails which are then distorted as a matched set by local air currents. A tumbling object would show the two trails criss-crossing or twisting, appearing to vary in distance from each other, and we don’t see that in the video.
Are you suggesting that, on the basis of a photo and of an internet video you are better able to judge the nature of this phenomenon than are people, including “experts” who are on the spot?
I am pretty sure most Peruvians have seen contrails before.
I’d like to see a quote from an actual expert. Sometimes the media is very shoddy when checking stories. The average velocity of an earth crossing asteroid is something like 17km/s, that’s why shooting stars shoot. That object doesn’t appear to be travelling any faster than an aeroplane.
Clearly there is a consensus among people in the area that it was a meteor. They are looking for the place where they think it landed. This is not a case where “the media” are making an unwarranted inference on the basis of a crappy video or a handful of reports from uninformed eyewitnesses. It is a case where a handful of people on an internet message board are making an unwarranted inference on the basis of a crappy video (and on the assumption that Peruvians are all hicks).
How do you think you can judge the speed of this thing without knowing how far away it is?
That’s the thing. All the digging that I’ve done brings up a few facts: The video was first presented as having been shot at 2pm on August 25. It later turned out that it was actually filmed approximately 10 days earlier, and at around 4.50pm. The video was supposedly passed to a local TV station which saw fit to release it internationally, and from there it just took off. (See links from this message board thread). As far as I can tell, nobody saw a meteor land, and it seems to me that if the reported fires were linked with the purported date (25/8) of the video, then they cannot have had anything to do with the actual object filmed (on, presumably, 15/8).
That is why I am sceptical, and suspect that the search was based on erroneous video reports. It has nothing to do with “Peruvians being hicks”, any more than Germans are hicks.
There’s absolutely no question that it’s NOT a meteor, it’s an aircraft contrail. It’s not even close, and it’s not subject to some plebiscite of Peruvians.
If you’ve ever seen a bolide meteor, you’d know. Just for starters, the video lasts far too long. A bolide can cross the entire visible sky, horizon-to-horizon, in moments. Also, the trail is swirling shortly behind the object, indicating that winds have distorted the trail before the object has gotten very far. That indicates it’s not moving very fast, on a cosmic scale. A meteor will be at least supersonic and get much farther on its course before the tail begins to show the effects of local wind currents.
The meteors I’ve seen have all appeared to be brilliantly-lit, even the tails, and not puffy, contrail-like smoke.
Impressive meteors sometimes leave trails. A really fantastically spectacular meteor might leave a trail that lasts for a second or two. There’s no possible way that what’s in that video is a meteor trail. My guess is that there really was a real meteor, which really did start fires (yes, they can do that), and that once it started getting hype, someone decided to cash in on a completely unrelated video.
In which case you’d expect them to be able to recognize one when they see one, but unfortunately, people are stupid. I mean, I’m pretty sure that most Americans have seen contrails before, too, and yet there are people so baffled by them they’re convinced that they’re evidence of the government deliberately poisoning us or mind-controlling us or something.
It’s clearly well within the atmosphere, which puts an upper bound on how far away it is. Notice that the nucleus is dark, it is not incandescent, so it cannot be travelling at a very high speed. For comparison, here is a video of the Hayabusa spacecraft disintegrating on re-entry. It entered the atmosphere at a speed of 12.2 km/s, and was filmed from a plane 12km away.
