I was just coming home (Pasadena) and passing through the 210/134 interchange when I looked up and saw something blazing across the sky leaving a huge trail behind it. At first I thought it was a meteorite but it was moving way too slow (hard to judge without scale but definitely aircraft speed), and it doesn’t appear to be an aircraft. I can’t find anything on the news about it yet and there are no sirens going off, though I have seen a couple of helicopters flying around (not unusual; Pasadena Police regularly orbits a helicopter from dark to the wee hours of the morning, much to my annoyance).
Any information, ideas, crackpot theories? I have my roll of Reynolds Foil at hand.
Driving to So Pas from downtown LA at about 7:30pm, I saw some kind of signature in the western sky. It looked kind of like the trail an airplane leaves; given that it’s dark, it seemed strange that I could still see it. But the trail seemed almost reflective, with a couple of loops or whorls. Probably completely unconnected with what you saw, but it’s the first time that I’ve seen something like that. No idea what it is.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
I was just coming home (Pasadena) and passing through the 210/134 interchange when I looked up and saw something blazing across the sky leaving a huge trail behind it. At first I thought it was a meteorite but it was moving way too slow (hard to judge without scale but definitely aircraft speed), and it doesn’t appear to be an aircraft. I can’t find anything on the news about it yet and there are no sirens going off, though I have seen a couple of helicopters flying around (not unusual; Pasadena Police regularly orbits a helicopter from dark to the wee hours of the morning, much to my annoyance).
Any information, ideas, crackpot theories? I have my roll of Reynolds Foil at hand.
The great unincarnated Car Knack here, reporting to you from the great beyond.
Won: Reynolds Aluminum foil wrapper put on supersecretspysatellite2002 just now coming down.
Too: It isn’t an uncontrolled descent. Reverse engineering, however, is still a cold b…baby. Cough, Baby.
Tres: The TV REALLY is talking to you. In gibberish.
I hope this helps. Yes, we do check my brian biochemistry regularly. No snorting coca cola out your nose on the bosses bosses computer after hours. I’m actually quite fine, thank you. Still booting up my systems however.
And i nver read the instruction manual. Including the one for the body.
And SleepyDuck gets the prize[sup]*[/sup]. I looked online for launch schedules out of VAFB but didn’t find anything. That completely makes sense as a Minotaur launch though. I just didn’t think they’d fly the thing over Los Angeles.
Stranger
[sup]*[/sup]An all-expenses paid vacation to the Valley of Your Imagination. Alcohol and gratuities not included.
I was driving around (also in Pasadena, CA) and saw it around 7:40pm. By that time, I couldn’t see anything “blazing” anymore, just the big, bright trail it left behind. It looked, at first glance, like a really thin aurora… red and orange and slightly bluish in a twirling trail.
Was hella cool. Tried to grab a picture, but the trail had faded significantly by the time I got my camera. Did anyone else have better luck?
I saw something similar in 2000. It was so bright and close to the ground, I thought it must be an airplane crashing, as I was near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at the time - I pulled right over on I-70. The burning thing left a huge streak and the light was slightly greenish. I never heard anything about a plane crash on the news and couldn’t find anyone else who had seen it. I later found out that this happened during a major meteor shower, so I surmised it must’ve been a meteorite.
It wasn’t actually over LA, FWIW; those trails are a lot higher than they look (visible, apparently, from as far as Phoenix AZ!). It launched southeastward into a polar orbit and was over the ocean well before even Ventura County.
[ned flanders]
Well, golly, if that doesn’t put the “shaz” in “shazam.” Oh, listen: what’s the cash value of this vacation so I can report it on my income tax?
[/ned flanders]
Heh, I saw the exact same thing. I saw it aas it started forming and the trail break off for a few seconds and reappear. I was recording it on my cell phone camera and taking some pictures when I overheard someone in the next car mentioning to their passenger that it was just a rocket launch.
R.E.M’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” just finished playing on my stereo when I saw it :eek:
Airline pilot here. The size and scale of those launch trails are so different from what we’re used to seeing in the sky that people just don’t know what to make of them. I grew up in SoCal and saw many launches back in the 60s. Always spectacular.
One day I was flying over Denver heading west just after local dusk at altitude and we saw a Vandenburg launch. This was about 2 months after 9/1 and everybody was still kinda edgy.
A bunch of airplanes reported seeing a strange trail in the western sky and somebody suggested it was a SAM. The ATC guys had no clue and the herd was getting skittish. I mentioned that it looked just like the dozens of launches I’d seen from Vandenburg over the years & the anxious chatter dropped off.
Looked in the newspaper the next day & sure enough, a Minuteman was test launched for some Star Was thing the previous evening.
The point being, from 6-7 miles up we could see this thing from 800+ miles away as it climbed out over the coast of California. And it looked big even from that distance.
I’d just like to point out that it is extremely hard to judge sizes and distances of aerial objects. If you don’t know how far away it is, you don’t know how big it is, and vice versa. Read books like Philip J. Klass’ on UFOs and you rapidly learn that objects people thought were UFOs close overhead were really things like re-entering space launch debris hundreds of miles away. No wonder they were silent!
A corollary is that , unless you know how far away/big it is, you can’t really judge speed. Add in the fact thatb the flight path might not be along the direction you think it is (I know that I automatically assume at first that things are moving about perpendicular to my line of sight) and the result is that you can’t be sure abiout the speed, either. That thing might not be moving slowly at all – it’s a lot farther away than you think, and its direction is tilted at a very different direction than you think.
It still bugs me that in the original film of The Thing robert Cornthwaite’s scientist character looks at pictures of the Thing’s spascecraft and declares loftily that it must be artificial because “a meteor can move in any direction, but not up”. But, seen from the right angle, a falling meteor might certainly appwear to be moving upwards.
The assumption people tend to make when they see a light in the sky is “airplane size”, “airplane height”, and “airplane speed”. If one of those things don’t match, it can look really weird, and can easily make you think it’s something otherworldly.
I should’ve spelled it the more correct “aeroplane”, but I figured it’d look pretentious
