Were you chasing the "FIREBALL" in the sky?

[NJFFSA16]

Meteor seen in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming
rkfon3tvden
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A fireball was seen in Utah, Colorado and southern Wyoming Sunday night, with some of the spotters thinking
it came down near them.
"It was probably a meteor burning up in the atmosphere," said
Peter Wilensky, meteorologist with the National Weather Service/Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
He said he got reports of sightings from Bear Lake to Richfield.
Davis County and Box Elder County dispatchers said they received a few reports of sightings, and there also were reports from Vernal and Blanding in eastern Utah.
The fireball was seen about 7:30 p.m. MDT.
The Weber Area Consolidated Dispatch Center in northern Utah
received about 50 calls, with some saying it looked like it might
have been a plane that crashed.
Weber County sheriff's Sgt. Jeff Lasater said about 10 officers from the three counties responded to the calls.
At one point, they searched for wreckage near mile marker 91 on Interstate 84. "Our initial report was that a plane went down in
the canyon area," Lasater said.
A medical helicopter was called to the scene and an air search
was made for signs of wreckage.
In San Juan County, one of the sightings was by a group of
people at a cabin 10 miles west of Blanding. They thought it might
have been a distress flare that had been fired near them. The
sheriff's office started to dispatch a deputy to the site before
other reports of the meteor came in, including one from north of
Blanding.
In Colorado, people reported seeing a fireball with a long tail of green, orange and purple flames racing across the sky over the
southwestern part of the state.
"People said it had a 500-foot tail and it was huge, like a
meteor, and green and orange," La Plata County, Colo., sheriff's
dispatcher Kristy Lee said.
No man-made objects fell from space Sunday night, said Major Ed Thomas, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense
Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., which tracks satellites and
space debris.
"We don't have a mission to track meteorites, but that's got to be what it is," Thomas said.
The fireball was spotted at Pueblo, Colo., about 100 miles south of Denver, and at Rawlins, Wyo., about 180 miles northwest of
Denver. From Ogden and Bear Lake in Utah, to Pueblo, Colo., is
about 440 miles.

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

[StayBack500FT]

See..."They" are coming!!!

[RspctFrmCalgary]

See..."They" are coming!!!

do do do do do do do do

hehehe LMFAOOOOOO I just KNEW there was a secret message summoning the Mother Ship in that thread

[NJFFSA16]

I thinks dat StayBacks gotta concrete bunker in da yard...with rations for 26 weeks..........just in case THEY show up!

His real name.........Rod Serling!

They's here!!!

[MalahatTwo7]

HHHHHMMMMMMMMM Mother Ships, Fireballs in the sky???? I dunno about you guys sometimes. About 2 weeks ago we saw a meteor fly over Victoria, pretty close too judging by the fire trail it was leaving behind (at around 10pm or so). I tried to call the Observatory, but "Our hours of operation are from 8am to 7pm..." Go figure eh.

However, I am starting to become very concerned for Stayback. He has been drifting a little left of centre these past couple of posts. I am wondering if he has had any further contact with unconnected road signs or something. Just a concerned buddy looking out for another buddy.

[raven911]

Way back when I was active duty military stationed in Alaska, we got called out for a reported plane crash on a mountain. Turns out it was really a meteorite, after what seemed about 8 hours of searching. I feel for those guys who had to look for this thing.

Then again, the Klingons do have cloaking devices... or maybe they're just really good at hiding!

[FlyingKiwi]

Why is it called a Mother Ship, where are the Fathers?

[NightShade]

Its called Mother Ship because it's sending smaller ships out to recon for lifeform to carry back to study............
Now if they capture some that post in the forums here.......................... ...........
no comment

[mark440]

I am a chaser! We had about 8 calls last night about that damn thing! People from all over this county were telling us they saw it crash in the mountains, and no, it couldn't have been a meteor. Good thing I'm on days off or I'da been chasing it all over Gods creation in Ogden! MM 91 is my area!
Watch out for fallin' rocks!

*Mark

[FlyingKiwi]

Here is a New Zealand Fire Service tanker set up for Meteor Intercept duties.

LOL, all credit to the Dannevirke Volis for the creative parking.
http://www.geocities.com/dannevirkefire/

[NJFFSA16]

They're getting closer. They managed to sneak their planet...just a little closer to earth....before THEY come looking for StayBack. Beware!
-------------------------------------
BC-SPACE-QUAOAR (EMBARGOED)
Out beyond Pluto, astronomers find something new
By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's the biggest thing found
orbiting the sun since astronomers discovered Pluto in 1930,
but please do not call it a planet. Call it Quaoar.
At half the size of Pluto, Quaoar -- pronounced KWAH-o-ar
-- is a large celestial object, but not large enough to be a
planet, one of its discoverers said in a telephone interview.
Quaoar's discovery also calls Pluto's planet status into
question, said Mike Brown of the California Institute of
Technology, who first detected the object June 4. His
findings were presented Monday to the American Astronomical
Society's planetary science division meeting in Birmingham,
Alabama.
Still, Quaoar acts a lot like a planet. Circling the Sun
once every 288 years, Quaoar is located a billion miles
beyond Pluto, in an area loaded with icy orbiting
objects called the Kuiper Belt.
The Kuiper Belt is where comets originate, and astronomers
have long believed it harbors planet-shaped rocks like Quaoar.
Over the last decade, more than 500 Kuiper Belt objects have
been detected.
"In any realistic definition of a planet, you would have to
say something like, a planet is significantly bigger than
everything around it," Brown said. "(Quaoar) is only 50 percent
bigger than the next biggest Kuiper Belt object, to me it's not
massive enough."
Quaoar's existence confirms that large orbiting bodies can
reside at the very fringes of our solar system, and could give
new insights on the primordial materials that formed planets
like Earth some 5 billion years ago.

PLUTO'S PLANETARY STATUS QUESTIONED
It also supports the theory that Pluto is not a planet at
all, but rather a Kuiper Belt object. Pluto has a similarly
long orbit -- 248 years to make a complete trip around the sun
-- but is far more eccentric than Quaoar seems to be.
Instead of going around the sun in the same plane as the
rest of the planets, Pluto's orbit is tilted about 17 degrees.
At one point, Pluto comes close enough to the sun to heat up
the volatile substances on its surface, making it more
reflective.
By contrast, Quaoar has a highly regular orbit, tilted only
about 7.9 percent, never getting close to the sun. Faint
ultraviolet radiation over the ages has slowly changed the
surface of this rock-and-ice object to a dark, tar-like
substance.
Scientists have long suspected that big, planet-shaped
objects like Quaoar would be found in the Kuiper Belt; this is
by far the largest they have discovered.
Brown said Quaoar's presence some 4 billion miles
from Earth casts doubt on Pluto's planetary
status.
"There are nostalgic forces that are operating that prefer
to call it a planet," he said. "If Pluto were discovered today,
there are very few people, other than the person who discovered
it, who would want to call it a planet."
Brown said, however, that even if it is not a planet, Pluto
is "an incredibly interesting body" that deserves to be
studied.
Quaoar is named after the creation force of the Tongva
tribe, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin where
Caltech is located. It can be detected just northwest of the
constellation Scorpio.
REUTERS

[MalahatTwo7]

Now Kiwi, we know that you guys "Down There" do things a little different sometimes... but I am sure that is not the recommended parking proceedure for your apparatus. Unless of course that was a fuel tanker, and it is in "Launch" mode.

[NJFFSA16]

DENVER (AP) - Scientists believe a fireball that lit up the
skies of at least three states came down over western Colorado, and
they are asking residents and hunters to watch for strange-looking
rocks that might be meteorites.
The meteorite research team at the Denver Museum of Nature &
Science said Tuesday that eyewitness accounts have led them to
believe the meteor observed Sunday evening broke apart in an area
of northwestern Colorado roughly flanked by Meeker, Rangely, Fruita
and the Utah border.
The bright object, which had a tail of green and orange flames,
was visible across Colorado, Utah and southern Wyoming. More than
600 reports about the event have been sent to museum scientists,
including some accounts from as far away as Idaho and Kansas.
Just a day later, a second fireball was observed racing across
the skies over central Colorado toward New Mexico.
Howard Cook, chief technologist at the museum, was driving from
Denver to Colorado Springs Monday evening when he saw a bright
light in the sky for eight to 20 seconds. He said it appeared to be
flaring, and was about as big as a softball relative to his
outstretched arm.
"You had this great green fireball and tail with orange sparks
coming off of it," Cook said. "It was very, very spectacular."
Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
detected sonic evidence that a meteor may have entered the
atmosphere Monday evening in northern New Mexico.
Eyewitnesses in Los Alamos and Ponderosa, N.M., said they saw
the bright light for about five seconds and heard a sonic boom at
about 7:30 p.m., said lab spokesman James Rickman.
He said the scientists also detected sonic evidence of Sunday's
fireball. They planned to further study the data and analyze
satellite photos of the Earth's atmosphere for more information.
Jack Murphy, curator of geology at the Denver museum, said he
did not know whether the two meteors were related. Neither is
believed to be part of a meteor shower, he said.
"These are random fireballs. They can occur at any time," he
said. "To have two in a row is very unusual, but we really can't
say they're related."
Sunday's fireball may have been part of an asteroid that broke
away from its belt and entered the Earth's atmosphere, Murphy said.
Fragments of space debris hurtle into the atmosphere, producing
streaks of light known as meteors. The objects may burn up during
entry or break apart, sending small pieces called meteorites to the
ground.
Murphy said recovery of any meteorites that landed in Western
Colorado would be a boon to scientists studying the composition of
objects from space.
He said area residents or hunters should look for odd rocks -
such as those with a ceramic-like surface - though the rugged,
sparsely populated terrain makes it unlikely something will be
found.
"If they see a black rock that looks very out of place that
wasn't there before, then they might have found a freshly fallen
meteorite," he said.
"They carry quite a lesson in the history of the solar system
and they come to us free of charge."
---
On the Net:
Denver Museum: http://www.dmns.org

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

[ramseycl]

Quote: "People said it had a 500-foot tail and it was huge, like a
meteor, and green and orange," La Plata County, Colo., sheriff's
dispatcher Kristy Lee said.

That is us, we received around 50 calls and ended up sending out an engine to check the area.