Mystery Flash and Explosion Startles Eastern U.S.
On Monday morning, the Hampton Roads (VA) Daily Press posted a report on “flashing lights and a noise that sounded like a loud explosion in the sky” at about 9:30 PM on March 29th.
On Monday evening, it was announced that the object was a spent booster from a Russian Soyuz rocket re-entering the atmosphere. Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory was “99 and four one-hundredths [percent] convinced that this is what it is.”
On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Strategic Command said that the Russian booster fell back to Earth near Taiwan several hours after the spectacular sighting across the Eastern seaboard, and that the flaming object was likely “created by a natural meteor, or bolide, burning up as it plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere.”
An embarrassed Chester wrote an email to Space.com saying, “Well, we’re all entitled to a ‘mulligan’ now and then, right,”…adding that he deferred [to] Strategic Command. (A mulligan is a do-over in golf.)”
Bolides are often mistaken for “genuine” UFO sightings. In June 17th of last year, I reported on my own sighting of a probable bolide streaking over Orange County, CA.
Hat tip to internet friend Phillip Spencer for the heads-up.
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Apr 01 2009 
April 1st, 2009 at 10:28 am
Yo Greg — I just watched Ron Howard’s documentary on the Apollo astronaut’s trip to the moon. Considering the “alien lunar base” meme of late and the “faked moon landing” meme it’s quite enlightening to consider how innocent NASA was in terms of the fragility of re-entry, etc. I’m not going to invoke the Reichian Center for CryptoZoology at this point since I’m sure you can psychoanalyze these Fortean anomalies to Kingdom Come as well.
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:26 am
Interestingly, the excellent spaceweather.com site ruled out the Soyuz right away based on timing and location. The USNO guy was shooting from the hip.
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:07 am
“The USNO guy was shooting from the hip.”
Yet his comments were picked up by mainstream media outlets and reported as gospel. I haven’t seen them run follow ups saying he was wrong. Thanks for the info Greg. I assumed the guy was correct.
April 4th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Remember, one all-too-common implicit definition of “skeptic” is “one who always believes in and champions the Official Story.”
Did the Navy guy really say he was 99.04% sure? I’m tempted to make a Marilyn Chambers joke, here…
April 7th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Everyone,
In his 1957 book Contact With Space, Wilhelm Reich wrote, “There are no ‘experts.’”