A Little Procession in the Sky

A short one here, folks, so you won't be starving for strangeness.

I was unEarthing SITU paper as usual, and the above painting showed up. I recognized it as referring to a case which had appeared in PURSUIT but this was the witness' original art and much more vivid. So, you have the pleasure of joining me as the only ones who have seen it [maybe].

The artwork represents a witnessing of a "fireball" procession in 1983 from the deck of a boat 150 miles due east of Cape May, NJ. A VERY blue ball-of-light came directly from the west and passed not quite overhead. Its path was a straight line as near as determinable. The BOL or fireball had a lightblue inner core and a darker blue outer layer. There was a long train, also blue, and what seemed to be a noticeable "wake" within that train, which also manifested a production of light colored blobs. The passage was about 8 seconds.

Well, OK. Pretty, dramatic, but "just an unusual fireball".

As the TV football guy says: " not so fast, my friend!" About 15 seconds later another one crossed the sky, this time passing directly overhead. And.... "at least a dozen more of the things flew by during a period of some ten to 15 minutes."

Hmmmm......... maybe fireballs, maybe not.

Here's a map for the case. The "fireballs" seemed to the two witnesses to be pretty identical and "flying" at about the same height. To get a rough estimate of what that height was, they noted that after they had moved one mile in the boat, the last blue BOL cruised by at a 45degree sighting angle. That makes a neat equilateral triangle and would indicate that the procession of the Blue Fireballs had taken place at about one mile high.

And given the whole observational scenario, that seems like not a bad guesstimate. ... at least for talking purposes, let's give them the grace of a pretty honest approximation here.

All this makes for a very odd group of fireballs to say the least. What are the awkward points for the hypothesis?

1). There aren't a lot of purely blue fireballs. The pretty picture above is a blue-green fireball which is much more common. Some so-called "blue" fireballs are bright white of the sort that many stargazers call "blue-white" but not a blue of the richness as this. Still, there ARE elements which COULD give you a fairly rich blue if their emission spectra were not interfered with by other burning elements [particularly emitters at the red-orange end, or any very bright emission line elsewhere]. Two such elements might be Potassium and Mercury. I'm no expert on emission spectra, but this is my understanding.

2). If there were a bunch of, say, mercury-loaded pieces of spacerock traveling together, it still beats the odds further for them to nicely space out in a straight line and cruise over New Jersey west-to-east in a remarkably ordered behavior.

3). This third thing is something I know nothing about, so I'm trusting Internet Astronomy sites for the claimed fact: fireballs are stated to burn out at about ten to twenty miles up. At that time they, in whatever fragmented form they still exist as solids, hurtle to crashes on the planet. But our witnesses got a pretty good estimate of only ONE mile. That's a big error bar to overcome.

So what did The Universe serve up to us this time? A statistics trouncing Blue Fireball procession? A set of flying BOLs threatening to crowd into the UFO file cabinets? Some Faerie Merpeople heading for Atlantis? { I like that one, but will not bet you money on it }. .... or did The Universe just shudder a little, and "stuff" slipped through from Outer You-never-see-it in the eleventh dimension?

Mystery .... what's not to love?

.... and much better than doing taxes.

Till next time... Happiness and Wonder; unEarthing the unEarthly.