Spacecraft
returning to Earth create nearly-horizontal artificial meteors, which often
resemble natural meteors but have the advantage to investigators of being well
documented, and sometimes predictable. They also serendipitously create
‘control experiments’ in eyewitness perception and recollection of sudden
startling sky spectaculars that can be generalized into assessing other such
reports from non-spacecraft stimuli.
During its
lifetime, the space shuttle program created massive fireballs as the 100-ton
vehicles entered the atmosphere and slowed for a runway landing. For landings
in Florida, and depending on the orbital paths they descended from, these
fireballs could be passing overhead as far south as the Yucatan, to due
eastwards across Texas, to coming across the Great Lakes.
If the entry
was in darkness, the view from inside the spacecraft was ‘like flying through a
neon tube’, especially since there was an overhead window and the orbiter was
pitched so far nose-high that the window saw straight back along the fiery
trail.
Shuttle fireball
view at 46:00 into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAaMuTRGP6k
Overhead
window view
The
variations in flight path, time-of-day- and weather created several
opportunities for sightings from the NASA-Houston area [where it was doing Mach
20 about 60 km up], and I saw four of them, including the first [STS-11, Feb
1984], when nobody knew what to expect – and we were all blown away by the
spectacle.
One
cross-country entry was described by a sequence of witness reports that I
compiled here:
Paul Maley’s
excellent accounts are linked here: TBS
MISUNDERSTANDING
OF THE SHUTTLE ENTRY FIREBALL
Since events
were well publicized in advance, they rarely led to published ‘UFO reports’.
However, the Columbia catastrophe in Feb 2003 led to some significant
misinterpretations of photos taken as the fireball crossed California, when an
image suggested it had been struck by high-altitude lightning. Here’s what the
photo actually showed.
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