Skywatch 2010: The Marystown Video

Courtesy of Glen Carter at NTV News:  First Edition, here is a screen cap from the Marystown video taken on the same Monday evening people saw unidentified flying objects near Harbour Mille.

1.  The contrails are plainly visible and have both the reddish and the dark characteristics seen in the image from Harbour Mille.

2.  The aircraft making the contrails is plainly visible in one portion of the video.  It is a twin-engined commercial jet – similar to an Airbus A310/A320 or an Embraer 190 -of the type that routinely fly in that area on the way to and from St. John’s.

3.   The multi-coloured splotch on the right side of the picture is either sun glinting off the airframe or a strobe light on the aircraft.  Remember that this is essentially a single “frame” of the video.  There may well be things in the shot that wouldn’t be as prominent in the full video.

4.  The angle of this shot is somewhat unusual.  It appears the aircraft flew directly over the shooter and in this particular shot is proceeding away from the camera.  The camera also appears to be max’ed out on zoom.  In the video, the aircraft is seldom if ever steady in the centre of the frame.

5.  While it isn’t quite so clear in this shot, there is a gap between the back end of the engine and the start of the contrail.

Flightaware.com Update: 

flightaware.com is a great resource.  Here’s a screen cap taken – as the time stamp shows at about 1800 hrs local or 2130 Zulu.  That would be 6:00PM to normal people.

The red dot is about where Harbour Mille would be on this crude map.  The blue track is the official flight path for Air Canada’s flight 695, an Embraer 190 run from St. John’s (YYT) to Pearson (YYZ) with a stop at Halifax along the way.  The yellow line is the actual track as it showed up on flightaware.com.  Allow for inaccuracy given the crude nature of the map.

It was an airplane folks.

-srbp-

Skywatch 2010: NTV has the proof

A viewer from Marystown sent NTV News some video footage shot on Monday evening that pretty much nails down the identification of the mysterious objects in the sky.

The mighty Ceeb can continue to ignore the obvious: there were no time-traveling missiles from France, there guys.

NTV has the truth:  a fairly good video of at least one twin-engined commercial jet – it might have been an Airbus A320  - cruising along and streaming out the contrails looking almost exactly the like the one in the photo displayed by CBC.

All that does is raise more questions about the CBC photo itself, but there can be no mistaking what was flying in the skies over Harbour Mille last Monday.  It was a flock of three aircraft – likely all commercial jets -  flying the usual route for aircraft coming from from Halifax and the eastern seaboard, potentially into St. John’s.

And for all those intrepid reporters busily scurrying around like this was a national security issue, here’s a simple and fairly obvious question.  Since even a missile would have turned up on radar, did anyone think to call those lovely folks at the Gander control tower to see what might have been flying along the south coast last Monday?

Beuhler?

Beuhler?

Didn’t think so.

Next time, though, people might go for the more obvious answer rather than leaping to all sorts of speculation and rumour for their answers.

After all, when you hear hoof-beats in this part of the world it is more sensible to think “horses” than an Eohippus that escaped from that mysterious experimental farm on the Bauline Line run by some fellow Hammond.

-srbp-

Skywatch 2010: Not French M51

Get out the tinfoil hats.

Stories are circulating – including at voice of the cabinet minister – that the object sighted in the sky over Newfoundland on the evening of January 27th may have been related to a test launch of France’s new submarine-launched ballistic missile, the M51.

Highly unlikely.

The French test concluded at 0825 hours Greenwich Mean Time on January 27.

That would be Tuesday.

But as CBC reported, the object seen over Harbour Mille was in the sky at dusk on Monday evening.  That would be roughly 12 hours before the French missile flew.

In any event, the French test attracted considerable international attention for reasons other than the insane idea the missile reappeared magically the day after it was fired, on a different trajectory and apparently originating from an area of the world  pretty much the opposite of where it was actually fired from.

-srbp-

Skywatch 2010: UFO over Newfoundland

Seems like it is time for the quinquennial skywatch panic.

In 2005, it was a load of seemingly unending silliness about debris from a NASA booster rocket. That’s just one of a bunch of posts from April and May 2005, incidentally.

Now it’s this thing seen over portions of the south coast and the northeast coast.



Okay.

It isn’t a French missile launched from St. Pierre, apparently.

And it isn’t the maiden flight of a locally produced nuclear missile.

Odds are it is a bit of space junk or a meteorite burning up as it enters the atmosphere.

But why should that get in the way of a good yarn?

-srbp-