Great balls of fire could explain UFOs
Great balls of fire could explain UFOs
December 1, 2010
By Carl Holm
ABC News
An astrophysicist believes he has come up with a plausible explanation to a series of strange phenomena seen four years ago, which may explain ball lightning and some UFO sightings.
On the evening of May 16, 2006 people across a wide area of Queensland, the Northern Territory and northern New South Wales saw at least three bright green fireballs streak across the sky.
Similar sightings were also made from New Zealand.
A farmer from Greenmount, 28 kilometres south of Toowoomba, says after seeing one of these fireballs land behind a nearby ridge, a pale green ball rolled down a hill and "was seen to bounce over a rock".
Dr Stephen Hughes, from the Queensland University of Technology, has investigated the phenomena and his findings appear today in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
The farmer who observed the ball says it was approximately 30 centimetres in diameter and glowed green with the intensity of a 75 watt bulb.
It descended from the ridge immediately after the fireball passed overhead. No trace of any meteoric fragments were found in the area.
Dr Hughes says the most likely explanation he could find is that it could have been a form of ball lightning associated with the fireball.
"If it was something solid, 30 centimetres in size, it wouldn't just roll gently down the hill," he said.
"There'd be a whacking great crater there and a huge explosion."
Dr Hughes says this ball sounded more like a light "beach ball-type" movement.
"I thought straight away this was an electrical phenomenon. Ball lightning was the closest thing I could come up with. It's certainly not a meteorite," he said.
He says the fireball may have momentarily provided an electrical connection between the ionosphere and the ground, thus providing energy for the ball lightning.
Dr Hughes says it is possible such connections could create a wide range of strange phenomena and could be behind some hitherto unexplainable UFO sightings.
Source of the fireballs
Dr Hughes says the green fireballs were most likely debris from a comet that had passed close to earth several months before.
"It [the green fireball] was definitely something from space and of meteoric origin as opposed to space junk," he said.
"A green fireball is a lump of rock coming in from space, more massive than one kilogram. That's probably going to be something about the size of a lemon or an apple."
Dr Hughes says the fireballs were most likely debris from comet 73P Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which had passed close to earth about four months earlier.
"There are [Hubble] space telescope images and doppler studies, [which] were used to measure the speed of the fragments being ejected from the comet," he said.
Based on this information, Dr Hughes says the debris would have taken about 120 days to reach Earth.
He says because the sightings fall in a line from New Zealand through to Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, the suggestion Earth passed through the trail of debris is strengthened.
Votes:39
Comments: 0