N_C's UFO sighting!

[neutrino_cannon]

Well, I saw something odd, or that I couldn't place at any rate, in the skies over Gunnison Co. today.

From about twleve noon until about three a c-17 had been practicing touch-and-goes at the Gunnison airport. The two event may be correlated, I don't know.

Later (about 4:00 PM) my step brother (~18 mos) pointed out what he took for stars, which were in fact something falling from the skies. Best I could tell, they were flat and rectangular white things, the wind taking them rapidly east. Only a few came close enough for me to make anything out about them, they appeared to be tumbling as they fell, and they had a very low ratio of air resistance to weight because they fell quite slowly. I stepped back and forth a bit, and based on the paralax based on clouds behind the things, they weren't very high up, certainly less than a thousand feet.

We never found any on the ground, and they cleared from the skies quite quickly.

Any ideas?

 

[geni]

magnesium flares?

 

[Soapy Sam]

Call the sirport. Ask to speak to traffic control. Describe what you saw. They may know the answer. Or they may need to know the answer.

 

[uruk]

Could have been something shoved out the back of the C-17.
Pallets or somesuch thingy.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Neutrino said:
I stepped back and forth a bit, and based on the paralax based on clouds behind the things, they weren't very high up, certainly less than a thousand feet.

This interests me. How can you guesstimate the height of an object using parallax relative to clouds?

Edited to add: I suppose if the clouds have enough features, you can see how much the object "moves" relative to those features as you step back and forth. But wouldn't this be affected by the size of the object? And how do you calibrate the movement so you know it was at 1,000 feet or so?

~~ Paul

 

[neutrino_cannon]

This interests me. How can you guesstimate the height of an object using parallax relative to clouds?

Edited to add: I suppose if the clouds have enough features, you can see how much the object "moves" relative to those features as you step back and forth. But wouldn't this be affected by the size of the object? And how do you calibrate the movement so you know it was at 1,000 feet or so?

~~ Paul

A little something I like to call the "WAG" method. They were fairly low lying clouds, and I could tell that the objects were closer to me than to the clouds. Based on intuition, and I suppoise the built in rangefinder in my head (which doesn't work so well at long ranges) I roughly figured them to be at 1000 or so feet.

The objects were a bright white, but they didn't seem nearly bright enough to be magnesium flares. If they were burning, that would account for them just going away after a while.

It's late tonight, but I'll have to confer back to Gunnison (I just got back to Denver) to see what frater_cannon has read in the news, if anything, and what the airport says.

 

[wipeout]

Could have been something shoved out the back of the C-17.
Pallets or somesuch thingy.

Yeah, I was going to suggest that it was polystyrene pieces from some packaging that the aircrew threw out of the plane for fun.

 

[Correa Neto]

So, you saw Unidentified Falling Objects!

Some questions-

How was the wind by the time of your sighting? Any ideas on wind conditions above ground level?

Are you sure you checked the right places were the rectangles felt?

Regarding inferred height, couldn´t the objects be small-sized, such as paper sheets?

And what about casings (Expanded poyestirene- sorry, I´m not sure if that´s the name in English) casings -or pieces of it- used in electronic equipment boxes, flown from tall buildings (are there any around?) due to wind?

 

[Anathema]

They could have been testing decoys designed to thwart the radar of AA missiles.

 

[American]

You LIAR!!!! There aren't any UFOs! What have you learned reading this website? THERE ARE NO ALIENS!

 

[Bruce]

You LIAR!!!! There aren't any UFOs! What have you learned reading this website? THERE ARE NO ALIENS!

He didn't say he saw any aliens, you twit. Just because he saw a UFO doesn't mean there were aliens on board.


The aliens could he sent out a remote-controlled probe or something.

 

[neutrino_cannon]

So, you saw Unidentified Falling Objects!

Some questions-

How was the wind by the time of your sighting? Any ideas on wind conditions above ground level?

Are you sure you checked the right places were the rectangles felt?

Regarding inferred height, couldn´t the objects be small-sized, such as paper sheets?

And what about casings (Expanded poyestirene- sorry, I´m not sure if that´s the name in English) casings -or pieces of it- used in electronic equipment boxes, flown from tall buildings (are there any around?) due to wind?

Best I could tell, the wind up there (there was little at ground level) was a pretty stiff gale to the East. There were only about seven of the objects, and they dispersed over a wide area.

Sorry folks, I'm taking a while. I will contact the Gunnison Airport when I have time, but I'm caught up in schoolwork once more, and there was a suprise birthday party that prevented me from getting many things done!

The indignity of it all!