Saturday, January 18, 2014

UFO Over Arabia? It's Just the Flash From Chinese Space Junk


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UFO Over Arabia? It's Just the Flash From Chinese Space Junk



By Alan Boyle
Science Editor / NBC News
1-17-14

     Bright lights in the night sky sparked UFO alerts in Saudi Arabia, but the display turned out to be a well-known space phenomenon: the fiery re-entry of some Chinese space junk.

Multiple videos of Thursday night's lights were posted on YouTube. One sighting was reported by a witness who was near the Prophet's Mosque in the western Saudi city of Medina, according to reports from the Saudi newspaper Al Sada and the Emirates24/7 website.
"I was passing just near the mosque when I saw the object ... I captured a film of it, but I could not trace it as it split into two or three parts," Al Sada quoted Fahd Al Harbi as saying.
"This was a satellite re-entry that was predicted," NBC News space analyst James Oberg said in an email. "The object was a rocket body from the Chinese communications satellite Chinasat 9, launched in 2008. It is amazing how bright the fragments can be, and when they fly horizontally and 'in formation,' they often fool people — especially pilots — into imagining they are lighted windows in aircraft, spacecraft, or even UFOs." . . .


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