You can stop freaking out about the UFO you saw for 30-40 seconds on Saturday night that looked like a “leaking star.” And the Google UFO logo. Both have been (conveniently) explained today.

According to an article on the NASA website, on Saturday night, a Black Brant XII Sounding Rocket was launched off the NASA Flight Facility (Wallops Island, VA): “Using ground based instruments and the STP/NRL STPSat-1 spacecraft, scientists will study an artificial noctilucent cloud formed by the exhaust particles of the rocket’s fourth stage at about 173 miles altitude.” No matter how fantastically sci-fi the NASA website looks now, their language will not penetrate the “I know what I saw” population who frantically, shakingly reported their sightings to MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network):

Witness rendering of the UFO spotted up and down the east coast on Saturday night

A witness from New York writes:

“Four of my friends and I were sitting outside the Taco Bell parking lot and one of my friends looked in the sky and said “What is that?” We looked and saw a bright light hovering and dropping a cone-shaped light from the bright light and after 30 seconds of staring at it, it disappeared and what looked like a light fog or mist seemed to just float where the object was hovering. We all were overly excited and ecstatic… we still do not understand what we saw… we’ve been trying to debunk it and there is nothing we could think of or ever seen… it was the unknown.”

And as far as the UFO sightings in the Google Logo over the last few weeks, the Google blog announced today that they were simply “an official nod to Herbert George [H.G. Wells], who would be 143 years old today…we wanted to celebrate H.G. Wells as an author who encouraged fantastical thinking about what is possible, on this planet and beyond.” And give some excitement to that part of the population.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 2:16 pm.