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A Spanish pilot with Air Comet (which flies from South and Central American countries to Madrid) flying the Lima to Madrid route reported a bright descending light in the region of AF 447's last position:
"Suddenly we saw in the distance a bright intense flash of white light that fell straight down and disappeared in six seconds".
At the time of the sighting, (the copilot and a passenger who was in the front kitchen area of the airplane also saw it), the Air Comet aircraft was located at seven degrees north of the equator and at the 49th meridian West. The estimated location for the A-330-203 until the moment of its disappearance is at the equator and around the 30th meridian West
It seems reasonable to suggest that an aircraft would not produce a bright and intense white light for six seconds as it fell from the sky. The many dozens of meteorite and fireball sightings over the past few years however are often seen as bright white flashes of descending light.
A Sott.net reader later sent us the following report:
Early in the morning today (8th June 2009) I saw here in Brazil, an interview (on Record television network) with a native from the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha who stated that he saw strange lights in the night of the disaster with the Air France Jet.So are we saying that a meteorite hit AF 447? Not exactly. The chances of a single smallish, (or even largish) rock falling from the sky and hitting a plane travelling at 500mph are surely too remote to be plausible. But meteorites and comets often do not simply fall to earth intact. Remember Tunguska?
He declared seeing a light (bright white) and later it changed directions several times and changed to red color.
The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m. on June 30, 1908The Tunguska meteorite probably was visible as it exploded and broke up, appearing as a bright white light descending in the sky. Six to ten miles up is within the height range of commercial aircraft. And AF flight 447 was indeed located in a remote ocean area. So if, as we suspect, the blast from a Tunguska-like comet - though a significantly smaller one than that which exploded over Tunguska - destroyed AF447, it would have produced something similar to an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) which explains the complete failure of the air craft's electronic systems. It is also likely that modern satellite monitoring systems would have picked up such an event. Indeed, Brigadier General S. Pete Worden's article NEOS, Planetary Defense and Government - A View From the Pentagon confirms this likelihood:
Although the cause of the explosion is the subject of debate, it is commonly believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5 - 10 kilometres (3 - 6 miles) above the Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across
The Tunguska shock wave levelled 2000 sq kms of trees
Although the meteor or comet burst in the air rather than directly hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons to as high as 30 megatons of TNT, with 10 - 15 megatons the most likely - roughly equal to the United States' Castle Bravo thermonuclear explosion set off in late February 1954, about 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and about one-third the power of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.The explosion knocked over an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometres (830 square miles). It is estimated that the shockwave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.
Although the Tunguska event is believed to be the largest impact event on land in Earth's recent history, impacts of similar size in remote ocean areas would have gone unnoticed before the advent of global satellite monitoring in the 1960s and 1970s.© Don Davis
How the Tunguska blast might have looked from the windows of a nearby airliner. The expanding shock wave would have knocked the plane from the sky moments later
I can show people evidence of real strikes inflicting local and regional damage less than a century ago. Even more compelling are the frequent kiloton-level detonations our early warning satellites see in the earth's atmosphere.If we consider that such an event has an electromagnetic pulse, almost immediate effects, a sound shock wave propagating at about one mile every 6 seconds, then stronger shock waves traveling slower, the cometary fragment explosion scenario matches precisely the reported events. If the blast occurred 15-20 miles from the plane, the electronic failure would be near immediate from the electromagnetic pulse. It would take 90-120 seconds for the sound shock wave to hit, followed by the even stronger atmospheric shock waves finally tearing the plane apart. The plane would have been intact for 90-120 seconds in such a scenario before it was ripped apart. And it probably would result in the types of injuries being reported like broken bones and no burns, suggesting there was no explosion. The plane would have simply been torn apart in the atmosphere, resulting in mostly impact type injuries from the concussive forces.
Within the United States space community there is a growing concern over "space situational awareness." We are beginning to understand that it is essential to identify and track virtually everything in earth orbit. Some of these objects, down to a few centimeters in size, present a potential threat to commercial and civil space operations such as the International Space Station.
So, what are the chances that civilian, or even government/military satellite imagery will be available to either confirm or deny this "wild speculation" of ours?
Well, up until a few days ago the chances seemed good. But then, for some unknown reason, and very coincidentally, this happened:
Military Hush-Up: Incoming Space Rocks Now Classified
Space.com
10 June 2009
For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere - but no longer.
A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com had learned.
The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.
The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.
