You have probably read or heard about the Norwegian spiral and you have probably also seen it somehow. Of course, what’s the best answer to an unexplained phenomenon ? UFOs, aliens, black holes! I won’t link any material, you can find it everywhere. I will instead link the only rational analysis of the phenomenon. Thanks to Phil Plait, which is always a pleasure to read.
So, what was it? the spiral pattern is interesting, and the fact that it was only visible from Norway as well. The first fact indicates something that rotates while ejecting something, producing therefore a spiral. The second fact indicates something that is quite low in orbit, otherwise it would have been visible from many other places. The brightness of the observed fact is due to the sun.
Ok so, a rotating object ejecting something that brightens up in sunlight and it’s quite low in altitude… something like, a spent rocket?
But no! Both Norway and Russia deny any rocket launch. Of course they are telling the truth, so it must be alien technology! Of course… yeah, right…
Update: ok, so apparently it was confirmed and known that a rocket launch was to occur. Here is a link to a NAVTEX message about a rocket launch occurring in the area.
5 Comments
Funny! But not alien!
could be some kind of military secret testing of som kind of new technology?
It’s part of development of the Bulava rocket, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSM-56_Bulava . So in some sense it’s new war technology in testing, but hardly secret.
If the thing was a rocket, don’t you think that the source of the spiral (as Russia suggests) would be flying into the sky, like a rocket? It doesn’t make sense to me that a rocket, would stay immobile in the sky, supposedly spinning and spitting out a spiral shaped excretion. Just my opinion.
It was moving, there was a trail. The fact that it wasn’t rushing away, but remained relatively put is because it was flying at considerable height. When you observe an airplane flying in the sky, you see it moving slowly, even if it’s moving at 900 km/hour. For the exact same reason, even if the rocket was moving, its distance from the observer was so large that its apparent movement was negligible.
In addition to that, if something distant flies directly towards you, it seems not to move, because it is reducing its distance from you, but you cannot evaluate it (you evaluate distance by focus or parallax). If you observed the sky frequently, you probably had the chance to observe a falling star heading just straight in front of you. It’s rare, but happens. What you see is just a bright dot that appears and stays put in the sky, to disappear briefly afterwards. That object is moving fast, but since it is doing it right in front of you, you cannot appreciate any change in its angular position, hence it appears static.
All what I said applies to the rocket as well.