Are UFOs visiting Tobago?

[Steve Wooler]

Hi Folk

For around 20 minutes from around 9:15pm last night, the sky over Stonehaven Bay was filled with vivid orange lights. It was almost like a firework display. A number of lights appeared from roughly the north-east, travelling over Plymouth and heading out across Buccoo towards Trinidad. At first I thought it was a couple of helicopters, but they showed no green/red aircraft lights and were just a bright orange 'ball'. After the first dozen had appeared, I realised it was not aircraft. Over a 20 minute period or so, we must have seen 50 or more. I have managed to photograph them, but am having to use an Internet cafe and can't post them here. Sadly, these things were travelling so fast that I was unable to get a clear shot. Spectacular and eerie are hardly the words to describe it. At first I thought they were flying at around 2000-4000 feet, but then I realised they were passing behind very high cloud and so were very, very much higher than that. So, the intensity of the light must have been phenominally bright. I suspect that could only have been meteorites. Having passed us, they all faded - but faded long before they reached the horizon. Weird but wonderful.

No, I was not with David Watkins and was perfectly sober.

Has anyone any (sensible) ideas or read/heard anything about meteor showers in the southern Caribbean? Lots of people here saw it, but all the locals couldn't believe it and said they'd never seen anything like it.

[Phil Bondie]

Steve, The blimp was up here today Wed. heading down from St Giles at about 1:15 in the afternoon. I wonder if it was around last night and might be what you saw. Phil

[Gary]

After a quick Google it would appear Meteor Showers have been seen over Trinidad & Tobago before although I couldn't find anything relating to this time of year.

My guess is that MS are the most likely explanation of what you saw. Would like to have seen it myself

I sure don't go along with the UFO rubbish

[Steve Wooler]

Hi Phil

Yes, I saw the blimp yesterday morning - 15-20 minutes after you report it passing C'ville. No, no chance of it being the same. I think Gary is right.

[Jonathan Richards]

First of all, I Am Not An Astronomer, but I agree that the most likely explanation for what Steve saw is something burning up on entry into the atmosphere: things that do this get spectacularly hot and bright even when they are no more than grains of sand.

There is a Meteor Activity Outlook page here which gives no hint of anything as intense as 50 meteors in 20 minutes (150 per hour), so I wonder if it could be spacecraft or artificial satellite debris falling back to earth? If it was a loose collection of materials that would account for it occuring over a relatively short period of time.

Of course, the Americans broke up their wayward spy satellite by shooting at it with missiles from the central Pacific last night (well, daytime for them), but that was at about 03:20 UT (11:20 p.m. Tobago time) and several thousand miles away in the wrong direction. That doesn't explain it!

Fascinating stuff.

[Scott Aubart]

Well i will be coming out there on March 8th hopefully the objects will appear again.

[David Watkins]

Steve,I think what you saw was a rogue spy satellite that had been shot down by the US Navy.I saw it on the news on TV last night.Apprently it was quite a large job and had to be destroyed so it burnt up to prevent any parts hitting Earth.
David

[Brian Taylor]

I thought they shot down the satellite AFTER the objects were seen in tobago skies...

[David Watkins]

Just checked and it was shot down just after 10pm EST which is about right ,Tobago is one hour behind EST(I think)
David

[Brian Taylor]

did you read what jonathan wrote earlier?
steph

[Steve Wooler]

Hi All

Taking hand-held photos of fast-moving objects in a night sky is never going to be easy, as the following photo shows. Sadly, by the time I'd got back to my room and collected a long lens and tripod, etc., the show was over.

No, they are not flying worms. That is just the effect of the camera shake, possibly induced by not having had my full daily quota of Stags.

[Scott Aubart]

It definatly wasnt the U.S satilite that was blown up the next day and it was over Hawaii. And looking at the pics here they all look pretty uniform

[Carol Townsend]

Hey Steve!
This gets more intriguing by the day.
I wonder what Sir Patrick Moore would say? Maybe you could contact him via the BBC. He also has his own site would you believe! sirpatrickmoore.com
Cheers
Carolnoe

[Jonathan Richards]

Good pic., Steve, in the circumstances. With UFOs streaming across the sky (and that's exactly what they are: Unidentified {Flying | Falling} Objects), I reckon I'd have had a bit of a camera shake as well!

If we knew for sure that they were alien spacecraft then they'd no longer be UFOs! I still think debris from orbit is the most likely; meteors (shooting stars) typically streak across the sky in a second or two, so these must have been travelling at speeds much closer to that of the earth.

Have there been any other reports or photos that you know of? It would be interesting to know over what region the lights were visible; it would give us an indication of altitude, maybe.

I'm guessing from your original description, that the points of light are moving from right to left across this picture. Can you have a look at the EXIF headers in the photo file and tell me what the exposure time was? It occurs to me that by subtracting the shake in the fixed lights from the flying worms we might get an estimate for the distance travelled during the exposure, and hence the speed.

Jhead is a useful free tool for reading the headers, if you haven't anything else: there are builds for both Windows and Linux - I recommend it.

Jonathan

[Steve Wooler]

Hi Jonathan

Fascinating stuff!

I have spoken to a number of people and none have heard any mention of this 'incident' so I can't tell you over how large an area they were visible. Yes, you are correct - they were travelling from right to left across my field of vision - more or less half-way between straight towards us and/or diagonally across our path. Probably coming from the north-north-east. Coming from the horizon, over land, at 3 o'clock, they faded out at around ten o'clock high - so long, long before hitting the horizon.

The exposure on the shot I published was 3.2 seconds at f4.5 (ISO800). The original shots are at 3888x2592 resolution and I have them in full RAW format. The shot was much reduced in size for adding to the forum here. I have a dozen shots in total and used that particular shot - the first - because it demonstrated a large cluster of the objects. Some of my later shots are sharper, having been shot at just 1 second, but only have a couple of the objects.

There's not much I can do working here on a laptop with a slow dial-up connection, but when I'm back in the UK I'm happy to drop the 10Mb RAW files onto a CD and send to you for examination if it will help. That won't be until I'm back in the UK in April though.