Fireball fears stoked by space history

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

The sensational tale of the falling Russian satellite and the Chilean airliner lasted only a few hours before it was debunked — but the erroneous connection of the roaring fireball with a Russian space shot was entirely reasonable, given Chile’s long and unusual history of being on the receiving end of Russian space spectaculars.

The reports from New Zealand described fireballs that passed within 6 miles (9 kilometers) of a Lan Chile Airbus 340 jet en route from Santiago to Auckland. The crew even claimed they could hear the roar of the passing objects.

Only a few days before, Russia had issued a "Notice to Airmen" (or NOTAM) for that region of the far southern mid-Pacific, alerting pilots to avoid a specified zone during a short period on two succeeding days. A Progress supply ship was being dumped from the international space station and would be plunging to its destruction in that particular region of the atmosphere — a procedure that Russia had safely followed a hundred times before.

Even though the fireball was seen 12 hours prior to the specific interval the Russians had warned against, aviation officials at both ends of the trans-Pacific route jumped to the conclusion that the Russian satellite had simply crashed prematurely. That misinterpretation was soon cleared up, thanks to a more careful assessment of the actual schedule of the space maneuver.

But the initial reaction was far from random, or even obviously wrongheaded. Chile, due to a peculiar accident of global geography, has been on the receiving end of spectacular Russian space activities for decades — and Russia to this day has made no acknowledgement of its impact on the South American country.

Since the early 1970s, Chileans have been reporting one particular type of unidentified flying object that seems more sensational and astonishing than ordinary flying-saucer stories. Again and again, a moon-sized luminous ring is seen to rise into the sky out of the west, soon after sunset, and move in stately silence northward.

Witnesses from one end of the long country to the other — and people in Argentina and Uruguay as well — have told journalists of the object’s passage, of its effects on automobiles and on airport radars, and in one case, of a witness’ sexual dalliance with a crew member who beamed down for a quickie.

What was really happening was genuinely unearthly, but hardly alien. The people responsible for the phenomenon — Earthlings, to be sure — would be happy to shift the blame to extraterrestrials.

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