A strange night across the skies in Michigan and Ohio this week has many convinced that aliens are invading, or the government is testing out alien technology. The truth, as ever, is somewhat more tedious.
A series of photos showing a large blaze with what appears to be a tractor beam beaming towards the sky above it are spreading across social media, along with many eye witness accounts of a possible meteor accompanied by a large sonic boom.
These are the type of events that often have conspiracy theorists typing frantically at their keyboards, peddling stories of alien invasions and government cover-ups. However, while it was a busy night for residents of Michigan and Ohio, what really happened was not quite as exciting.
It is true that a meteor did enter Earth’s atmosphere and break apart above Michigan on the evening of January 16th. The NASA Meteor Watch claimed it was a relatively slow moving meteor moving at around 28,000 miles per hour and broke apart deep into our atmosphere, which explains the sound heard by many witnesses.
Our analysis yields a similar result, and we have calculated that this was a very slow moving meteor – speed of about 28,000 miles per hour. This fact, combined with the brightness of the meteor (which suggests a fairly big space rock at least a yard across), shows that the object penetrated deep into the atmosphere before it broke apart (which produced the sounds heard by many observers).
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Photos showing a large blaze with a tractor beam type light protruding from it into the night sky are likely to show either a pickup truck fire in Taylor, Michigan or a controlled oil refinery fire in Canton, Ohi0, both of which occurred on the same evening. Neither had anything to do with the meteor.
As for the tractor beam caught in many of the photographs, that’s an optical phenomenon known as “light pillars”, which are pillars of light that protrude from light sources on the ground during bitterly cold evenings. Such spectacles have been common in North America during January 2018 because of the unusually cold spell.