Date: 13-Aug-86 20:35 MST
From: Executive News Svc. [72135,424]
Subj: AP 08/13 MysteriousLight

By The Associated Press
People scattered over much of the eastern United States reported
a mysterious light in the night sky, and residents of Kentucky said
they heard a boom and felt their houses shake.
The phenomenon late Tuesday coincided with the Perseid meteor
shower, an annual occurrence lasting several days.
"I glanced up into the sky at about 10:15 p.m., and I saw this
white object spiraling. At first, I thought it was an airplane or
something," said Edward J. Uiszkowski of Vestal, N.Y. "It looked
like a bunch of fireworks followed by a white cloud."
There were similar reports in other parts of the East. Robert
Gribble, a spokesman for the National UFO Reporting Center in
Seattle, said he received more than 100 calls from a region bounded
by Michigan, Maine, South Carolina and Louisiana.
"Some people said they saw a great big ball of fire," said
Clark County, Ky., Deputy Sheriff Larry Lawson. "The people said
their homes shook and windows vibrated as if there had been an
explosion or earthquake, but it was just for just a very few
seconds. They said the whole sky lit up.

"All these people weren't imagining or seeing things. Some of
them were very terrified over it right after it happened. Some said
they smelled something like gunpowder."

"It sounded like a gun going off right over the house," said
Ethel Thompson of the Flannigan Station Road area of Clark County,
near Winchester in Kentucky's Bluegrass country. She said most
residents along the road went outside to see what had happened.

"My father, brother and uncle were outside and said they saw
just a bright flash, a white flash about ground level. My dad said
he thought it sounded like dynamite real close," said Judy Keesee.

"It was like a lightning flash through the window," said
Flannigan Station Road resident Albert Young. "We felt it on our
house. Our neighbors had flashlights looking at their house. They
thought something had hit their house."

Clark County Sheriff Gary Lawson surveyed an area about two
miles southeast of Winchester by plane today to see if the lights
and tremors could have been caused by a meteorite impact, the
sheriff's office said.

Weather specialist Dick Hathaway of the Columbus, Ohio, office
of the National Weather Service said he believed the light, which
appeared blue-green in the northern sky, was caused by a controlled
release of barium gas from a satellite that was being tested. Such
releases are used in research on the upper atmosphere.

But workers at Cape Canaveral, Fla., the North American
Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the NASA
facility at Wallups Island, Va., all confirmed there were no
launches Tuesday.

"It would probably be associated with the meteor showers,"
said a NORAD worker who declined to give his name.

"It was like three lights at once -- red, green, and white. It
was flashing on and off," said Tim Jones, an air traffic
controller at Syracuse, N.Y., airport who said he watched for about
45 minutes as lights periodically hovered and veered randomly.

Jones said something coinciding with the lights registered on
the airport's primary radar, which is designed to ignore stationary
objects.

"Personally, I do not believe it was an aircraft. The way it
was behaving is unlike any aircraft I've ever seen," said Jones, a
controller for four years. "It hovered. It remained stationary."

In Buffalo, N.Y., talk show host Tom Bauerle at radio station
WGR said his station was swamped with calls about the sightings
just after 10 p.m. He said people described a luminous cloud, with
one observer reporting a spiral shape. Other observers talked of
seeing a gas cloud.

[END STORY]
ParaNet rates this case S2/P5 on the Hynek Scale. We contacted the
Scientific Events Alert Network in Washington, DC, who told us it was
not associated with the meteor shower, however they believe "it was
undoubtedly a man-made object of some kind on re-entry" to the Earth's atmosphere. NORAD, however, has not yet identified it as such.
The case has elements of strangeness, however the object did not exhibit intelligent guidance in any way, and there is no reason to postulate
a connection between this event and the explosion in Kentucky. Until
further info is available, we stand by our rating of S2/P5: Definitely happened, probably explainable.


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