Shooting Stars

Most of you know that shooting stars are actually meteors falling to the Earth from space. The reason that I'm bringing this up is because of something that I had not heard about until recently.

Most meteors hit the Earth's atmosphere traveling at enormous speeds, often as much as 45,000 miles per hour (72,000 kilometers per hour). What usually happens is that aerodynamic heating (friction with the atmosphere) heats the meteor hot enough to glow bright red and descend in a flaming conflagration that usually results in the meteor being blown to bits or only a small chunk hitting the ground. When there is an actual chunk remaining it's called a meteorite.

Meteors are rocks flying around in space and meteorites are the things that end up falling to the ground. Asteroids are very large objects that pose a danger to Earth. In all cases when they act like a shooting star and fall to Earth, they're called a meteorite. If they are especially spectacular they're called a Fireball.

As it turns out, millions of these things hit the atmosphere every day and in fact sometimes are so numerous they're called meteor showers. Meteor showers are often the result of debris broken off of known comets that comes around the Earth on an annual basis.

Well, it turns out that meteors don't always act like shooting stars. In 2013, a Norwegian skydiver took video during his descent and nearly got hit by a meteorite, and it wasn't glowing. The UFO community immediately adopted his video as a UFO sighting. However, on careful analysis it was determined that it was a small meteorite falling to Earth at perhaps 300 kilometers per hour. It had the requisite shape and shadowing to be a typical meteorite. However, even this was not what it seemed. Analysis by NASA claimed it was a piece off the guy's parachute. However, the idea of it being meteorite is still valid.

How is this possible? It turns out that the phenomena has been seen before but never photographed. It's called 'Dark Flight' and it happens when the meteorite slows up enough to just fall like a dead weight. This is how the Russian Suez spacecraft fall to Earth.

This incident turned out to be the first time Dark Flight had been captured on video (assuming it was real), which only proves that there is a first time for everything.

Thanks for reading.