Sighting of huge oval object over Idaho and Washington on 2. august 2017

originally posted by: beetee
a reply to: tommyjo

Here is another Airbus 400M taking off, quite close... There is really not that much sound and at that range no way you would mistake this sound for being anything but an propeller airplane in my opinion.

It's really not that loud, nor very odd sounding to be honest.

Yes but under certain conditions it can sound quite odd. You have to factor in conditions at the time and where the sound foot print of the aircraft is falling. You also have to factor in speeds. At certain speeds and conditions the Airbus A400M will produce what is described as a "blue note". During that airshow demonstration it is not doing a sustained flypast at high speeds.





It doesn't surprise me for a moment that the average person hearing and seeing a formation of aircraft at night and especially if an Airbus A400M was involved would be startled and confused.

Never mind ...

Lincoln is at PDT at UTC -7 hours. So.. sigh.. I guess we have to subtract seven hours from what the witnesses report then?
Flighttracker24 is using UTC for its replay function, so whatever flew by should have flown by at 23:55 Pacific time, which should be would be at 6:55 UTC on the next day...

I don't think I am clever enough for this.

I need help, you guys... Is that the correct time frame?

So, this is a bit more complex than I first realized, because we are talking different time zones for the sightings as well, and I have no clue if the witnesses reported times have been converted in the databases that I have used for the observations.

To sum up we then have:

Lincoln at 23:55 PDT which translates to 06:55 UTC on the next day (3. august)
Oakesdale at 23:43 PDT which translates to 06:43 UTC on the next day (3. august)
Culdesac at 22:30 PDT which translates to 05:30 UTC on the next day (3. august)
Boise at 23:30 MDT which translates to 05:30 UTC on the next day (3. august)

I have found one military flight, a Hercules C-130 that I can track from south of Boise, where it appears at 11000 feet from the south squawking 3502. It goes past Boise at 06:05, which is half an hour after the witness repors his sighting, it then drops off the track (presumably not squawking or no radar coverage), comes back again around Culdesac 06:46, again squawking 3502, passes Oakesdale at an 06:55 (a little late for our sighting, but close after) and then passes Lincoln to the East at 07:07 which is after our sighting, and then breaks west after passing the lakes and disappear off radar.



Now, this is a tortuous fit for our sighting, as it sort of trails whatever is making the noise, but in the video from Lincoln it is possible to hear the man saying "there is a plane coming our way, sort of", which might be our plane.

This appears to be the only flight that is close that appear on the radar, but that doesn't mean there could not be other planes/blimps/ufo's there.

The C-130 seems to come from the South, when it appears on Flightradar south of Boise and breaks off to the west after passing Lincoln before dropping out of coverage again at 14000 feet.

Now, I have flown on the Hercules C-130 several times, and been around them flying overhead, and I doubt it was responsible for the noise heard in the witness videos. It might have been trailing something that did make the noise.

Sorry for messing up the Timezone data before, peeps, and you should probably take this information also with a grain of salt.

I don't think we are closer to any definite solution with this.

The closest commercial flight, right south of Lincoln when the sighting was reported, was American Airlines flight AAL398 from JFK to Seattle at 36000 feet. If anybody know anyone who was on that flight on the 2. of august 2017, well there is your best bet for additional witnesses.



And NOW I need to put this thing aside for a while... hehe.

Very interesting sightings....I just pulled up some reports from the time on nuforc's site:

Oakesdale, Wa. sighting post.

The hum was mentioned as noise as well. That was the son's report.

The fathers report of sighting is here.

There is also a post from nearby Lincoln County also, seen here.

a reply to: data5091

Yes, the Lincoln sighting was the one that set me off down this rabbit hole.

This witness also uploaded a video with her report to MUFON which you can see here.

The video is the best with regards to hearing the noise and experiencing the general anxiety that at least some of the witnesses described.

The reports you found from NUFORC are in my second post in the OP because I ran out of space :-P

I have trawled all manner of sites looking for other reports from the same day, but I can't find any more.

I have managed to find one military flight that follows the general flight path, but with time zone differences and a bit of confusion about if the reports were in their original format in the two MUFON reports at least, it is a bit difficult. I also suspect that the Culdesac sighting is slightly wrong time-wise, but it could be the first one as well. Or, whatever it was, flew not in a straight line, but a bit back and forth.

There have been suggestions that the Airbus A400M might be to blame, because it has a certain loud whine when it flies, but I can't quite get myself to believe it could cause the amount of uproar the witnesses display.

a reply to: beetee

sorry about the duplication post you indicated. I missed them. Great topic though.

a reply to: data5091

No, it's great you went to NUFORC and looked for reports.

Now, if you can manage to dig up some I haven't found, that would be even better... :-D

I still have a little trouble believing this was just a couple of Airbus airplanes.

a reply to: tommyjo

Great videos. I agree that the Airbus has an eerie sound, but what is noticeable to me is that the sound drops off pretty quickly.

This thing, whatever it was, produced a loud hum that was powerful enough to "vibrate surfaces"... If I judge the noise level of the Airbus correctly, it would have had to be pretty low to produce this kind of volume, and as it goes by there is really no mistaking the propeller..

I am not quite ready to believe yet, as they say... :-)

originally posted by: beetee
a reply to: tommyjo

Ah, thanks a lot.

What a silly mistake.

Now I have to start over ... lol..

Really appreciated.

No problem. It is an easy mistake to make!

a reply to: beetee

No problem. Thanks for the reply. Nice work on finding the C-130 on the flight tracking playback.

Definitely heard the hum....

a reply to: beetee

I've read recently that the military and privateers are getting back into blimps believe it or not.

It clearly has a flight path, it would be interesting to know what it's final destination was.

This sounds exactly like the craft my family described seeing back in the mid 90's, right down to the thrumming sound. We lived extremely close to the theorized flight path of this object as well. My mother, father, sister, uncle, and grandmother all saw this moving slowly over our valley while I slept. They said they didn't think to wake me, that their was an aura of calmness that made it seem like nothing out of the ordinary. I was going to post a screenshot of where we lived but can't get the pic to work here on my phone. 47°47'42"N 118°06'21"W
It's about 10 miles north of Davenport Washinton. We did frequently see a lot of military aircraft in the area practicing maneuvers, but from their description this was no conventional military aircraft. They said it took up most of the sky and moved extremely slowly. It's extremely interesting to hear about a nearly identical object over the same area 25ish years later.

a reply to: cepheusdraco

That is very interesting.

You should find out if the sound was similar as well.
The sound is best heard in the clip from the witness in Lincoln, although you can hear it in the other one too if fainter.

I would have been pretty upset if something like this flew over our house and people forgot to wake me :-)

a reply to: Thecakeisalie

I suspect that it turned west after the last sighting from Lincoln, based on the C-130 that trails the sound.

My main problem with these hypothetical massive airships has always been where do they keep them when they are not flying?

The other is that a slow moving, huge ship like that would be a sitting duck in any contested environment unless it has some tricks up its sleeve to remain hidden.

Both from radar and from the human eye.

But it does have some advantages also that a plane do not have, like not needing an airfield and being able to loiter almost indefinitely.

a reply to: tommyjo

No problem. Thanks for the reply. Nice work on finding the C-130 on the flight tracking playback.

Well thank you, it helps to look at the right time window, I guess :-)

Pretty odd that it should happen to go past all the places that there was a report.

One problem with these flight trackers is that they tend to estimate position if the plane isn't properly tracked, and this particular flight drops off the charts right after Boise and is picked up again after it has passed Culdesac. So some caution is needed when looking at details.

I have, as I said, flown as a passenger on the C-130 Hercules a number of times, and it is a neat airplane, but it does not generally cause people to start praying unless they are sitting in the back of it with condensation dripping into their faces.
That can make you pray a little.
Especially if you are sitting like herring in a tin, knee to knee with some other dude who is pretty pale and might throw up at any moment now, because the pilot decides that he should do some sharp manouvering.

But generally, the people on the ground are pretty unimpressed with it.

What needs to be mentioned, perhaps, is that the C-130 has been the starting point for some pretty novel developments over the years, because it is such a trusty platform. It has been turned into all sorts of weird things, including it has to be said (since this is ATS),a Psy-Ops variant, the EC-130E/J Commando Solo and the EC-130E Rivet Rider.

It has also been developed into electronic warfare variants, surveillance variants, drone control, special operations, gunship, command and control... the list goes on and on. A very versatile plane.

I don't think Flightradar can really distinguish type on that level so it might slap a generic C-130 on a lot of very different planes in terms of what they might be used for.

Double

Triple - mobile is not a great platform for this

originally posted by: beetee
Triple - mobile is not a great platform for this

Ahhh, you tried to post at :31.

Here you go:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: KKLOCO


Hehe, thank you for the tip, that is great information.

But I actually, stupidly, pressed "quote" on the post I was going to try to correct for spelling mistakes, and (yes, I know it is hard to believe) did it twice!

So, instead of editing my post, as I thought I was doing, I replied to my post with a new post ...

There is no cure for sausage fingers on a small display, alas...