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But what really happened?
There were no big obvious pointers on site. No signs of ice problems. There was no foreign or dare I say ‘alien’ debris on the ground to indicate a collision and no sign of a lightning strike either. Mind you, one blade was up in the air and the other a 1 tonne dead weight on the floor, so examination was limited. But we were stumped for an answer and in those first few days it made the incredible UFO strike theory just a little more credible.
The connector (which joins the blade to the hub) - on the downed blade was cut off and sent back to Germany for some more ‘forensic’ testing, mid last week. We’ve not had any results back yet, but we keep pushing.
Oh, BTW, none of the blades will be repaired, all three will be replaced with new.
The likely culprits of this are actually quite a short list: Ice, Lightning, Collision (UFO inc), Material failure, Design failure, Maintenance failure. There’s not more.
We’ve ruled out the first two pretty absolutely. Collision we can still see no evidence for, there should be some debris on the ground (surely) and some ‘exchange’ of materials on the blade surface. We’ll get to inspect the ‘bent’ blade today - the crane arrived to rebuild this machine. It is pretty probable though as people have said here, that the fallen blade hit and broke the second blade on the way down.
The testing of the fallen blade will determine if material failure was the cause, my own feeling is that it’s not, but let’s see.
As for design fault, there are thousands of this type of machine in use, and this is the first time this has happened. It seems very unlikely.
That leaves maintenance and we’re examining the machine very closely to establish the degree to which maintenance was properly undertaken by the manufacturer.
In so far as we’ve narrowed down the options, we are closer to an understanding of what happened. But we’re not there yet. We’re left with Collision and Materials or Maintenance failure.
As for UFOs? I believe absolutely that intelligent life exists in the universe. But I doubt (as someone may have said here) that if it could get here from another galaxy it would crash into a windmill – then again accidents will happen.
The 8 tonne MOD UAV, Taranis (would that make a good car name…?), has some merit as a possible culprit (Thanks for the stats on that Peta).
But the giant space tentacle was a bit beyond the pale for me, as was the idea that aliens wanted to steal our technology – having tramped squillions of light years to find us…
All good fun. But seriously UFOs are bottom of my probability list.
If I were to try to make the case that this is a true UFO based only on this photograph, I would link it to other reports of "mist" around UFOs. On many occasions UFOs are reported to become gradually engulfed in a vapor cloud. One such case is found in James McCampbell's "Effects of UFOs upon people": A highway patrolman saw a strange object sitting on the ground in the San Joaquin Valley of California. It was early morning on a wintry day. Suddenly, the object became surrounded by a mist. Then a brilliant glow appeared as the object rose off the ground. The sudden appearance of mist in the San Joaquin case is a vital detail. That region in California is noted for very dense, ground fogs resulting from ground cooling due to radiant heat loss to the cosmos during long winter nights and high humidity near sloughs and swamps. Water vapor adjacent to the UFO could have been condensed by a reduction either in temperature or pressure.
A repulsive force-field, such as the one theorized by Plantier, Cramp, Hill etc may have exerted an outward force on the air molecules near the skin of the UFO, thereby reducing the atmospheric pressure close to the UFO's surface. A very small pressure change, indeed, would suffice to cross the dew point and condense water vapor from saturated air at 100% humidity. Such condensation can sometimes be observed in the low-pressure zone above airplane wings.
yep, its annoying alright ...
Originally posted by alyosha1981
Cool thread topic as always mike! I think it's deffinatly an anoymolous "solid" object, is dosen't resemble any of the lenticular clouds pictured below. Was there a more detailed discription given of the object or witness testimony?