Loud explosions in Hampton Roads area

Yea I live in chesapeake and sometime around 9 or 10 last night on March 29th I was flipping threw channels and wargames was on televison I was in bed and all of a sudden I heard what can only be discribed as a nuke going off I say that because I know what a impact tremor is and I also know the difference between that and a sonic boom.

Last night was no sonic boom and it was no impact tremor either it was long and a drawn out slow explosion lasting at least 4 or 5 seconds where I was. I know that sometime 5 mins afterwards the military was sent to investigage something that went down in williamsburg.

Why I dont know where that is the people im with tell me theres no way it could have come from williamsberg and make that kind of noise from here because we couldnt have heard it that far away.

I know this I have seen plane crash's helichopper crash's and been able to identify shots fired from a gun that was more then a mile away from me and still get the caliber right and in some cases the make and model. What happened last night was no metor and it was no kind of impact tremor.

Im guessing here when I say it was at least some kind of bomb or rocket explosion. Some kind of explosive gas but it was not any natural gas going off Ive also heard that kind of explosion and it wasnt that either. The closest thing I can discribe it as is watching a nuke going off underwater at a distance. Without being outside to tell the direction it was coming from I dont know but my closest guess is its direction was somewhere around or close to newport news.

I know that because of where im at in chesapeake it was coming from a explosion wise from that direction. If the military was up to something I would have heard something about it by now nothing so far if I hear anything they were up to I will make it public here.

Thats my 2 cents for now the investigative teams of ats will get to the bottom of this matter.

Falcon

Folks - in case you haven't noticed, these events are happening with ever increasing frequency. As this solar system moves closer to the Galactic Disc (Galactic "center") events such as these will become more commonplace - due to the greater volume of swirling celestial debris contained in the disc (just as would happen if you passed thru the rings of Saturn). Hopefully you have also noted the increasing frequency of techtonic events around the planet - which are also due to the stresses inherent in this passage...as are the changes in the Sun's natural cycle, note the changes in the weather - everything is connected, do not look at any single event in a vaccuum. The major governments of this planet are fully aware of what is going on and are prepping for survival and making plans for the inevitable panic when the information becomes public (18-24 months off, give or take) due to a major event that can't be explained away. Government treasuries around the world are being raided to pay for these preparations (oh, excuse me - "Bailouts"). One day you will wake up and those with real power and wealth will be gone...in underground shelters awaiting the aftermath. There are no safe havens however, even for those "elite" making preparations. Those that survive what will come will do so mainly by random chance - scattered in small groups around the planet. These survivors will tell stories to their children of the wonderous society that disappeared overnight in a great calamity. This has happened before, it will happen again.

just fond this on the Mufon web site. Take a look

I saw a flash of light so I looked out of my back window that gave me an excellent view of a huge white blue sphere of light that flashed and shot backwards away from my area very fast. It again flashed and I saw a smaller sphere move from it, then shortly after was a loud kind of percussion boom, this all happened very fast. I went outside to my back deck and looked to see what was going to happen next. I really felt I was seeing a UFO. I never thought meteorite I did not see the sparks or green ball people were describing but maybe it was just my location.I noticed about 5 minutes or so later up very high in the sky was an object flashing from red to blue to green. At first I thought it was an aircraft but it moved left and then backwards. It really scared me because I have never seen anything like this. It stayed up there so long I had my husband come out and see it then had my mother drive over to look at it. Then there were jets flying around up there near the area and then it was gone. I can't say what that was.
I just know that many people saw the flash and heard the boom there were sirens with emergency folks looking for a crash it pretty scary. Not everyone saw the big moon like sphere that people in my area did.
I have read that now the navel observatory is calling it space junk but wow wouldn't someone know where this stuff was falling?
I think this needs an investigation by someone because it seems no one really knows for sure what happened last night. But as for me, I'm calling it a UFO.

someone told me there was video from a business camera on the news moments ago. she said the video shows a flash and then the camera shakes. i also hear that most sources are saying space junk now. i will post what 11:00 news says tonight(e.s.t. of course) if more difinitive and/or noteworthy info is given. someone else will probably post before me as i took me 4 minutes to type this on mobile. a video should come soon too as its existence is now confirmed by my family who also saw it on the news.

[edit on 30-3-2009 by pa.Frost]

This just came in over the news wires on yahoo.

Yahoo Story Link

Im in the process of uploading a map in my area to help identify the direction I heard the explosion when im finished I will post it here.

Here is a map that I downloaded off of map quest and edited it to show the direction the explosion came from.

Map Data1

Falcon


[edit on 30-3-2009 by falcon]

reply to post by projectvxn


was some news here in the UK a few weeks back that Obama was briefed on an asteroid threat and that they are ready to use nukes on a certain area of space where there is a huge "firing line" of Asteroids. Also something about deadly meteors.. some wierd stuff is happening this year so far

Originally posted by C.H.U.D.
Thanks squiz I'll check them out. Also a bit busy right now so I'll probably reply a bit later.

One question for you though - if it's not contact between our atmosphere and the meteor making it appear to glow, then why do we not see meteors before they enter our atmosphere?

Yeah still busy, at work ATM, but I can answer this one briefly.
You've actually hit on one of the reasons friction alone cannot be the whole story. I'll ask another question - why should we see meteors when there is no air for friction to work against outside the atmosphere and very little in the upper atmosphere?

The plasma double layer that envelops the Earth (magnetosphere) represents the boundary where most of the charge differential between the solar wind and the Earth takes place.
Any object entering from space is going to be of a different charge and the charge differential will begin to occur here and again as it closes with earths geomagnetic field.

I'm just an amateur, I hope I have my explanation correct.

It's not to say that ablation or chemical reaction are not factors but once again most astrophysicists are ignoring the electrical element. And as you can see the evidence comes from various independent sources.

A couple more links.

adsabs.harvard.edu...

xxx.lanl.gov...

Thanx for considering, most only scoff at this without really looking into it.

reply to post by pa.Frost


Sometimes you need to wait a while, and the real trick is being comfortable while you do so. The best rates are just before dawn usually, which is long after most people tend to give up either because they are cold or tiered!

In most cases they probably wouldn't feel half as bad if they layered up with cloths, and got out a sleeping bag + something comfortable that you can lay down flat on like a sun-bed.

I can easily spend 6+ hours observing like this, and remain comfortable even when it drops a little way below zero like it sometimes does in January here.

It also helps if you can get away from light pollution, and find somewhere with "open skies". It's a fair bit of trouble to go to for most people, but it's worth it for those times when you see multiple meteors appear at the the same time, or a bright fireball explode in an even brighter flash of light, or... well the list is endless... you'll just have to dip your line in and see what you catch

Also, at the risk of going on a bit, if you want to see long graceful meteors rather than brief streaks, observe when the meteor shower radiant is on or close to the horizon. This usually means just after dark, sometimes an hour or two later depending on the shower and your location.

Although you may not see many, the meteors (belonging to most major showers) that you see early on in the night are usually meteors that are skimming the outside edge of the atmosphere (called "earthgrazers"), which means that they last longer (less thick atmosphere to be battered with) and due to the angle/perspective, look much longer.

Sometimes they travel nearly all the way from horizon to horizon, either shooting upwards, apparently from the ground and directly over head, or low and parallel with the horizon, and IMO are probably amongst the most amazing meteors you can see.

They typically play tricks on your eyes, seeming much lower than they actually are for some reason more than most "normal shower members" in my experience, and a really bright one, if you are lucky, is likely to bring your lower jaw in contact with the ground (if you happen to be standing whilst observing one like this)

Here's a bright Leonid earthgrazer from 2001, taken during a storm with an all sky camera:

Source: SPA Meteor Section

Later on in the night, although the rates will tend to increase through the night, the meteors look much shorter.




Source: SPA Meteor Section

They are now almost falling directly down towards you, rather than approaching you from the side and flying overhead like a "jet fly-by" as they were earlier on. This is because Earth is turning, and meteors belonging to the same shower always travel more or less parallel to one another in their orbit around the Sun, so we can predict what angle a meteor would approach us from at any given time in relation to a specific point on Earth's surface.

It sounds complex, but the concept is actually quite simple, albeit hard to visualize at first. These two animations I've uploaded might help visualize what is going on.

One shows the formation of a Leonid dust trail that was created in the year 1767, and the other shows why it is that Leonid meteors appear to radiate away from the constellation Leo (the 'Leonid radiant'), which is closely related with apparent meteor length. Hope that wasn't too confusing. If anyone wants me too, I'll try and explain the concept a bit better.

After all that talk about Leonids, it seems fitting to post an example. Here's a slowed down fireball from the 98 Leonids:



Damn that turned into a long post - again lol

Yeah, I thought that something on my porch had fallen over. Everyone in Virginia Beach heard it as well...

The front story on www.aol.com is that the culprit was space junk from the second stage of Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to earth, according to an offical with the US Naval Observatory.

yeah, and the video on the news was weak. it was a business cam showing the object fly through the sky via a reflection from a vehicle's rear window then a flash of light. i satisfied with the official story of this being the Soyuz rocket but was the boom a sonic boom or did it explode? if it did explode... how can metal explode from travelling at a high speed?

reply to post by C.H.U.D.


thanks for all the info! itll come in handy soon enough.

www.space.com... may explain the noise and light over Hampton Roads - it was a Soyuz second stage re-entering over Virginia. The estimates are that debris landed out to sea.
Frakking Russians..

"Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket
By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
posted: 30 March 2009
02:25 pm ET

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last night with reports of hearing a loud boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news reports.

Chester heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.

He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.

The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi - the world's first two-time space tourist - to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.

Chester ran a satellite tracking program that showed that the rocket debris should have come down exactly in the area where the fireball was spotted.

"This is just too much of a coincidence to be coincidence," he said.

Chester said that U.S. Space Surveillance Network had not yet confirmed that this was the case, but said that he was "99 and four one-hundredths [percent] convinced that this is what it is."

The descriptions of the boom and streak of light reported by local residents were "entirely consistent with re-entering space junk, especially something this big," Chester said.

Delta airline pilot Bryce Debban reported seeing the streak of light on a flight from Boston to Raleigh-Durham when his plane was about 31,000 feet in the air.

"We saw it streak across the sky and then blow up," Debban told SPACE.com. "It was brighter than the full moon. It lit up the cockpit as if it were daylight."

James Zimbelman of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Sciences said that the explosion being caused by a re-entering rocket was very plausible. It "sounds all too reasonable," he said.

A rocket stage would fragment and explode "just as if it were a meteorite," he said. And the size of the rocket would explain why the explosion was seen over so wide an area."

Originally posted by pa.Frost
yeah, and the video on the news was weak. it was a business cam showing the object fly through the sky via a reflection from a vehicle's rear window then a flash of light. i satisfied with the official story of this being the Soyuz rocket but was the boom a sonic boom or did it explode? if it did explode... how can metal explode from travelling at a high speed?

Because of the incredibly high temperature which friction between the re-entering metal object and the air in our atmosphere causes. Eventually the re-entering material is superheated, burns fiercely, and pressure from inside the object (as the metal inside literally vaporizes) causes an explosion.

Rockets tend to be built from metals such as aluminum and titanium which, once they begin to burn, burn fiercely. A mixture of superheated metal vapor and compressed air in the wave front ahead of a re-entering object can be just as energetic - or more so - as dynamite.

Also, residual rocket propellant in the second stage tanks could and probably did contribute to the detonation. Second stage boosters often use high-energy propellants (LOX, various hydrazines, nitric acid) which tend to detonate loudly anyway.

Orbital mechanics is an exact enough science that the various stages of a multistage space rocket can be "aimed" to re-enter over lightly populated areas. It's surprising that the Russian Space Agency was careless enough to allow a re-entry over the Eastern Seaboard, but this may be part of that a-hole Vladimir Putin's campaign to intimidate us into abandoning Eastern Europe so the Russians can take it back over. It wouldn't surprise me.

[edit on 31-3-2009 by Murky]

Originally posted by Raider of Truth
reply to post by projectvxn

 

was some news here in the UK a few weeks back that Obama was briefed on an asteroid threat and that they are ready to use nukes on a certain area of space where there is a huge "firing line" of Asteroids. Also something about deadly meteors.. some wierd stuff is happening this year so far

You wouldn't happen to have a link to that story, would you? Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and chief curator at the New York Museum of Science, is one of the prominent astrophysicists who think we ought to be actively working on how to reorient asteroids in advance of a collision. Most of the people who wind up interviewed on the question are dismissive of the danger of Earth intercepts, but Tyson thinks ANY chance that we have another impact like the one that killed the dinosaurs (genetic studies indicate at least one more mass extinction event in Earth's history which may have been due to an asteroid impact) would be one too many not to try and prevent. I forgave the man for demoting Pluto to Kuiper belt object status for that statement.

nextbigfuture.com... describes a "sprint mode" unmanned variant of Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor's Project Orion nuclear detonation-propelled spacecraft which could make intercepts of asteroids far enough out in space that the problem of directing an Earth-intercepting asteroid is dramatically reduced.

The idea would to have a ship like this at one of the Poles, and launch under conditions that would reduce or eliminate fallout from the propulsion charges distant from the launch site. It might be the ONLY way to intercept asteroids on Earth-intercept trajectories from the sunward direction - where they might not even be detected until they are well outside the orbit of Mercury. Then, a sprint intercept would be the one chance of catching the thing and turning it away in time to save Earth.

I personally favor assembling an Orion craft in orbit from components orbited by chemical boosters, but politically, this may not work - for one thing, it would require changes to the Outer Space Treaty, but so would any other use of nuclear weapons in space (unless the people who think that "peaceful nuclear explosives" are not covered by the treaty convince the World Court). However, such a spacecraft in orbital standby anywhere near Earth would also be usable as an orbital nuclear bomber, so I can't see it happening unless the major space-faring and nuclear powers would agree to a design using nuclear pulse units that would not survive re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Even so, the hazard is present of a stray (or intentionally launched) pulse unit detonating in the ionosphere and creating electromagnetic pulse that would destroy most electronics in a continent-sized area under the detonation.

[edit on 31-3-2009 by Murky]

I don't give much creedence to this site, but the information is compelling to say the least. Also, if you take into account the "crashed" F-22 Raptor in Cal last week things get pretty interesting...the govt really needs to hire some new people to generate thier cover stories!

www.whatdoesitmean.com...

PART ONE OF TWO


March 30, 2009

US Warplanes Repel ‘Mysterious’ Attack On Washington D.C.

By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers (Traducción al Español abajo


A most curious report from Russian Space Forces (VKS) circulating in the Kremlin today states that over 75 United States Air Force Warplanes engaged in a battle off the Eastern Coast of the US to repel 5 ‘unidentified’ aircraft said streaking towards their capital city of Washington D.C. at Mach 1 speeds and which saw the loss of 2 US Fighter Jets of as yet ‘unknown’ type.

Russia’s Space Command constantly monitors US Air Force activities over North America from which this report derives from, but which has been further confirmed by reports emanating from the United States today, and as we can read:

“People from Maryland to Hampton Roads heard loud explosions...

[mod edit: clipped quoted content, added Required EX tags]
Mod Edit: Quoting External Sources – Please Review This Link.

[edit on 31-3-2009 by 12m8keall2c]

www.whatdoesitmean.com...

PART TWO OF TWO
[excessive quote from external source removed]
Mod Edit: Quoting External Sources – Please Review This Link.

[edit on 31-3-2009 by 12m8keall2c]

Rest assured, the 'Real' powers that be won't allow this planet to be destroyed.

This is the matter of the Divine, not of man.

Man attempts 'population control'; always with disasterous results.

He refuses to identify his neighbor as his Brother.

He rots in the world he destroys.

Divided and Conquered.

Who wins?

?

reply to post by way2slo


I've been researching the fireballs in the sky and loud booms heard throughout Hampton Roads, Virginia and have discovered a few interesting things.

After a friend and I made a custom Google Map that was added to a PilotOnline.com article, many, many people began dropping pins. Some as far north as Erie, Penn and Brooklyn, New York. There was a pin as far south as Augusta, South Carolina.

Whatever fell from the sky not only lit up the night sky for the better part of the eastern coast, but the loud "boom" sound (explosion?) was also heard along the coast as well (this wasn't limited to just Hampton Roads).

So can a sonic boom encompass an area the size of the eastern coast of the United States? Would a descending rocket ("space trash") make an explosion loud enough to be heard from South Carolina to Erie, Pennsylvania?

There were also comments on a PilotOnline article where some people heard multiple booms:

Submitted by yeldarb215 on Mon, 03/30/2009 at 12:57 am.

So it's 12:50 am and I have heard and felt the explosion for the 4th time since 9:45...

source

And another commenter reported seeing a E-2 Hawkeye in pursuit...

Submitted by de- NERVE on Mon, 03/30/2009 at 12:01 am.

I am looking forward to hearing what our U.S.Navy may have to say / offer , no sooner than the "boom" occured an E-2 Hawkeye was flying overhead speeding in the direction of the "boom"...

source

Thoughts?

Just to put a different spin on the theory's so far how about a scaler wave type weapons test? sounds similar to the same type of incident that happened in the australian outback years ago. just my 2 cent's ( 2 cent's? i'm english!!)