Mysterious Light

 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.