Did a UFO or SDI blow up a meteor? Go to Denny's to find out.

Photo from Express. 


Here is another one from Claire.

One morning last week, as I was barely out of my hypnagogic state, she contacted me about a few tabloid allegations. They go a little something like this. Hit it.

A webcam in Maine recorded what looks like a meteor falling from the sky. It is claimed that there is also the appearance of a second object entering the frame and intercepting the meteor, destroying it in a fireball. The American Meteor Society announced that there is indeed a second object on the webcam video, but it is nothing more than a smaller fragment of the meteor that had already broken off in the atmosphere.

What? That is so lame. No imagination at all and it's certainly not a very entertaining explanation. No, if you want that, you've got to go to the internet. There you will find the claims of the Space People True Believers who say the second object was a UFO. It destroyed the meteor and saved the east coast of the United States. After all, there are alien patrols who watch out for us as they know we are nowhere near technologically capable at this point of fending off a meteor strike.

I've read another slightly more plausible (that is if you still insist on doubting the factually accurate explanation from the American Meteor Society) but no less entertaining scenario. It states that a missile defense system, similar to what was proposed under the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI or colloquially "Star Wars," blasted the meteor. That theory took me all the way back to someone I ran into in a Denny's late one night.

Because it's where I get all of my UFO and conspiracy information.

It was a few months after 9/11 and the people at my table were chugging coffee, smoking Marlboros, and fretting over chemical weapons. A young guy from another table overheard and jumped (literally) over to us. He claimed he was a Navy SEAL (brandishing his Navy keychain as if it were some sort of credential) and proceeded to school us about chemical weapons. All of it knowledge that he gained as a medic in the SEALs. "I've got enough medical gear in my trunk to keep someone alive until the ambulance arrives" he boasted. Made me wonder what he had in mind for the evening. Also he claimed to know that SDI is a reality and that there are particle beam weapons based in Alaska that are "70% effective."

I really didn't have any desire to call him on the flim-flam I was smelling. To tell you the truth, I was rather entertained by him as I usually am when I encounter these types. Great fodder for stories. Also, I didn't doubt his claims about SDI. The specifics maybe, but not the overall claim.

Stories like these proliferate because people see things in the sky and they don't know what they are. Watch the starry night sky sometime. You'll see something move high above where most planes fly. Probably a satellite. Could also be a drone conducting surveillance (an eerie feeling, eh?) Might be something else entirely, something we haven't been told about. Because there really are secrets. That's not paranoia or conspiracy talk. Several of our defense capabilities are being kept secret.

Because they have to be.

So while the webcam footage of the meteor is immanently explainable, I understand where the many of the other stories come from. They come from an awareness that things really are being kept from you, for good reasons, and the creepy sensation of the unknown that produces.

Well, that and from Denny's late at night.


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