Mosquito-repellent coil-shaped UFOs? No problem, we're old friends.

On the night of April 17 this year, the Hawaiian Islands, which were about to enter summer, had almost bid farewell to the chill of late spring, but it was still not hot on Mount Mauna Kea.

The staff of the Subaru Telescope activated the mirror as usual that night, and after completing various checks and calibrations, pointed it at the sky. However, just as the observation was about to end that night, a bright spot suddenly appeared in the sky, and then a spiral structure appeared. This blue-white spiral light rotated all the way and slowly disappeared on the distant horizon.

Could it be that aliens are visiting the earth in mosquito coils?

While joking about keeping the UFO secret, the Subaru Telescope team revealed its true identity - the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

How did the rocket become connected to the UFO that looks like a mosquito coil?

How did the rocket become a mosquito coil?

In the early morning hours of April 17, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket on the NROL-85 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

On April 17, Eastern Time, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched a U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spy satellite into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California | SpaceX

After the rocket is launched, the first stage returns safely to Earth for reuse, while the second stage, a disposable component, returns to the Earth's atmosphere and burns up.

In order to avoid insufficient power due to environmental reasons, the second stage rocket usually carries more propellant than the mission requires. However, after the carrier successfully enters orbit, if there is any residual propellant in the rocket and it falls into the atmosphere and burns up, an explosion may occur.

Therefore, after the second stage rocket separates, it will first vent the remaining propellant before entering the atmosphere.

During this process, a spiral trail is produced - this is the mosquito coil photographed earlier.

The remaining propellant is usually discharged from the injection ports around the rocket to control the direction, which can prevent the second-stage rocket from entering other orbits and improve the controllability of its angle and position of entering the atmosphere. In this case, the rocket only spins, spinning in the air like a firecracker, and enters the atmosphere along the predetermined orbit.

The propellant discharged from the rocket quickly vaporizes after decompression to form a trail, and then because of the spiral movement of the rocket, these trail clouds become spiral-shaped, forming the mosquito-coil-shaped UFO we see in the video.

Spiral contrails are different from trails. Trails are formed when the hot exhaust gas ejected by the propeller quickly condenses into tiny water droplets or ice crystals when it cools in the air. The picture shows the spiral contrails captured by the Asahi Star | Asahi Star

In addition to spiral UFOs, people sometimes see "space jellyfish," which are also related to rocket launches.

Russia launched an Angara 1.2 rocket from the Plesetsk launch site, sending the MCA-R military radar satellite into orbit. In the village of Yalunga in Kirov Oblast, Russia, photographer Sergey Kokovini took a photo of the "jellyfish-like" rocket cloud.

When launching before sunrise or after sunset on a clear day, although the surface is still dark, the upper atmosphere where the rocket is launched can be illuminated by sunlight. Here, the hot gas ejected by the thruster is quickly cooled and condensed into droplets or ice crystals, reflecting the sunlight in the upper atmosphere in all directions, and the rocket's launch trajectory will make these contrails look as round and full as jellyfish.

In the early morning of May 6, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida carrying a new batch of 53 Starlink satellites. After the launch of this rocket, the timing coincided with the "space jellyfish" phenomenon in the upper atmosphere.

The 12-hand Falcon 9 rocket launched on May 6 also had gorgeous space jellyfish | Erik Kuna

Another perspective, also from the 12-hand Falcon 9 rocket launched on May 6th | Chris Combs

Spiral UFO, our old friend

As early as August 27, 1987, people in China's southeastern coastal areas saw sparkling spiral spots of light quickly passing through the sky when they looked up at the stars in midsummer.

But this is not an alien.

According to the People's Daily at the time, James Oberg, a UFO research expert in Texas, said in an interview with reporters that Japan launched an "H-1" three-stage rocket at the Tanegashima Space Center (TNSC) on August 27. After completing the launch mission, its second-stage rocket threw the remaining fuel into space, and the vaporized fuel turned into the UFOs seen by people under the sunlight.

JAXA launches H-1 rocket | Reference [3]

Sometimes spiral UFOs are not limited to satellites and rockets.

On December 9, 2009, a huge spiral light circle appeared in the sky above Tromsø in northern Norway. At that time, a blue light first shot out from behind a mountain in the north, then the light began to move in a circular shape, and finally threw out a huge vortex pattern, almost covering the entire local sky, and the whole process even lasted for 10 minutes.

Shortly afterwards, Russian media said that this was indeed a failed test of the Bulava sea-based intercontinental missile conducted by the Russian side. By the way, this was also the seventh failure of the missile in all 13 test launches.

Norwegians had a front-row seat to this bizarre light show, with giant spirals of light covering almost the entire sky. | Dagfinn Rapp /space.com

Due to the increasing number of space missions, spiral UFOs have actually appeared frequently in recent years - a large part of them are caused by the Falcon 9 rocket. After all, SpaceX has been busy in the past two years.

However, there are occasional cases where China's black technology is seen.

On the evening of June 18, 2021, residents in the Republic of Vanuatu and New Caledonia in the southern hemisphere photographed a circle of dim yellow "spiral flywheel" in the sky. The flywheel rotated in the sky for nearly 10 minutes before disappearing.

The "spiral flywheel" photographed by an eyewitness on an island in the southwest Pacific｜haskovo.net

American astronomer Jonathan McDowell said that the flywheel should be the second stage of China's Long March 2C carrier rocket that was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center that day. This mission successfully sent four satellites into orbit.

Those unresolved UFO incidents

The most famous UFO sighting in modern times was the Roswell incident in 1947, when an unidentified object crashed on a farm in Roswell, New Mexico, USA. The military quickly cordoned off the scene for investigation.

Although the U.S. military later determined that the object was the wreckage of a weather balloon, many people still believed that it was not just a balloon that crashed, due to the testimony of some witnesses who were not sure whether it was true or not. Many conspiracy theories continued to emerge, and the Roswell incident later became a frequent theme in many science fiction movies.

Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947, claims to have captured a UFO | Roswell Daily Record

The U.S. Pentagon released three UFO videos on April 28, 2020, which once again made UFOs and aliens a hot topic.

However, what the Pentagon released were only old videos that had been circulating on the Internet in various forms since 2007. The purpose of the release was only to clarify the rumors and prove that the US government and military did not process the images, and there was no public conclusion about these UFOs.

Screenshots of UFO videos released by the Pentagon. These videos were shot with infrared cameras and show fast-moving UFOs. Two of the videos also include conversations between U.S. soldiers who marvel at how fast the objects move. References [8]

At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, various UFO sighting videos and photos appeared in large numbers, which set off a wave of alien contact. However, most of them were scams constructed by relying on photographic equipment with extremely low clarity and resolution.

With the elimination of low-definition equipment and the growing size of social media, it is not difficult to find that the popularity of UFOs has decreased a lot in recent years.

Whether aliens and UFOs exist or not is still an unresolved problem, but at least the spiral light wheel that appeared in the sky this time was really not a mosquito coil driven by aliens.

References

[1] NROL-85 MISSION https://www.spacex.com/launches/nrol-85/index.html

[2] Wu Shijia, “American expert James Oberg believes that Shanghai UFO is not an alien” [J], People’s Daily, 1987-09-14

[3] About HI Launch Vehicle https://global.jaxa.jp/projects/rockets/h1/index.html

[4] 2009 Norwegian spiral anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Norwegian_spiral_anomaly

[5] What was the Norway Spiral? https://www.universetoday.com/47219/what-was-the-norway-spiral/

[6] 'Strange spiral in the skies' spotted across the Pacific explained https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/strange-spiral-in-the-skies-spotted-across-the-pacific-explained/V5X3L5XHU32JGRZVINJZDXKZ2E/

[7] Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947, announcing the capture of a flying saucer https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Roswell-Daily-Record-July-8-1947-announcing-the-capture-of-a-flying-saucer-Location_fig1_344186953

[8] Pentagon UFO videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

[9] Why the Pentagon UFO report is deeply troubling for US security experts https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/25/ufo-report-pentagon-security-experts-reaction

Author: Cat again

Editor: Little Towel, Steed

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Riding a mosquito coil is too shabby...

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