Maggie Martin had just finished a two-mile walk through Haines with her sister on Saturday evening, when she saw something above Mount Ripinsky that startled her. “I looked up and saw this little glowing dot falling out of the sky and it came with black smoke coming out of the sky,” she said.
Was it a plane? A meteor? A UFO? Martin uploaded the video to the Haines Chatters Facebook group for others to see.
A handful of people commented, saying they’d seen it also, and offering theories for what it was. Local news reporters shared the video with meteorologists who had some ideas. One scientist tracked down the path of a Soviet satellite that launched in 1982. The satellite was defunct, and aerospace.org’s reentry database showed that the timeline it could have reentered the atmosphere and been burned up roughly aligned with the timeline that Martin saw the smoke.
Anchorage-based climatologist Brian Brettschneider said while the satellite reentry was conceivable, he had a different take, based on the problem-solving principle of Occam’s Razor, which posits that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
After reviewing the video, he said the likely culprit was contrails from a cargo plane passing overhead. Contrails are condensed exhaust from airplanes which form under certain conditions.
“If the temperature is cold enough and the aircraft is high enough up, the exhaust can immediately form into ice crystals,” he said.
Brettschneider said the atmospheric conditions were ideal for contrail formation at the time Martin saw the smoke.
Plus, Haines is on a frequent cargo route for airplanes traveling from the Lower 48 to Anchorage.
The temperature at airplane cruising altitude was -32 degrees Fahrenheit near Yakutat when Martin saw the object, based on data from a weather balloon. Scientists send up hydrogen balloons at thousands of sites around the world twice a day and report the data back to earth. Data from Whitehorse showed even colder temperatures there with a sharp gradient between elevations. In other words, a plane flying through the sky could go from forming contrails to not forming them, giving the appearance of an object falling out of the sky.
“With change in just a few hundred feet, the plane could go from forming contrails to not,” Brettschneider said. Depending on the humidity, the exhaust could linger in the air for hours, or just a few minutes.
Donald Moore, a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, agreed. He said an online flight tracker showed a jet flying over the area when Martin took the video.
“The airplane flew through that area of higher moisture, which allowed for the contrail to form in that particular region of the sky and not elsewhere. The darker UFO from page 1 portion of the contrail is a result of the contrail being dense enough to block light coming from the left side of it,” he wrote in an email to CVN.
Brettschneider said another mystery of the video – the apparent falling of the object – also had a simple explanation: the curvature of the earth.
“If it’s going exactly away from you, it looks like it’s going down from the earth’s curvature,” he said. “It would have been moving much faster if it were a meteor.” Brettschneider said that there was no evidence of U.F.O.s or aliens, at least that he’s seen.
For her part, Martin was satisfied with Brettschneider’s explanation.
“I don’t think it was an alien this time,” she said.