Maybe Santa Was Testing A Souped-Up Sleigh Fiery Spectacle In Tuesday Sky Was Probably A Meteor, But You Never Know

Blitzen and Comet have quite an act to follow.

Just a week before Santa’s reindeer take to the skies, hundreds of Northwesterners saw a fiery spectacle in the predawn sky Tuesday. Early risers from northern Oregon through Washington reported a streaking orb - described as white, green or orange - in the northern or western sky just after 6 a.m.

“It was a big, bright ball with green streaks behind it,” said Lorene Neubauer, who saw the sight over Admiralty Inlet as she was beginning her daily commute from Hansville to Seattle.

In Aberdeen, Wash., Tim Harrington, had just stepped outside radio station KBKW to stargaze when he noticed something new.

“We saw this bright green florescent ball with green tracers,” said Harrington, host of a morning talk show. “This thing was just moving.”

By early morning, pilots were reporting a sighting to the Federal Aviation Administration. Motorists on Interstate 90 over Snoqualmie Pass were phoning the Washington State Patrol. And talk radio in Seattle was abuzz with the mere hint of a UFO.

But even UFO enthusiasts were saying the light show was not an invasion from Mars but simply a meteor plunging to Earth.

“It’s probably just a classic meteorite,” said Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle. “I have no reason to believe people were looking at a UFO.”

What Northwesterners saw in the heavens wasn’t man-made, said a spokeswoman for the Defense Department’s Space Command Center in Colorado. Anything in the air that’s manmade is monitored by the center, she said.

Don Brownlee, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, said the naked eye can ordinarily see a couple of meteors every hour in a dark sky. They fall at 30 to 40 kilometers a second, so most burn up in the atmosphere, he said.

The rare meteor that hits the ground usually arrives with some sort of sonic boom, Brownlee said.

Tuesday presented a harmonic convergence for meteor watching: a clear December sky with the morning commute just begun. So lots of folks were outside or in their cars.

Davenport’s UFO center in Seattle got calls from throughout Western Washington and beyond. A couple in Tigard, Ore., reported a silver-white ball high in the sky that dropped at a steep angle. A motorist on Interstate 405’s Renton “S” curves told the center about a ball streaking almost horizontally.

In Wenatchee, the State Patrol heard from drivers at Easton and Cle Elum who said they saw a greenish-orange ball in the sky.

A Horizon Airlines pilot told the FAA that he saw a green light in the western sky near Port Angeles. A pilot of a private plane reported the same thing near Everett, north of Seattle, FAA spokesman Mitch Barker said.

Washington provides fertile ground for UFO-watchers. The center in Seattle receives more reports of sightings from residents of this state than any other. But Davenport found little intriguing in Tuesday’s reports, save for differences in the position of the object and its color.

In fact, he was far more enthusiastic about reports of white lights over Lake Washington and Juanita on Monday night.

Perhaps you just had to be there yesterday morning.

Harrington, the Aberdeen talk show host, said it looked almost like the object had ducked behind a hill.

“It just seemed so low. It was strange,” he said.

Harrington figured the glowing orb might have crashed on the Olympic Peninsula, maybe in the mountains. He went back to work with a perfect subject for his talk show.

Neubauer, the commuter from Hansville, watched the object for five seconds as she drove down a private lane.

“It just kind of arced down, and it looked like it went down in my neighbor’s yard,” she said. “I really expected to see it burst into flames.”

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