News By James Plafke May. 29, 2014 5:06 pm
When you think back on late childhood nights, not all of them created fond memories of staying up beyond your bedtime. Sometimes, you can remember specific nightmares that kept you awake, or news reports and television shows like*Unsolved Mysteries causing you peer into the night sky looking for UFOs. You don’t really hear much about UFOs anymore, which isn’t exactly a surprise considering we’re not only living in a time when science can generally explain most sightings, but also a time when*high quality cameras are in the pocket of just about everyone who owns a phone. Now, we can snap a picture or take some video, throw it onto the internet, and people will immediately dissect what a sighting is, quashing the story before the news can get ahold of it. However, a couple of years ago in Kentucky, Google caused a sighting that went unexplained for quite a while.
Those of you with intimate knowledge of Google’s side projects may already know what caused the sighting: Project Loon. For a couple of years, Google has been tinkering with a project with the goal of bringing WiFi internet to rural areas, delivering from balloons floating high in the sky. The most common way to dismiss a UFO sighting is to claim the object in the sky was simply a weather balloon or swamp gas being hit with light in such a way to cause an eerie glow. In this case, that’s actually what happened.
The balloon was launched in California back in 2012, but the controls malfunctioned and it went for a ride across the country. The balloon, which hung in the sky at around 60,000 feet for a few hours, spurred Pike County residents to report the sighting to the police; the local government couldn’t explain it. It took Google one year to claim credit for the sighting, but UFO believers claimed that the Project Loon balloons look nothing like what was hanging in the sky. Google, however, noted that the balloon seen over Kentucky was a new prototype with a different design.
Funnily enough, Google was actually relying on UFO watchers to report the balloon as a UFO sighting*so they could figure out where it went. For more on Project Loon, check out our coverage.
Image credit: East Kentucky Broadcasting
More...
Those of you with intimate knowledge of Google’s side projects may already know what caused the sighting: Project Loon. For a couple of years, Google has been tinkering with a project with the goal of bringing WiFi internet to rural areas, delivering from balloons floating high in the sky. The most common way to dismiss a UFO sighting is to claim the object in the sky was simply a weather balloon or swamp gas being hit with light in such a way to cause an eerie glow. In this case, that’s actually what happened.
The balloon was launched in California back in 2012, but the controls malfunctioned and it went for a ride across the country. The balloon, which hung in the sky at around 60,000 feet for a few hours, spurred Pike County residents to report the sighting to the police; the local government couldn’t explain it. It took Google one year to claim credit for the sighting, but UFO believers claimed that the Project Loon balloons look nothing like what was hanging in the sky. Google, however, noted that the balloon seen over Kentucky was a new prototype with a different design.
Funnily enough, Google was actually relying on UFO watchers to report the balloon as a UFO sighting*so they could figure out where it went. For more on Project Loon, check out our coverage.
Image credit: East Kentucky Broadcasting
More...
