According to the
Space.com article:
Space.com wrote:Banbury said he saw the lights on his way to work between 7:50 and 8:00 a.m. local time, or 1:50 and 2:00 a.m. EST (0650 and 7000 GMT).
I'm sure by 7000 they meant 0700, since 7000 hours is larger than 2400 which is the end of the day. So anyway,
the incident occurred December 9, 2009 @ 0650-0700 UT (Norway is UT+1).
Richard Hoagland
has already posted about this, including some striking images worth checking out. Can anyone source the Russian military's initial denial Hoagland references, or for that matter, the
official (i.e., non-anonymous) admission of the missile test? Because all I'm seeing is anonymous sources, but perhaps I'm looking at the wrong sites.
The most interesting thing he mentions is the nearby
EISCAT facility in Ramfjordmoen (so close by it's called the
Tromso facility), whic includes VHF and UHF antenna arrays, plus:
EISCAT wrote:In addition to the incoherent scatter radars, EISCAT also operates an Ionospheric Heater facility at Ramfjordmoen (including a Dynasonde) to support various active plasma physics experiments in the high latitude ionosphere.
That's HAARP technology, straight up, no WOO. This Tromso facility even looks roughly like the Gakona, Alaska facility:
(from
http://www.dcs.lancs.ac.uk/~kavanaaj/campaign.html)
Their
Heating facility page describes it in more detail:
EISCAT wrote:The Heating facility is situated next to the UHF and VHF incoherent scatter radars.
[...]
The Heater is used for ionospheric modification experiments applying high-power transmissions of high-frequency electro-magnetic waves to study plasma parameters in the ionosphere. The name Heating stems from the fact that these high power electromagnetic waves, which are transmitted into the ionosphre with high-gain atennas, heat the electrons and thus modify the plasma state. To create plasma turbulence, the transmitted frequencies have to be close to the plasma resonances, which are 4 to 8 MHz.
Facing directly East from Tromso, the EISCAT facility is to the southeast:
Compared with the phenomena (facing East or Southeast -- can anyone confirm this? I couldn't):
I mean, holy shit, right? But
correlation ain't causation, kiddies... so let's continue:
EISCAT keeps a
detailed and searchable experiment schedule, which is only good insofar as an experiment is officially
scheduled before they run it, of course. According to the
operating instructions page for the Dynasonde, they capture data with UT (GMT) timestamps, so all times should be safely assumed to be UT.
Anyway, according to the schedule,
the UHF system ran for 4 days straight from 12/7 to 12/11, which probably doesn't mean anything, but the VHF
and Heater ran on 12/9 from 0700-1000, which encompasses most of the phenomena's observation window insofar as that one witness Banbury was concerned. Here's some details:
EISCAT schedule wrote:Contact: Antti Kero <antti.kero@sgo.fi> +358442894669
Description: Meteor Dust studies with VHF and Heater
Notes: TEQUILAsunrise (Transient Effects Quantification Under Ionospheric Low Angle sunrise). The idea is to
look at the polar wintertime mesophere through the transient
caused by (scattered) sunrise around 8 UT. Interestingly, this happens to
be the maximum occurence time of the Polar Mesosphere Winter Echoes (PMWE).
Which, to me, doesn't sound terribly relevant to this phenomena,
but we at least know the ionospheric heater was operational during the phenomenon. This experiment could have been a good cover for it, or it could all be a coincidence.
In addition to the
schedule, there's also a log (which apparently anyone can submit to without authentication) intended for experimenters to record their on-site work as conducted rather than as scheduled.
The log for Dec 9 has a gap between 2 AM and 6:52, then between 6:58 and 8:28 when the 6:52 experiment is stopped, so I tend not to think these logs line up with the phenomenon.
Considering the amount of aurora photos they take with their antennas in the foreground, it's possible but unlikely to me that nobody at EISCAT noticed this apparition and if they did, I would think it would have been worth noting here or somewhere, you know,
just in case, but their procedures might dictate otherwise, who knows.
I also don't see a big correlation with the published
Ionograms (with polarization in color) or
Skymaps (with doppler in color) for that day.
Perhaps someone on the
PDF list of contacts for the facility (Tromso at bottom) saw the phenomenon and can comment on it, but the time I spent barking up this tree has vastly exceeded my sleuthing budget for the day, so I leave it to another more eloquent and charming researcher or gonzo internet journalist to work this angle without me.
But just to put things back into perspective:
a no-shit HAARP-derivative ionospheric heater was in operation at the time of the phenomenon.