UFOs

October 1957: Sputnik launch . My mother ran up Antares Street and alerted the boy-scouts; we all trooped outside and gazed at this bright fast-moving thing that raced from West to East across our Northern Sky.

Only, it wasn’t unidentified, and it wasn’t flying, and it wasn’t an object. It was one of the stages of the launch rocket system. Sputnik was too small (about two feet diameter) to be seen by the naked eye, but the launch vehicle was large enough to provide a flood of photons to our weak retinas.

This so-called UFO

(1) Was poorly identified (only around 1020 did I learn that the “thing” was the launch rocket)

(2) Was not flying

(3) Was in deed an object, and a man-made object at that, but also the most/best documented object ever to be put in orbit around Earth.

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