That's a great story, Jim. The man has gone to hell and back lately, this personal vignette is much appreciated. I sincerely hope that you're image can help find the answers. C. --- Jim Gibson <xajax99@yahoo.com> wrote:
To all:
To meet my wife is to meet a gum shoe. She doesnt do it by profession but by nature. True to her super sleuth propensity she got a hold of Ron Dittemores (NASA shuttle program manager) home phone number and called it. She expected to get an answering machine but to her surprise he answered the phone. He doesnt usually answer the phone these days because of people like us that have the audacity to bother him at home. He just happened to see the 801 prefix on the caller ID and thought it may have something to do with his son or daughter who are attending BYU. Because of my wifes loyalty to me, she thinks that the photo I happened to capture of the Columbia passing over is the key piece of evidence.
Mr. Dittemore was very polite and after hearing of the photo asked us to email it to him right away. I quickly went out to gather previous post that I have made to this listing and tried to put together a coherent description of the possible event the photograph may have captured. I included the timing of the photograph, the location in both Lat & Lon as well as UTM coordinates as garnered from topozone.com. I included all four pictures as are posted on Patrick Wiggins web site and the URL to Joe Baumans, Deseret News article and sent them off.
No more than ten minutes had passed when we received a call for Mr. Dittemore. He was very professional and wanted me to explain exactly what he was looking at. I mentioned that the camera was pointing straight up and gave him the orientation of the orbiter and a similar explanation of the event as has been posted here previously.
The question of the event possibly portraying the door to the wheel well came up and he commented that the sensor data he had, indicated that the wheel well door remained latched. Then I suggested that because of the size of the signature that possibly part of the wing may have come off. I also mentioned that it is possible that the object may have been smaller than portrayed in the photo. If the object were bright enough and had excited only part of a pixel the whole pixel would have turned on thereby making the object appear larger that it really was. To me the signature looks almost as large as the orbiter signature.
Preliminarily the photo supplied at least two good pieces of information. The timing was important and the fact that the signature of the object appeared to waffle indicating some aerodynamics. A team of experts had already begun to analyze a video taken in Flag Staff, Arizona to try and determine where the object captured in the video may have landed. Mr. Dittemore thinks that the video and the Leeds photo are the same event. The team could not tell from the video whether the object was a blob or whether the object had some aerodynamics which information they need to try and determine a fan of possible landing locations. The Leeds photo shows that aerodynamics are involved and will make the search that much broader.
I mentioned that there are good people both in Utah and in Arizona that would volunteer to search for the object given possible sites to search. He took that information into consideration.
My wife briefly mentioned that our daughter lives about a block away from his daughter just off BYU campus. All of a sudden he was much more exuberant. I felt like he would much rather talk about his children than anything else. Under the circumstances it would be nice if that were all we had to talk about.
Jim
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