Jim,
Have you
compared what you have with mine at http://takeaflyingleap.org/eric/ ? I have not
seen anyone else’s but would like to here a comparison.
-----Original Message-----
From: utah-astronomy-admin@mailman.xmission.com
[mailto:utah-astronomy-admin@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Jim Gibson
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003
7:47 AM
To:
utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com
Subject: [Utah-astronomy] NASA
phone call
To all:
To meet my wife is to meet a “gum shoe”.
She doesn’t do it by profession but by nature. True to her super sleuth
propensity she got a hold of Ron Dittemore’s (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 doesn’t 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 wife’s 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
Wiggin’s web site and the URL
to Joe Bauman’s, 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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