ANDEAN UFO IDENTIFIED AS A RUSSIAN SPACECRAFT

Mon, 16 Sep 1996
Source: UFO Round Up
At 9 p.m. on August 14, 1996, nearly a hundred people in the northern border area of Argentina and Chile "observed a strange phenomenon" which was described as "a ring-shaped object crossing the sky from north to south."

This week the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA identified the UFO as exhaust from a rocket motor "burn." The spacecraft was a Molniya-IT satellite launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Russia's Arctic region. The spacecraft was on a north to south polar orbit, ranging from 207 to 438 kilometers above the Earth. The satellite's Blok-ML booster stage fired at 9 p.m. over the Andes, a spokesman for the observatory said, and the angle of the sun made the exhaust plume visible to observers on the ground.

(Editor's Comment: Well, that explains the "ring-shaped UFO," but what about the nickel-colored saucer seen flying over Talagante, Chile?)

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