(I apologize for the screen grab, but the weather channel doesn't let me cut and paste.)
(Brian Brettschneider, weather.com, "November kicks off the cloudiest time of year...")
(**sigh**) The polar jet stream is a current of circumpolar air, so it's cold. When the jet stream loops down into the lower 48, it brings a lot of cold air down to us. When the air is colder, moisture in the air more readily condenses into clouds. Will that do as a simple explanation?
(Side note: one of the things that has caused significant amounts of weird weather in the USA is the fact that the jet stream is swinging in wide oscillations at times, not following its usual pattern of behavior. That give us times that, for example, the temperature in Fairbanks is higher than the temperature in Orlando, as happened a couple of years ago at Christmas. The temperature where I am in Ohio dropped 35°F overnight, and I suspect the jet stream is responsible.)
My sense is that there are aome number of people watching stuff in the sky on the 4th of July! ^_^ Of course, it may be that they are more likely to interpret interesting lights as part of a show on the night of a million "C" Class fireworks...
I'll concede that point -- but still, low clouds are not impossible on the 4th, or on Opening Night of the community theater, or Big Sale night at the car lot.
This needs to be read in the context that "they followed us" is also a behaviour seen from venus (or was it jupiter?) in eye-witness testimony - from experts!
Maybe your kid was shaken by the experience because he was in a car with a hysterical person behind the wheel?
Absolutely - well spotted, thank you! This highlights the exponential attenuation of the beam brilliantly. The "losing 0.1% of its energy per 10m slice of air"-type thing I mentioned above. There's more energy to be dissipated and diffused near the source, and less as you go along the beam.
Bright orbs that seemed to glide through the clouds over rural parts of the state were recently captured in video footage shared by social media users who thought they might have seen a UFO.
"Multiple witnesses reporting orb-like UAPs flying in formation over rural Wisconsin..!!" wrote Twitter user Joshua Rodriguez. A tweet of the video on his page garnered over 24,000 views.
But according to investigator and columnist Mick West, the illuminated objects likely came from spotlights at a home in Belgium, a village in Ozaukee County.
"Regarding the Wisconsin searchlight 'UAP' [unidentified aerial phenomena], I asked around and apparently the Holy Cross Church of Belgium, WI, added searchlights to their Christmas display this year. And it's right in the lines of sight," West wrote.
Absolutely - well spotted, thank you! This highlights the exponential attenuation of the beam brilliantly. The "losing 0.1% of its energy per 10m slice of air"-type thing I mentioned above. There's more energy to be dissipated and diffused near the source, and less as you go along the beam.
i was looking up projectors as a house on the way to a family member had a projector that shined on their house and you could only see the beam if you went down a side street. Here the Aitken "Lighthouse" design is a good example...from most angles you see no beam
So we continued on our drive, we were going to go to Candy Cane Lane with our daughters, which is a holiday tradition for us. And we drove for 20 miles and the entire 20 miles, we continue to see these lights that would pulse through the sky incredibly fast. There'll be like a five to 32nd delay in between, and then they'd either come back again, the same direction, or they would come back the opposite direction. And it just seemed very odd.
So at this point, I wanted to capture some of this on on video. And I thought it was incredibly odd once again that we had seen these for 20 miles, I just started rolling things out in my head of what that could be. So we got off an exit in Greenfield, which is a more populated area, and pulled into a church parking lot and looked up in the southern sky, which was the direction we were seeing these while driving. And the only thing I noticed in the sky at that point was a bluish purple hue up in the sky. And I thought that was odd.
I think that's what I thought. I had picked Mt. Zion's Lutheran church as a possibility based on the description at the time, but obviously the Kingdom of Glory Lutheran church also fits the description. There seems to be a lot of Lutheran churches in that area.
So, they would be seeing the lights towards the Southern suburbs of Milwaukee, right?
May have to find another Christmas light display, which seems totally plausible. People that are into Christmas lights always seem to go bigger and better.
