Fireball near Atlanta Sky! Oh, my!

Yet again, an unusual sighting yesterday of a common phenomenon has people hand wringing over what it could be. Is the earth under attack by space aliens? Did North Korea launch an ICBM? Was it just a big meteor burning up in the atmosphere? Space junk? What? What? What!

AJC has the vid, but here it is on Youtube:



This, friends and co-conspirators, is a jet-plane contrail. Look carefully and you can see two separate streams of exhaust at the front that merge at the rear just before the contrail dissipates. The only thing unusual about it is the color from the setting sun. Note that in the vid, another jet flies in from the right and its contrail is the same hue.

Depending on atmospheric conditions at the altitude of a flight, contrails may stretch far behind a plane or dissipate quickly. Sometime, contrails do not even form.

Not long ago even CBS News said its video proved a missile was launched off California, but no one could identify where it came from or whose it was. Of course not - it was a contrail, too.

No Armageddon in waiting here, folks.