造就重大空间恶作剧的7件事情编辑本段回目录
造就重大空间恶作剧的7件事情
By Bjorn Carey and Remy Melina, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writers
10 November 2010 1:25 PM ET
In 2009, Norway residents witnessed what some believed to be a UFO putting on a bizarre light show: a giant spiral with a green-blue beam of light shooting from its center and lighting up the sky. Credit: Dagfinn Rapp. 2009年,
It doesn't take much to convince people that they've seen an experimental missile or a UFO. A funny-looking cloud or an exceptionally bright planet will usually do the trick. Here, our top 7 things that drive space-related hoaxes.
不需要有更多的说明,人们看到了实验导弹或UFO。看来很有趣的云彩或异常明亮的行星通常会做会取这样理想的结果。这里我们列举了最主要的7件事情,它们可能造就那些与空间有关的恶作剧。
7. 闪电(Lightning)
Mysterious UFO sightings may go hand-in-hand with a natural weather phenomenon known as sprites — flashes high in the atmosphere triggered by thunderstorms. Sprites suddenly appear when lightning from thunderstorms excites the electric field above the storm, producing dancing flashes of bright light.
Sprites can take the form of fast-paced balls of electricity, although they can also form streaks or tendrils. "Winter sprites" are common in the northern hemisphere during winter months.
6. 导弹试验(Missile Tests)
In December 2009, a spectacular spiral light show appeared in the sky above northern Norway: A giant spiral, with a green-blue beam of light shooting from its center, lit up the sky in a raindrop-ripple effect pattern. It looked like a wormhole to another dimension, but it turned out that the lights were caused by a Russian missile that failed just after launch, according to Russia's defense ministry. The botched Bulava ballistic test missile spun out of control, thus creating the mysterious rotating spiral effect.
2009年12月,挪威北部的上空出现了壮观的螺旋体灯光表现:一个巨大的螺旋体,从中心发射出蓝绿色的光柱,以雨滴纹波的效果模式来点亮天空。
它看来像是空间中另一维空间的一个虫洞,但根据俄罗斯国防部,结果证明这些光线是他们发射不久就失败的导弹试验所引起。布拉瓦弹道导弹的试验给办砸了,由此产生了神秘的旋转螺旋体效应。
Last October, footage of a giant halo in an overcast sky over Moscow surfaced on YouTube. The video had everything needed to ignite UFO rumors. It's grainy. At one point, a dark pointy object appears to bolt out of the ring. There's even a panicked-sounding Russian radio broadcast in the background.
今年10月份,莫斯科阴天上空的巨大光环的连续镜头浮现在视频网站上。视频具有可以用来谣传UFO所需要的一切。它是有条有理的。在某一时刻,一个模糊、尖尖目标似乎要匆忙地离开了这个环状物。在视频的背景上,甚至还有个惊慌音响的俄罗斯广播电台。
Cool-headed meteorologists were quick to put the story to bed: It was just an optical illusion, the cause of sunlight hitting a cloud disturbed by wind or plane traffic in just the right way. Most likely it was what is known as a hole-punch cloud. These occur in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, which are often composed of ice crystals and super-cooled water droplets – water that is below freezing temperature, but still in liquid form. The physical properties that hold these clouds together are delicate, and when disturbed – by a jet plane, wind or even cloud seeding efforts – the droplets can freeze instantly or evaporate, the latter of which will form the hole.
头脑冷静的气象学家很快把这件事搁置起来:认为它只是一种光的幻觉,起因于阳光击中了一朵云彩,刚好能以一种合适的方式被风或飞机交通而使人感到不安。最有可能的是所谓冲孔云。这些云层发生在卷云或卷层云,它们通常包含着冰晶和过冷的水滴——温度低于冻结温度却依然能保持着其液体的状态。把云层聚合在一起的物理性质是很微妙的,当它们受到扰动的时候——喷气式飞机、风,甚至是云种散播效应——水滴就可能会立即冻结或蒸发,如果是后者就会形成洞眼。
4. 轻气球(Balloons)
Unlike Balloon Boy, not all balloon-driven hoaxes are intentional. In the afternoon of Oct. 13, hundreds of people in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood saw a cluster of silvery, shiny lights glittering from above. Naturally, initial descriptions of the supposed UFO varied wildly: Some folks reported seeing one large, slow-moving object full of lights, while others say they saw nearly a half-dozen entities
不像是气球男孩,并不是所有由气球驱动的恶作剧都是故意人为的。2010年10月13日,曼哈顿的切尔西街坊的几百个人看到了来自天空上面的一簇银色、闪耀的光,从上向下地闪闪发光。自然地,想象上UFO原始描述的差异是很大的:有些人报告说,他们看到的是一个很大的、充满光亮缓慢移动的物体,而其他有的人说,他们看到了差不多是近乎半打的实体。
The strange, shimmering lights turned out to be caused by 12 helium balloons that escaped from an engagement party held for a teacher at the Milestone School in Mount Vernon, Westchester County, about 15 miles awayThe balloons were inadvertently released at 1 p.m., and the first of the "UFO" sightings occurred around 1:30 p.m.
奇怪和闪耀的灯光,原来是离开曼哈顿约有15英里的威彻斯特县芒特弗农的迈尔斯通中学给一个教师举行一个订婚派对上,所飘移出来的12个氦气球。这些气球并不是人们在下午一点钟故意释放的,而第一个看到的“UFO”大约是在下午1:30.
The planet Venus often gets mistaken for a UFO. To viewers on Earth, the second planet from the sun appears as a bright light that hangs in the sunset sky, seeming to slowly hover in the twilight as it outshines every star except for the sun. Because Venus orbits the sun inside our own orbit, from our perspective it constantly darts out on the either side of the sun, which people often mistake for a moving UFO.
Here's proof that anything funny-looking in the sky can cause an uproar. This past Monday, most of the U.S. woke up to reports that a mystery missile had launched off the coast of California. The sightings were spurred by video of a condensation trail, or contrail, streaking through clouds lit up by the rising sun. No one could conclusively say what it was at the time—officials at the Department of Defense reported no scheduled missile launches, NORAD and USNORTHCOM detected no foreign activity and the FAA hadn't cleared any commercial space launches in the area. After a thorough investigation, many experts now believethat the streak was a – wait for it – a run-of-the-mill jet aircraft contrail that happened to hang around longer than usual. Contrails appear most vivid around sunrise or sunset, and it's not uncommon that one showing up in an unexpected location will generate whispers of a UFO or experimental military aircraft.
Lights in the sky, especially when viewed by pilots, can also cause a stir, but are almost always revealed to be running lights of other aircraft, or flares dropped by weather research craft.
天空里的光,特别当被飞行员看到的,也可以引起骚动,但它几乎总是被揭露为其他飞行器运行时的灯光,或者是气候研究用飞行器所放下的照明弹。
1. 军事试验(Military Experiment)
The late 1940s and early 1950s were a great time for spotting UFOs and aliens in New Mexico, primarily because that's where the Air Force was conducting some of its top-secret research. One such program was known as Project Mogul and involved floating microphone-carrying balloons to high altitudes in an attempt to pick up the sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests. The Air Force has since confirmed that a 1947 crash of one of those balloons created the debris that birthed the Roswell UFO Incident
1940年代末和50年代初是新墨西哥州发现UFO和外星人的美好时光,主要是因为当时空军正在进行着最为绝密的研究,称为莫卧儿项目(Project Mogul ),它涉及到把携带着浮动麦克风的气球上升到高空,企图检测到苏联试验原子弹所发生的声波。此后空军证实,1947年这些气球中的一个,因坠毁所造成的碎片,引起了当时的罗斯威尔UFO事件(Roswell UFO Incident)。
Another military experiment provided the bodies for that UFO. In the 1950s, Air Force scientists dropped several dozen anthropomorphic dummies from planes to test new high-altitude parachutes and determine whether the bodies would enter a dangerous spin as they fell. Results from these studies contributed to designs for the parachutes and pressurized suits that fighter jet pilots and early astronauts would wear. The Air Force was more than happy to allow Russian spies to think New Mexicans were a little kooky than to reveal the true military origin of the sightings.
另一个军事试验为UFO提供躯体。在上世纪的50年代,空军科学家从飞机上放下了几十个人体模型来测试新的高海拔降落伞,并用来确定当这些躯体掉下时,是否会进入危险的自旋状态。研究的结果却促成了降落伞和供战斗机飞行员和早期的宇航员的穿着的加压服装设计。空军更乐意让俄罗斯的间谍认为新墨西哥州人都有些古怪,而不是揭示所谓UFO事件的真实军事来源。
译者:王士杰