The explaining-away of inexplicable phenomena with euphemistic devices such as weather balloons or in this case a failed Russian Bulava missile launch entered into the realm of tired cliché long ago. Still, we have a pretty hard time swallowing the news that the above enormous, glowing spiral that appeared last night in the sky above Norway (justifiably panicking onlookers who believed it was at the very least a UFO and quite possibly a sign of the apocalypse) was simply the result of said failed Russian missile test. From the NYTimes:
"It has been established ... that the missile's first two stages worked as normal, but there was a technical malfunction at the next, third, stage of the trajectory," a Defense Ministry spokesman said.
Norwegian experts reported sighting of phenomena in the atmosphere near the White Sea, where earlier Bulava rockets were fired, the Kommersant and Vedomosti newspapers reported.
We are hard-pressed to think of a person whose excuse we're less likely to believe in this situation than a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman. Those guys have been lying to us since we invented a way to ask them what the hell was going on over there. And it's not as though news of Russia blasting nuclear-deterrent missiles into the stratosphere is entirely encouraging either. But for us it's about, as always, the possibilities. It's hard to get a sense of the face-melting awe that would accompany stepping into the street and actually seeing something like this, and we often feel that if we did, our lives would never be the same. We leave you to sift through the story as it develops, but for our part we will be keeping an anxious eye on the horizon, as always.
photo via Discovery
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