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By DAVID BALLINGRUD
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 8, 1999
It was a visitor from outer space.
Well, in a manner of speaking.
What turned out to be a piece of a Russian rocket falling back to Earth had a lot of early risers in Florida rubbing their eyes and staring into the dark sky early Tuesday.
"I'm not into UFOs; I'm a realist," said Tim Beachy, 38. "But this was the strangest phenomenon I've ever seen."
Beachy is a licensed pilot and a computer and electronics technician at the VA Medical Center at Bay Pines near St. Petersburg. He was westbound on Interstate 4 near Plant City about 5 a.m. when he saw a glowing object that appeared to be trailing sparks, slowly descending toward the southeastern horizon.
"It was north, to my right, elevated about 40 degrees from the horizon. I saw lights, compact and close together." Behind the object, Beachy said, was a "stream of luminous particles, like sparks, but steady and straight, unwavering."
Henry Clifford, 64, a security guard at Florida Power's Weedon Island facility in northeast St. Petersburg, saw it, too.
"It wasn't like a shooting star," he said. "It didn't dim rapidly and it descended slowly at a shallow angle. I saw it at 5:04 a.m., and I had it in sight for about 15 seconds."
The object had a reddish glow and appeared to be trailing whitish-blue sparks, Clifford said.
Phones soon started ringing at local law enforcement offices, the FAA, NASA's Kennedy Space Center and in media newsrooms.
"We got 30 to 40 calls, people from Hernando County to Manatee County," said Billy Fuchs, producer of AM Tampa Bay on radio station WFLA-AM 970.
What Beachy, Clifford and many others saw was the flaming remains of a rocket used by the Russians to launch a commercial satellite into orbit a day earlier.
That word comes from the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs, the organization that monitors the 9,000 or so objects -- from rockets to wrenches -- orbiting Earth.
"It was a spent SL12 Russian rocket body," said Army Maj. Mike Birmingham, spokesman for the Space Command. "It was launched (Monday) from a place called Tyrataum in Kazakhstan. It re-entered the atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico, about 17 hours earlier than expected."
When told that the object appeared to some witnesses to be over Florida, Birmingham said he had no explanation other than to note that objects can change course when they interact with the atmosphere.
Between 60 and 80 artificial objects re-enter Earth's atmosphere every year, Birmingham said, "but we're not aware of most of them because they're destroyed during re-entry."
Also, he said, "about 75 percent of Earth's surface is water, and most of the remaining 25 percent of the Earth's surface isn't populated."
The Space Command knew this one was coming down. But where the rocket would enter the atmosphere was impossible to predict, he said. The reason, said Birmingham, is that objects often "skip" when they first contact the atmosphere, in the way a flat stone skips on water. Where they will stop skipping and begin a continuous descent cannot be known.
"We know the track they are following, but we don't predict when and where they will land or if they will burn up," he said. "We really can't."
If the time of re-entry is off by even 15 minutes, he said, the theoretical landing point would be different by as much as 3,000 miles. "We know it re-entered over the gulf, but we don't know where it came down."
Birmingham said the Space Command had received no reports of any object striking land or water Tuesday. "More than 16,000 objects have entered Earth's atmosphere over the years," he said, "and there has never been a report of a single human injury."
NASA spokesman George Diller said the U.S. and Russian space programs deliberately launch in a manner that causes the booster vehicles to fall back into the atmosphere, where they are destroyed by friction.
"It's a way to reduce space junk," he said.