"Impressive fireball" or "meteorite" in Cuzco Peru – looks like an airplane to me

TV news reports and Youtube have been showing the footage, recorded at Cuzco, Peru, on Aug. 25, 2011, of an “impressive”, “incredible”, meteorite falling from the sky. Some reports refer to it as space debris, fireball, meteor or even UFO!

Am I the only one to be sure that is nothing else than airplane’s contrails lit up by Sun? Most probably a wide-body with four engines, crusing at high altitude….

 

About David Cenciotti
David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.

4 Comments

  1. It’s a jet airliner. I appears that the video was shot near sunrise or sunset, which gives it an orange appearance. A meteor would not appear to be moving that slow, they move at tens of thousands of miles per hour. From the point of view of a ground observer, a meteor will cross the sky horizon-to-horizon in a matter of seconds. A meteor doesn’t linger for this long.

  2. This is a distinctive 747 contrail shape which widens immideately behind the aircraft and then slowly transfers to parallel condensation lines. And considering the fact that it is the evening shot, I have to agree with you with the assumption of a sunlit contrail

  3. Same thing happend in California some months ago… some people were thinking it was a missile shot at the US! It was a big story again. Of course it was the contrail of a plane sen at sunset and going from west to east.

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