FORM 112 - MADAR SIGHTING INFORMATION REPORT
 


WEST HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT   -   AUGUST 23, 2019

I.   DESCRIPTION OF INCIDENT

August 23, 2019; West Hartford, Connecticut    
10:00 pm EDT.. A SKYWATCH team in Connecticut was conducting routine observations and running equipment tests on older and newer skywatch systems. They were tracking a conspicuous orange twinkling orb at around 22:00 hours (10:00 pm local), 02:00 UTC. The object on the western horizon first caught the attention of one of the group, who quickly alerted the rest of the team. Another team member had the night vision camera running with a tripod-mounted 20" flat screen with the NV camera on top. At first the orb was stationary. Once the target was moving, they had to manually track it on-screen, as it slowly moved from left to right (W-N). As it moved to the right it decreased in altitude. At one point the motion was described as "fell like a leaf". They watched it until it went below the tree line and out of sight. No noise was ever heard from the object.  Total time of observation: 30 mins. (MUFON CMS 103581).

II - MADAR DATA

It was confirmed that MADAR node 139 at Wallingford did have six alerts during the skywatch but not during the NV scanning period beginning about 10:00 pm and separated in time by about an hour or so. It was also discovered that Wallingford had 76 hits that day and had an extremely high average ambient of 13,084 milligaus, which disqualified that node data for that date. 106 and 151 (field unit test node) at Newington  had no alerts but had some interesting field spikes under trigger within the data. If the sighting time was actually a little earlier than 10:00 pm, 151 shows spikes beginning at 9:55 pm and tapering off to 10:04, from 6 milligaus to zero in 9 minutes.

III.  STATUS OF INVESTIGATION

Investigated by MUFON. Re-evaluated by MADAR CSO.

IV - CONCLUSIONS

The NV team-man had gotten MADAR alerts on his SMS/cell a little over an hour before, and he obtained screen grabs of six MADAR hits at site 139 at Wallingford a little over 30 miles to the south. The screen grabs were stamped as beginning at 8:44 pm. The area of the orb was near Plainville and there had been a hot-air balloon festival, and sometimes the participants launch japanese jackalanterns. MUFON investigators had written it off as a "jackalantern". Later on, it was discovered that the fire department had grounded all hot air balloons by 9:00 pm, as they were getting ready for a fireworks display. This pending case was re-opened on 20 Feb 2021. During the re-investigation it was discovered that the NV target was in view for a full 30 minutes. However, no recordings had been made. The NV target at West Hartford was in view for 30 minutes. [For rating/evaluation purposes the distance of the target was estimated at 5-7 miles]  Investigated by MUFON. Re-evaluated by MADAR CCO. The fuel source in each sky lantern will burn for approximately 8-10 minutes. When used in ideal weather conditions, sky lanterns will easily reach heights of over 1000 feet. Typically, it's between 700 and 1600 feet. They will usually make it between 2 and 5 miles from the original launch site before extinguishing.  Due to the interesting data found in several of the nearby MADAR site's, the case was re-evaluated. At that time we learned that the original explanation was not tenable for several reasons: 1) The fire department had grounded hot air balloons, including Chinese lanterns by 9:00 pm. 2) Chinese lanterns cannot be sustained for 30 minutes. 3) Somebody filed another UAP report for 10:05 pm at Ashford, CT.  The MADAR data is problematic in this case and has no bearing on the case proper but MUFON's CSM still lists the case as IFO. Our re-evaluation shows the case as "Unexplained".


Fran Ridge
MADAR OPERATIONS DIRECTOR