The facts here come from several sources, all of somewhat, per usual, murky provenance. Are we reading these for the truth or the story? As Old Chief Broom says in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, "it's all true, whether it happened or not."
The news media are known for magnifying events out of proportion to their actual significance (Presidential oral sex, POTUS 41 hurling on the Japanese P.M., VP Cheney swearing, and the like). In this instance, however, it seems as though the media worked hard to downplay the story.
On August 10, 1972, what is known in astronomy as a "fireball" occurred in the afternoon over the Rocky Mountain states, witnessed by thousands of people under its path from Utah straight north all the way into The Great White North. Fireballs are actually large meteors; one bright enough to see in daylight is extremely rare.
This fireball left a trail across the sky that lasted for several minutes. Morning papers of August 11 from the area where the fireball was most visible, Utah and Idaho, had long stories, by local reporters filled with eyewitness accounts. The articles had an AP photograph of the object's trail. West Coast and Midwestern papers carried truncated versions of a wire dispatch. The East coast press didn't cover the story at all. Only one television network, NBC, mentioned the event, saying that an airliner pilot had seen a flaming object--possibly a meteor--pass under his plane.
The AP dispatch most papers carried had no dateline. A few of the wire stories had it datelined Denver. "One or more" objects had been sighted over a wide area of the Mountain states, the articles went. The articles contained contradictory reports of their direction of travel and altitude. An FAA official was quoted saying that an object was seen at 80,000 feet over Missoula. The article, however, also mentioned the item about the object passing under an airliner flying "in Utah." It quoted NORAD, which keeps track of all orbiting objects (including, as you may recall, Santa Claus), as quoted a second-hand report of an object over Boise going from west to east. Sidney Hacher, an astronomy professor at Washington State University in Pullman was quoted saying that whatever was seen was probably part of the annual Perseid meteor shower, due to reach its maximum in the next few days. And it quoted a Mrs. Thomas Williams of Mead, Washington as having seen an object "about four feet in diameter."
Newspapers from the area where the fireball was actually seen published coherent accounts. In particular, there was no doubt that there was only one object and that it was moving from south to north. Patty Minton of the Idaho Statesman of Boise said, "Most observers, laymen and experts, agreed that the object was traveling fast and at great height." These papers raised the question of whether the object might be manmade. The Deseret News of Salt Lake City cited a NORAD statement issued late in the day that "it is either a space vehicle re-entering the earth's atmosphere or a meteor." The scientist these papers quoted, Mark Littman of the planetarium in Salt Lake City, said that the object was probably not part of the Perseid shower, but rather from the asteroid belt. Patty Minton, in her Statesman article, noted that experts differed on the object's origin. She had obviously read the AP dispatch -- she handled the object-under-the-airliner report this way:
"Associated Press reports from Denver said a Frontier Airlines pilot allegedly saw it pass underneath his plane while it was in flight over Utah."
The confusing situation portrayed by the AP dispatch suggests that it was dashed off fast after the fireball. The AP story was never updated.
The Spokane Spokesman-Review, close to the periphery of the viewing area, had a mixture of wire service feeds and local reporting in its story. It quoted an unidentified spokesman for Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane. The spokesman said the object "was a manmade satellite that broke away from its orbit." The spokesman's statements seem full of mininformation: "A meteor would look like a rock and generally would not be flaming." He also said the object might have "rejoined its orbit," which may be a first--space junk or meteors turning around and leaving the atmosphere!
The San Francisco Chronicle tried to resolve the contradictions in the feeds and local articles by artfully coimbining them: "A fireball, possibly a deteriorating meteor, flashed across the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains yesterday afternoon, dipped beneath an airliner and vanished, observers said."
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