DALLAS — Aliens again!?
No. But once again something mysterious was floating over the North Texas skies.
Over the past several months, Space X rockets have been seen in the sky over North Texas, but this time around the mysterious object or objects were invisible to the earthlings below. Weather radar was the only indication of anything floating overhead.
On January 20th, The National Weather Service Radar outside of Fort Worth picked up a blob on radar when there was not any precipitation for miles around.
It is not uncommon for weather radar to pick up objects of non-meteorological origin. Birds, bats, bugs, smoke, and even cars can be picked up by weather radar at times. But this blob did not share any of those characteristics.
So what was it?
Our best guess as well as the National Weather Service is chaff.
What is chaff?
Chaff is small, lightweight fibers that are typically aluminum-coated glass fibers used by military aircraft during training exercises or combat missions. It is used to counter and confuse enemy radar systems.
In this case, it was likely released as a military training exercise over DFW.
Why can it be seen by weather radar?
Weather radars emit electromagnetic waves that bounce off objects like snow, rain, or hail. Those signals are then detected by the radar and plotted on a map. As mentioned above, those electromagnetic waves also can detect non weather-related objects at times.
That includes chaff. The reason chaff shows up so well on weather radar is it is highly reflective thanks to the aluminum coating and gives the appearance of rain on radar systems.
Thankfully, there was not any rain around this time and it was easily determined to not be weather-related.
While meteorologists most often use weather radar to track rain, hail, snow, and tornadoes, sometimes they come in handy to monitor other types of phenomenon. In this case, it wasn't something extraterrestrial but definitely was mysterious.
