Miscellaneous

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Flash seen in t he sky
was Soviet rocket fuel
By David &boup
11mel Wrtler I
A month ago, dozens of North-
west Alaska villagers reported
seeing a bright flash in the· sky.
Some · reported the flash as a
UFO.
It wasn't.
Instead, what the villagers
saw was the dumping of fuel
from the tanks of a new-genera-
tion Soviet rocket launched from
Tyuratam, the Soviet central
Asian space center, according to
I
a prominent scientist.
James Oberg, a flight control-
ler for Rockwell Shuttle Opera-
tions, on contract to the National
Aeronautics and Space Admin-
istration's Shuttle Program, said
Saturday the flash ~n from
Elim, Gambell, Savoonga and
several other places in .Alaska
was caused by the launch t>f
Cosmos 1833. Oberg is a promi-
nent author of several books on
Soviet space technology.
See Rocket, page A-5
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Rocket: Alaska flash came from laUnch of Soviet spy satellitecan't see traces of Soviet rocket
launches because their trajecto-
ries take them. too far from the
Alaska coast and too low in the
sky to be detected. But this
launch was different.
Continued from page A-1
"It (Cosmos 1833) was a bout
D> miles up when you (Alas-
kans) saw it," he said in a tele-
phone interview from his home
near Houston.
The villagers reported sight-
ing some kind of space vehicle,
described by many as a UFO
within a glowing cloud.
·~It was a fuel cloud," said
Oberg. Such clouds are created
when rocket fuel is purged from
tanks in flight.
91>erg said Alas~ typically
'
For one thing, he said, the
March 17 launch utilized the So-
viet SL-16, a newly designed Rus-
sian booster rocket which is very
large and has been used only a
handful of times.
For another, Cosmos 1833 was
pushing a Soviet spy satellite into
a higher-than-normal orbit -
a bout 600 miles up, he said. So
when the fuel was jettisoned
•
Oberg said Alaskans typically can't see
traces of Soviet rocket launches be-
cause their trajectories take them too
far from the Alaska coast.
from the rocket's tanks, a nor-
mal fire-prevention procedure, it
was at an altitude of about 200
miles, high enough in the sky to
be seen from Alaska.
"With this new kind of rocket
and higher altitudes, you' re
likely to see quite a few of these
in the future," he said.
Oberg first heard about the
mysterious flash in the sky in a
letter from Dave Cartier, a resi-
dent of Pilot Sta tion, a Yukon
River village near St. Marys.
Cartier, who saw the glowing
cloud that night, had written t:o
"Skeptical Inquirer," a Buffalo,
N.Y., quarterly that ca rries .arti-
cles on such things as UFO s1~ t
ings, and the magazine editor
forwarded the letter to Oberg.
On . his own time, much Of
which is devoted to investigating
Soviet . space a ttempts, Oberg
discovered Cosmos 1833 had been
launched from Tyuratam a t pre-
cisely the right time to create the
brilliant flash.
"It's .a pretty standard phe-
nomenon," he said, noting that
fuel cJouds f~o 111 Soviet rockets
~~? ~potted seve~ times a year
sa. outh Amenca. In fact he
•d, Australians have gro~ ac-
~us tomect to seeing fuel clouds
hrom American rockets, which
t a v~ , been passing near Aus-
raha.s c ~~tline since the 1960s.
b .T~ is . 1sn t the first time a
h ng t hght in th~ northern sky
r~~k~n 1attributed to Russian
. l)' · . n October 198.5, a So-
~~~ misslle falling out of low
r It created a bright white light
over ~outhcentral Alaska that
was ~idely described as a UFO
fi ~til the U.S. Air Force identi-
e It. J·, _