I'm just getting word that there was another "UFO" cloud sighting over New York last night and from the clips I've seen, it appears to be another sunlit contrail, this time in a horizontal alignment.

CBS 2 coverage: Did You See the Fire in the Sky?

fire-in-the-sky.jpg[cbs2]

The most notable feature I want to address about the video is this:

The object appears to be "streaking", but that is an illusion caused by the foreground buildings and the left to right motion of the news helicopter. The object itself is not moving at the apparent rate that it is in the video.

This story is a bit like the one that caused a stir (for a small number of people) in Seattle in 2006, to which KOMO-TV did a story you can see here:

What Was That Mystery Object in the Sky?

I don't know if will be possible to nail this one down to a specific airplane given the number of flight paths that criss-cross that area and the number of major metropolitan airports.

I have used Google Earth to recreate the approximate position of the helicopter, at that time of day, and you can see that with the setting sun, a north bound airplane at cruising altitude would be a perfect candidate for the source of the contrail in NYC. The sun would be lighting it up from below as it traversed south to north.

Picture 9.png

More updates later.