Rocket launch prompts calls of strange lights in sky

[Blue_Tires]

(CNN) -- A series of spooky lights above parts of the northeastern United States Saturday sparked a flurry of phone calls to authorities and television news stations.

CNN affiliate stations from New Jersey to Massachusetts heard from dozens of callers who reported that the lights appeared as a cone shape shining down from the sky.

However, the lights were the result of an experimental rocket launch by NASA from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, a spokesman told CNN.

Keith Koehler said the Black Brant XII Suborbital Sounding Rocket was launched to study the Earth's highest clouds. The light came from an artificial noctilucent cloud formed by the exhaust particles of the rocket's fourth stage about 173 miles high.

Natural noctilucent clouds, also called "polar mesospheric clouds," are "found in the upper atmosphere as spectacular displays that are most easily seen just after sunset," according to a NASA statement published earlier in September. "The clouds are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere around 50 miles altitude."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/09/20/strange.lights/

Wallops Island has a chance to be a huge player in the future...