The Mystery of the Meteor That Made A "Z" In The Sky

Speeding across the skies covering some 800 miles of area - from Key West to St. Simon's Island, Georgia - a large, very bright and oddly careening object blazed a trail.  At first it was labeled a meteor, another massive display of nature's variety and beauty.  On nearby McDill Field, however, some pilots and trained observers in the 307s Bomber Group were noting a lot of other things about the odd aerial show put on that night of June 5 at 19:45 hours some 20 miles northwest of Tampa.

Odd things like, since when did meteors make sharp turns so that their white trail or vapor trail would look like a "2" or a "Z"?  After that odd object disappeared, that trail was left in the sky for some 30 minutes.

The quality of the eyewitnesses - all ten of them at the Air Field -  was top level. They observed the object making that sharply defined zig-zag movement for some 8 minutes, they noted the high rate of speed (what one thought might be above the speed of sound.

The Norton, Kansas meteorite of 1948 was caught on film giving a "corkscrew" look to its trail through the skies. It is ragged and broad. So, a meteor leaving a less than straight course trail is not totally unknown. A search of various pictorial databases failed to reveal anyone having caught a sharp "Z" making meteor but it might be out there - somewhere.

For comparison, the Tampa Morning Tribune in 1949 printed a photograph of the sharp 'zig-zag' of the object seen by hundreds of people on June 5, 1949. Notice the sharp turns. On this page from the Project Blue Book file someone has dutifully noted : "Meteors don't make sharp turns!" The trail, remember, was reported to hang around for some 30 minutes.

All told the file leaves more questions than it provides answers.  The time of the photograph would speak much to the theory of the meteor (was it taken shortly after it zipped by while the shape was still clear? Was this what it looked like after 30 minutes?).  Wind currents can reshape many vaporous shapes  into odd forms depending on wind direction, speeds, etc.  As this link shows, trails can vary but the length it is visible is usually short.

Still, the evidence for labeling it a meteor is sparse and questionable. What else might it have been? A crashed experimental craft? A run-away missile that flew over heavily populated areas of the country? Since some Blue Book cases do involve such episodes it is not beyond the realm of possibility despite the pressing need to ask some one, okay,  "who's asinine idea was it to test a missile over populated areas?" I, however, digress.

One thing is sure ---- this was not a weather balloon.