The fires, except maybe where the line crosses I 10, are too far away from the road to be set from the road. Also, the line is 560 miles long and the fires are very much in line. The dots, representing detected fires, all appeared within 15 minutes of each other. Something would have to be traveling at least 2,240 miles per hour to travel 560 miles in 15 minutes or less. I would be very surprised if there were a large enough group of arsonists who were, so well organized, and so adept at locating themselves precisely on the earth's surface that they could set 560 miles of fires in 15 minutes or less in so precise of great circle line. I was thinking that maybe you had access to or knowledge of a website that tracked re entering satellites or that reported fireball sightings. If the detections were of a re entering satellite or fire ball, there probably never were any fires on the ground. The database stores the fire detections for 6 days or so. If something the satellite (I'm assuming GOES fire detection is from some satellite) perceives as a fire registers, the dot it puts on the overlay stays in the overlay for 6 days. On 6/20/2011 6:23 PM, Patrick Wiggins wrote:
I looked at the picture but don't have a "for certain" answer to your question. My guess might be fires intentionally set to create a fire break along a road. But, again, that's just a guess.
patrick
On 20 Jun 2011, at 17:43, William Lockman wrote:
I sent Patrick a jpg I made from Google Earth showing a fairly straight line of fires that suddenly appeared yesterday morning. He might post it so all here can see it. This is what I wrote to Patrick in the email to which I attached the JPG:
"I don't know if you remember me or not. Back in the late 80's I was a member of SLAS.
Now I live in Morenci, Arizona. I've been keeping a pretty close eye on the Wallow fire because there is a slight possibility that it could end up coming down here to threaten Morenci. I've been using the U. S. Forest GOES fire detection system data that can be overlain on Google Earth.
So yesterday morning, I opened Google Earth to check the Wallow Fire situation. I noticed a distinct line of fires, that started just north of I 10 near Wilcox AZ and ended up over in Texas. In the attachment, I drew a path to make it easier to see what I'm talking about. You can overlay the data on Google Earth yourself to see that the dots are really there. Just go to:
and select the GOES button then down in the KML box, next to fire detections, Current. It takes a little while to overlay Google Earth. After about 6 days the dots will disappear from the data.
Since the line is something like 560 miles long and the dots appeared close enough in time together that they have changed color from red to orange to yellow at the same times, the dots had to have appeared within about 15 minutes of each other. The only things I think could cause this was if the satellite interpreted a fireball passage or space junk re entry as fires. What do you think?
I decided to send the attachment to you because they don't like people attaching things to Utah Astronomy posts, but you have the capability of posting it somewhere to which you can put a link in a Utah Astronomy post."
Then I thought I should post this here, in case there are some other minds that want to ponder what made the path of fires.
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