A Russian intercontinental test missile lit up Middle Eastern skies on Thursday
night, as thousands of Israelis watched the spectacle.
Hundreds of people
telephoned police emergency lines after witnessing the bright object pierce its
way through the night sky. The missile traveled at tens of thousands of
kilometers per hour and with a large trail, spun into a spiral and vanished into
a smoky wisp.
The object was also visible in neighboring Lebanon, Turkey,
Jordan and Azerbaijan.
As the mystery grew, police posted a Facebook
message minutes after the mass sighting, saying it would check with the IDF over
the nature of the object. The Israeli Astronomical Association said in an
initial assessment that the object flew at a height of 80 km. but was not a
meteor.
The public did not need to wait long to learn the truth as hours
after the sighting, Russia said it carried out a successful missile
test.
“The fact that it was seen in our area does not mean that the
missile path was over the Middle East,” Uzi Rubin, an architect of Israel’s
missile defense program, told The Jerusalem Post on Friday. “It was likely fired
from some sort of test launch center in southern Russia,” he said.
The
missile struck its target in Kazakhstan, Russia said.
Rubin said the
missile was likely fired just after sunset at the launch center, adding that
when a missile soars to a point where the sun is not yet beneath the horizon, it
leaves the Earth’s shadow and glows in the sun.
“To an observer who is
under a night sky, it looks like the missile is glowing like a sort of comet.
The missile itself is not visible because it is relatively small, but the trail
of gases leaving the engine are lit by the sun [which] are highly visible,” he
said.
Rubin recalled seeing a similar phenomenon while visiting Los
Angeles and witnessing a test missile fired from Vandenberg Air Force base
located 500 km. to the north.
The missile seen Thursday night has no
connection to Israel, Syria or any other Middle Eastern country, he
added.
The launch can be seen as possible muscle-flexing by Moscow as
tensions over a NATO missile defense system in Europe remain unabated with the
United States.
Just last week, NATO announced that its program achieved
“interim capability.”
Washington asserts that the program is designed to
defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, but Moscow takes a suspicious view of
that position and views itself as the true target of the missile plan.
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