NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
UFO observed by sextant (1961)
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2015 Aug 29, 17:43 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2015 Aug 29, 17:43 -0700
Ted Molczan, one of the world's most expert satellite observers, has been going through old reports of unidentified flying objects and using recovered orbital elements and modern analysis he has been able to identify quite a few as re-entries of satellites and rocket boosters in the early Space Age. Today he posted an analysis of one which, it turns out, is a good match for Vostok 2, carrying cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to fly in space back in 1961.
The relevance for us is that this UFO was observed from a ship in mid-Pacific with a sextant, and the observer measured its altitude at some point as "53 deg 26.5 min". Rather entertaining that he recorded the tenths of a minute for a moving target! Details here.
Frank Reed
