UFO?
More likely a comet.
Paris because she's almost certainly been anal-probed.
Lincolnshire ufologists are combing the area around the Conisholme wind farm for evidence to back their theory that one of the turbines was on Sunday seriously damaged by a "mystery aircraft", as the BBC euphemistically puts it. The turbine - one of 20 operated at the site by Ecotricity - lost one 66ft (20m) blade and suffered …
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I'm eagerly awaiting amanfrommars' views on this.
Meanwhile, does anyone know what a overheating wind turbine brake looks like? Any chance it would appear as a "round, white light with a slight red edge to it that seemed to be over the wind turbines" ?
Oh, chicken sarnies for lunch today, with mozzarella & tomato pie. Very Islington.
Tim#3
... for the tin foil hat brigade to escape from their padded faraday cages it seems.
Yes , maybe it was hit by a UFO - a craft that can traverse light years of space in an instant, travel at hypersonic speeds in our atmosphere, accelerate at 1000s of G , and yet for some reason couldn't spot a 200 foot wind turbine in its path.
Or perhaps it got hit by a fat xmas turkey that somehow managed to escape from bernard Matthews in the nick of time.
Or just maybe the blade just fell off due to a component failing in the freezing weather. Something which the builders are hardly likely to want to admit. Much better to encourage the dribbling crazies and hope the media moves on to something else before the real cause is found.
Read in the Grauniad that one of their reporters was at a fireworks display in the general vicinity of the turbines on the evening that the strange lights were seen.
Doesn't quite make as good a story as tentacled space beings lighting up the bland Lincolnshire skyline...
so far as the statement
> To hit two of the blades, any object must have been about 170ft long
goes, I suspect this assumes the "object" was flying towards the front of the turbine. However if it was flying in from the side, along the plane of the blades' rotation then something smaller but slow moving could've caught two of them, as they turned.
“A large white circle in the sky with a red edge”, so like an unbalanced spinning turbine cessing up with a lot of friction would make?
And another thing you UFO nuts – Just think, seriously think for once. Postulate over how much tech it would takes to cross the stars, with the vast vast distances involved, the massive energy required to go even close to light speed, then enormous obstacles in space from cosmic rays, wandering black holes, stray stars, planets asteroids and things we do not even know about, but having managed to develop crafts that can do and navigate all these dangers safely and reached earth that then upon arriving in Lincolnshire (for a picnic possible) you crash into a wind turbine!
It’s like Appa Sherpa upon returning from Everest dying by falling of a curb.
Get A Grip or at least discover internet porn.
Mines the one with a logic book in it...
I'm not actually saying that this is good news, but it made the Today Program fantastic this morning as they had a feature on this mysterious damage to a wind turbine ("caused by something about the size of a cow") followed directly by a feature about a ghost. Charles Fort would have loved it.
Some enterprising listener proposed that it could have been ice from an aircraft that caused the damage.
I love the line "Until we have some idea, some plausible explanation that it was not a UFO, I don't think we should rule it out.". In other words "We messed up the install big time and something broke on it, Thank god nobody was near it to see it otherwise we would have to check all the turbines which would cost us a bloody fortune, Least we can now just blame it on little green men instead"
As for the nutters who noticed a UFO, no doubt they are on the same IQ level of the idiots on this area who rang the police reporing a strange object in the sky......It was a bloody street light.
One blade came loose, perhaps in the manner of the Dutch unit, and despite probably being flung by centripetal effect outwards, didn't clear the path of the next blade in time.
This will no doubt be seen by fans of the Carpenters as the official line to cover up the self destruction initiated by the occupants of interplanetary craft.
"Until we have some idea, some plausible explanation that it was not a UFO, I don't think we should rule it out."
Yes, of course it's an Unidentified Flying Object - because it was flying, an object, and unidentified!
An object is an UFO *until* it is identified. He's got it the wrong way round - it IS a UFO, but once they have an idea, it will no longer be.
/pedant
...and it fails? Must be the aliens and now't to do with a freeze-thaw on a fractured bolt that slipped through QC. Or ice building up on the blade. Or...
And as for what hit the second blade, my money's on... the first one!
Oh well, why let an embarrassing structural failure that you assured the planning committee could never happen get in the way of a nice UFO story, huh?
Alien because I'm sure it won't be used enough in these comments
"the cynical might say that the last thing wind farm owners want people thinking is that 'natural' causes can cause mechanically violent occurrences to wind turbines"
Ahem ... if you check Ecotricity's website you will see that the remote possibility of flying ice from a turbine next to the Manchester City stadium hitting the crowd was the reason for not building.
Meanwhile the Danish incident occurred during maintenance. The cock-up was apparent which is why the area was cleared in anticipation. No UFOs were damaged during filming of the subsequent and anticipated event.
Always be cynical of cynics ;-)
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/weather/daily-text.cgi?2009-01-03
At the time the weather was dead calm and very cold. If water had got into the joint then it might have sheared the mounting bolts like a burst pipe. First blade hit the second on the way to the ground.
As posted above, occams razor.
boltar said "Yes , maybe it was hit by a UFO - a craft that can traverse light years of space in an instant, travel at hypersonic speeds in our atmosphere, accelerate at 1000s of G , and yet for some reason couldn't spot a 200 foot wind turbine in its path"
Alien was putting on her makeup, maybe ?
"It’s like Appa Sherpa upon returning from Everest dying by falling of a curb."
It's also like surviving a trip over Niagra Falls in a wooden barrel, only to later slip on a piece of orange peel and die.
http://www.niagarafallslive.com/daredevils_of_niagara_falls.htm
Anyway, my money's on the meteorite theory.
"Yes , maybe it was hit by a UFO - a craft that can traverse light years of space in an instant, travel at hypersonic speeds in our atmosphere, accelerate at 1000s of G , and yet for some reason couldn't spot a 200 foot wind turbine in its path."
Why the UFO itself? Why not an extraterrestrial garbage truck dumping its refuse?
Or just simply a sophisticated craft with a dumb pilot?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089622/
So you're saying that after climbing Everest it's physically impossible to fall off a kerb?
Or just because you've come a long way in something high-tech you can't crash (Not to mention that if they had some sort of space-bending tech they'd have moved relatively little distance in a short time, utterly negating your argument)?
Your logic book must be an old edition...
I'm with Ian Ferguson on this one. Too many people equate "UFO" with "flying saucer/alien spacecraft" when it is far from it.
A UFO is an Unidentified Flying Object. Since they don't know what it was (i.e. it was Unidentified) and it clearly had to be Flying to damage a turbine blade up in the air, and it must have been some sort of corporeal Object to do any damage at all, it was definitely, 100%, a UFO. No question. Now, let's set about identifying it. At which point it would become an IFO.
Our celestial neighbours have been visiting, but it's the teenagers again. Not satisfied with doing crop circles just to wind up a few humans they've now taken to seeing if they can get in between the turbine blades without being hit.
Not that it does any damage to their vehicles but they didn't hang around to leave a 'sorry' note. Bloody typical.
and another dodgy mysteries type secret facts revealed thingy book is probably being typed as we speak. All we need now to really put the icing on the blades are the gathering UFO hunters (sorry , investigators) to get really paranoid and start accusing each other of being MIBs.
On the plus side it did happen in a remote area, and the headline "UFO hits Wind turbine" will be forgotten in a week. Had a turbine blade ended up skewering somebodies house I wonder what gem of a headline the tabloids would come up with.
The IT angle.. well one thing is for sure.. If a UFO did hit, then all the data logging for the turbine will have been altered, corrupted, mysteriously erased or lost in the post by now.
UFO it was, at least until it's identified... ;-)
"about 170ft long" to hit two of the blades? Or the size of a duck, but two of them?
Unless, of course, it's just a mechanical failure. Which is most probable, given the obvious attempts by the company to pass it off as an ET attack. "Our turbines are so incredibly sturdy, they must have been attacked by the Death Star, only way to damage them, honest". Wacky J. and friends should watch and learn. Coming soon: ET attacker steals Gov database on a CD, leaves it in pub.
So just how big must the joint that is smoked to summon Amanfrommars be?
It is a shame that news organisations constantly pander to the idiotic delusions of the tin foil hat brigade.
Anyway. It wasn't caused by UFO's. It was the combined Vl'hurg and G'Gugvuntt battle fleets screaming across the vast, majestic, sunswept plains of Lincolnshire in search of Arthur Dent.
Assuming that our anal-probing overlords have similar driving habits to human beings, it was a male little green man who was at the controls - male drivers are 70% more likely to be in a serious crash (even correcting for distance driven).*
/Paris, because the idiots making the sexist "jokes" could only ever hope to score with the, er, less-discriminating females.
*Of course, this may be considered to be a "minor" crash, since there don't appear to be any injuries or fatalities, so in that instance, there is a greater likelihood it was a little green lady instead.
The local rag, the Louth Leader, is obsessed with dreaming up UFO stories. It's not so long ago that they reported on the release of some Chinese lanterns as unexplained UFOs. I kid you not.
They run these stories for the publicity, and gullible hacks from other news networks pick up on it and add fuel to the fire. There's nothing to see here, except an embarrassing regional newspaper (part of the ailing Johnston Press network) making a desperate attempt to stay afloat.
It's to be expected this early after Christmas, the supermarkets have only just ramped up supplies of tin foil after the traditional turkey foil shortages so the crazies are extra susceptible to the mind control rays at this time of year.
Paris, damn, someone else beat me to the anal probing joke...
i have noted the distinct lack of any photo of the blade that came off, and none of the other photos i've seen so far show any good detail of the damage.
many of these theories can be cleared up with close examination.
wee from plane? -can prove if true
meteorite? -impact site. examination of trace substances on damaged blades.
ice expansion/hairline fractures/ broken bolts or welding etc? -close examination of blade would reveal.
Emily Bell, the Guardian's director of digital content, had a fireworks party that night, "a mere two miles from the Ecotricity plant". So bang goes the UFO explanation, at least for the strange lights in the sky.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/09/wind-turbine-ufo
But the Guardian goes on to finger a "cow sized piece of ice" falling from a passing aeroplane for the damage to the turbine. Ye gods! Not another falling cow story!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/07/flying_cow_shocker/
If it was traveling parallel to the rotational axis of the turbine it might have been 170 feet long. However it could have been a foot long and hit both blades one after the other. Or even more likely the first blade came off and hit the second.
We don't yet have any evidence that any other body was involved, things do break occasionally. As far as the UFO geeks are concerned, almost anything is evidence of a UFO. As far as the operators and manufacturers are concerned they need some external object to have caused the damage, if it turns out to be a catastrophic failure with no external interference then serious questions will be asked of the safety of that farm, all farms with that kit, all farms operated by that company and indeed all wind farms. Wonder what the health and safety man will say.