I got these photos from Abe Barker. I met him and his copilot (?) at the Congress St. Bridge in Austin TX. They’d flown some people in and were checking out the bats. We got to talking and they mentioned having some crazy shots of the shuttle from 20,000 feet and a really odd white cloud that formed shortly thereafter. It was odd enough that two professional pilots not only remarked on it but took pictures and brought it up in a conversation with a very strange guy taking 100 pictures of bats.
Abe was kind enough to email me the photos so I’m putting them up in case they interest anyone else.
I found this to be interesting not just because of the unique natures of the pictures but because of the way this whole thing happened. Just about everyone has a camera these days so all sorts of odd things are going to be captured that would have been missed before. These photos are now digital so it’s insanely easy for me to pass them along, put them on the web and let anyone in the world take a look at them.
Imagine JFK’s assassination today. Instead of one film, you’d have HD footage from a hundred angles and innumerable high quality still images. That’s not counting all the relatively low quality phone video and images or the people streaming it live to the web. There’d be no rumor of shooters on the grassy knoll. People would know one way or the other and be able to verify it. That’s a wild thought1.
1 I realize there’s good and bad in that but I’m being positive here.