This article was published in the daily newspaper Greeley Tribune on September 6, 2004 and on their website:
http://www.greeleytrib.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040904/NEWS/109040020&rs=2
This article is a follow-up on the sighting narrated in this previous article.
Mike Peters, peters@greeleytrib.com
September 4, 2004
The scene: A dark night, a dark room, sinister fog creeping about Scary music in the background. A phone rings. Agent Scully answers: Agent Scully here.
Phone: This is Agent Mulder. Is this Agent Scully?
Agent Scully: That's what I said when I answered. Is this Agent Mulder?
Agent Mulder: That's what I said when you answered. Listen closely. The Flying Sausages X-File Case has been solved.
Agent Scully: Was it as we suspected? Little green men? Flying Zombies? Shadow People? Government Conspiracy? CIA? Computers taking over the world?
Agent Mulder. Nope.
Agent Scully: Oh no! Not...
Agent Mulder: Yes. Sixth-graders. Frontier Academy.
And so the Sky Sausages Mystery of Greeley was solved Friday, right after a story appeared in the newspaper about the mysterious floating objects.
Two south Greeley residents, Wynne Levelle and Rick Mawson, a retired couple, saw the floating objects and shot a photo of them Thursday afternoon.
After the story appeared in Friday's Tribune, e-mails and calls flowed into the newspaper. Three of the calls were from sixth-graders at Frontier Academy. One was from a Las Vegas man who said he saw similar sausages over Vegas four years ago.
The object of attention was likely a "Solar Shuttle," used for school science projects or just for fun. The company that sells them said the thin plastic tube is inflated, then when the sun warms the air inside, the shuttle starts flying.
Brad Luster, a parent volunteer at Frontier, said this is the second year he's worked with the sixth-graders in the science project. They launched a total of six sausages Thursday -- two for each sixth-grade class.
"They're 30 inches in diameter and about 25 feet long," Luster said Friday. "The skin is like a very, very thin garbage bag, about five-thousandths of an inch thick."
Katie Diaz of Greeley said the sausages -- called Solarbags -- were part of an experiment by NASA in Weld County four years ago. "They were trying to determine if the bags could be used to move equipment in a Mars mission," she said.
In that experiment, NASA launched a Solarbag from the Windsor area, flew it to 122,000 feet, then landed it in eastern Weld County, near Hardin.
Agent Scully: Good job, Agent Mulder. Another X-File case solved.
Agent Mulder: Thanks, Agent Scully. The truth was out there.
