Odd thing in Houston

This isn't soaring related, but I just saw the oddest thing out my office window. My office is on the beltway, 15 miles from downtown. The sky is clear. A large (bigger than a 737) passenger jet escorted by one or more small aircraft circled downtown Houston about 30 minutes ago and departed to the east. It made at least 1 3/4 circuits of the downtown area. The smaller aircraft - from this distance just a glint - was at times behind and at times ahead of the passenger jet. I first saw the passenger jet banking over the N end of downtown, watched it make a complete circuit, begin a second one and exit to the E. I can't find anything about this on the news, but the local TV stations have gotten the same report from others and are investigating. Hope it's just a procedural infraction or something like that.

Probably just an advertising photo shoot. We see them all the time here near the Golden Gate bridge...

Saw it too, I'm pretty sure it was the 747 Shuttle Transport aircraft with a Nasa T-38 as escort, probably for a photo shoot of the transport with downtown Houston as the backdrop. There was a similar picture taken 10-15 years ago that I've seen in a number of places at JSC. If you noticed, it had the additional vertical stabilizers located on the ends of the horizontal stabilizers.

Did the 'escort' take off between two lines of luminous globes that were floating in the air but were neither flares or balloons? And was it shaped like a black arrowhead and did it leave a green boron-fuel trace behind it in the classic 'String of Pearls' design as it streaked out into space at an impossible rate? And then, some time later, did the globes light up again and did it come back to Earth to land glowing red from the heat?

I was standing with Marc Ramsey on the runway at Current Ranch Airport in Nevada talking to a local rancher about just that same kind of odd thing. It

two landout day and missed the rest of the story. I have been sworn to secrecy about those details.

So, rest easy. It was probably just a non-existent hypersonic replacement for the SR-71 that is hidden somewhere deep in CIA funding and is of no interest to you.

Please disperse.

Mark Zivley's answer is probably the answer. I used to work in downtown Houston and when the shuttle was being ferried back to Florida it would circle downtown before going on to Ellington AFB, out by NASA. It was quite a site.

Fred Blair

It was the 747 used to transport the shuttle and a T38 escort. Was

'terrorist' attack.

NASA apologized for scaring people.

David Martin ASW 27 BV

Unnerved me. My wife was meeting a friend for breakfast in the financial district of Manhattan in on her birthday, September 11, a couple years ago. She made it through that OK but I guess I'm now a little twitchy when I see a big plane do something unusual over a downtown area. We live just across the bayou from downtown.

Brent

Thats good stuff-the aliens thing and NASA scaring people that is.