Update July 16.2008
The origin of the object that had crashed near Kurseong town in the evening of July 10 remains a mystery.
No one has turned up to identify the object that has been kept in a secluded room of Kurseong police station for the past six days.
Although the airforce authorities at Bagora, 20km from here, were informed about the incident, no officer has come to see the saucer-shaped object (in the picture) that had fallen from sky with a hissing sound near the cattle shed of Hari Bahadur Chettri at Lower Sirubari Busty around 6.30pm.
“We are waiting for somebody from space or defence organisations to check the object,” said Rakesh Singh, the subdivisional police officer, Kurseong.
Asked if the police are planning to send it to any other agency for test, the SDPO said they were mulling over approaching the department of science and technologies at Bikash Bhawan in Calcutta. “We may contact them and further steps will depend on their suggestions.”
In Bagdogra, the airforce officials said they had not received any communication from the police. Nor had they got any instructions from Eastern Air Command in Shillong to check the object.
They said since there was no space aviation expert in the region, technical personnel of the air force would be in a better position to identify the object, which, they said, was most likely to be a part of a satellite or a rocket.
A US-based agency had forecast that the remnants of an Israeli rocket would re-enter the earth’s atmosphere at 13:28 Universal Time (6.28pm in India) on July 10. They had kept an error margin of 75 minutes.
Original headline: ‘Alien’ origin still unknown )
