+++

I first stumbled across this theory from someone who calls himself “Lord Steven Christ”. Despite having a gigantic ego to call himself Lord Christ, and being of a heavy fundamentalist Christian slant with not much proof, I found he did indeed have some good evidence that there was glass in the sky. So credit due where credit is due, regardless of the source.

Since researching NASA’s weird and wonderful orbiting machines and their problems with the thermosphere, more evidence came to light to support this theory. Some of the evidence below is weaker than others, but still deserves a mention.

+++

Space shuttle nose cone

Space shuttle re-entry

Thermosphere

Ionosphere

Atmospheric elves

Libyan glass

+++

The nose cone and front edges of the wings of the space shuttle are made of reinforced carbon-carbon; not used anywhere else on the vehicle (but also employed for the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles).



Only the nose and front wing edges are made of reinforced carbon.

Reinforced carbon-carbon is carbon fiber in a matrix of graphite. The carbon fiber gives it a tensile strength of 101 ksi and also makes it less brittle than the heat resistant tiles on the rest of the shuttle. Compare this to the roughly 65 ksi strength of aluminum which constitutes the shuttle’s frame, or the paltry 0.013 ksi of the Li-9000 ceramic tiles on the underbelly. It also doesn’t crack at extreme temperatures (up to 2000 °C).

Why are the nose cone and wing edges super-strengthened since there is nothing up there but a few atoms of gas? Re-entry perhaps? Firstly, there is hardly any atmosphere at that altitude whether going up or coming down which also opens a new can of worms regarding why the space shuttle should heat to 1650 °C when there is so little air in the upper atmosphere.

Secondly, the shuttle re-enters at an angle with its nose pointing up, not down, as seen below. It also launches at an angle, as seen from the inside of an airplane. This is highly suspicious in itself and leads one to presume that the shuttle flies as a projectile in a semi-circle arc, going straight up and then down again soon after. But this isn’t conclusive and also isn’t relevant to the point being made here.



The shuttle launches at an angle which becomes increasingly parabolic.



The space shuttle re-enters at a 40° angle.

Projectile motion is the likely trajectory the shuttle travels from start to finish.



The ESA shows projectile motion in a diagram for re-entry. Interestingly 100 km is the re-entry point, which puts this altitude as the likely location of the glass.

There can be only one reason why the shuttle is reinforced at its nose and front wing edges: it must hit something hard at some point on its way up. And looking at the numerous footage from balloons being sent into the stratosphere, we can see only black, which must mean this material is both hard and transparent.

The only hard and transparent materials we have is glass or plastic, and glass is usually a lot more brittle than plastic, which it would need to be for the shuttle to break through. We will also see later that it is glass rather then plastic which is in the sky.

+++

On re-entry, the space shuttle heats to 1650 °C at 100 km altitude.

Why 100 km?

We are told this is so because those few air molecules present at this altitude (1/2,200,000 of the air at sea level) are compressed against the hull due to the shuttle’s hypersonic speed (30,000 km/h). These compressed molecules accumulate and can’t get away causing excess pressure and therefore heat; but there is hardly any air up there at 100 km. The shuttle should heat up at a much, much lower altitude where there is a lot more gas to get in the way… and yet it does not.

For this kind of temperature to occur at 100 km, there must be a lot of something up there to create this amount of friction; and glass fits the bill perfectly… or you can believe the steel-melting temperatures of the shuttle occur because of the compression of a few molecules of air trapped in the shuttle’s shock wave.



The shuttle remains the same size in the above photos, but the heat radiated turns it into a glowing blob, akin to an asteroid, eventually leaving a trail of molten glass behind.

Why over 1650 °C?

At what temperature does glass (silicon dioxide) melt? You guessed it… 1600 °C. This is why the underbelly of the space shuttle has to reach 1650 °C in order to melt the glass underneath, so it can fall through and re-enter. If the angle of the shuttle is too shallow, it bounces off the “atmosphere” (read glass) like a skipping stone and goes back into space, which is called skip re-entry.

The basic concept is to ‘clip’ the atmosphere at such an angle that the craft is ‘pushed’ back out into space, conceptually similar to a pebble skipping across the surface of a lake. Each time, the craft’s velocity is reduced so that it can eventually drop into the atmosphere at a low suborbital velocity.

+++

There is supposedly nothing up there for the shuttle to “skip” against… unless of course there is glass in the sky. If the re-entry angle is too steep, it could cause too much stress on the brittle heat-resistant ceramic tiles, possibly breaking a few of them, which would be fatal.

Also worth a mention is that later in the upward part of its parabolic flight (once broken through the Kármán line), the shuttle turns over exposing its most heat-resistant underbelly to the occassional steel-melting temperatures of the Sun allowing the shuttle to travel much further into the thermosphere than it would otherwise.

Also, according to NASA, the solid fuel booster rockets jettison from the shuttle at only 64 km, and the external fuel tank is released just short of orbital velocity. At what altitude is “just short of orbital velocity?” Just under 100 km. 100 km is the Kármán line, commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. The external tank has to be jettisoned at just below this height as it cannot penetrate the glass. Only the shuttle itself and intercontinental missiles can do so as they are the only ones with reinforced carbon nose cones (and front wing edges).

Potential commercial space flights, such as Virgin Galactic which use space planes, also only go as high as 100 km thereby not penetrating the glass.

Speaking of space planes, the Black Armadillo rocket burns out at 100 km and falls back down to Earth with only foam insulation behind the aluminum nose section protecting the crew from frying to a crisp. Admittedly, falling from 100 km doesn’t equate to the 30,000 km/h of the space shuttle, but as the top speed of the red bull free fall dive from 39 km was 1,357.6 km/h (1.25 times the speed of sound), the rocket will be traveling several times this as it descends. Aluminum melts at 600 °C, so the temperatures can’t be that high.



Only foam and aluminum protects the occupants from the heat of re-entry.

All commercial space planes never fly past 100 km. Why 100 km?

This magic 100 km figure crops up an awful lot when looking at “space”. Here is the next one.

+++

Guess at which altitude the temperature of space starts to take off from -50 C to 200+ °C within a mere 10 km and then to 500-1500 °C within another 40? Yep, you guessed it: 100 km.



The thermosphere starts at 100 km.

How is this possible with a gradual decrease in air density? There should be no abrupt changes at all; no virtually instant increases in temperature at a specific height; especially one so drastic.

There has to be something solid up there at just above 100 km to absorb the infra-red rays of the Sun to cause such a drastic change of temperature from one side of that altitude to the other. Speaking of which, Dr. Christian from NASA’s own Questions and Answers session has said in space:

…thermal radiation is always there, and that is what a spacecraft uses.

+++

I know we aren’t to trust anything NASA says, but if there is nothing up there but a few atoms of gas, thermal radiation can’t always be there. At night, the Sun doesn’t shine and therefore there is no thermal radiation… unless “always there” means “only during the day”. The only way thermal radiation can be present at night is if there is something solid above 100 km to absorb the radiation when the Sun is shining and then continue to emit it when the Sun isn’t. Otherwise Dr. Christian is telling porky pies. Okay, maybe the latter is more likely to be the truth, but this “evidence” still needs to be mentioned.

+++

The ionosphere exists from 60 km to 600 km altitude and is full of ionized radiation. An ion is a charged atom or molecule, and as we have seen there aren’t that many of these at 60 to 100 km altitude, let alone 600 km! Yet, some modern communication technologies rely on bouncing radio waves off this sea of ions, especially shortwaves (intercontinental communication) which only bounce off the “E” area, which is 90 km to 120 km high… surprise surprise. Our modern communications systems rely on fiber optics and the ionized glass in the sky.



Intercontinental communications bounce of the ionosphere 90 to 120 km up.

If the ionosphere was solely a product of our ionized atmosphere, then we would expect a gradual and uniform increase in density of ions as we got further towards the Sun. This is what indeed occurs until we reach a certain height… and what height could that be? Drum roll… Until just above 100 km. Who’d a thunk it!



Just above 100 km, electron density goes skew ways. This shouldn’t happen if the only thing up there is an increasingly thin atmosphere.

Here is another mystery. The D layer (60 to 90 km) is due to the ionization of nitrogen and oxygen, whereas the E layer (90 to 120 km) consists solely of ionized oxygen. This is impossible. Nitrogen is 3% lighter than oxygen (it is just behind it on the periodic table). Where is the nitrogen? And more to the point where is all this gas coming from at all at this altitude? The ionized oxygen obviously comes from the glass which chemically is silicon dioxide.

Another ionosphere phenomena are the Aurora Borealis and Australis over their respective north and south poles. This game is getting a bit easy, but guess at what altitude these events begin to take place? Around 100 km. Funny that.



The lower border of an Aurora usually starts at 60 to 70 miles (96 to 112 km) high; exactly where the glass is.

+++

Above the altitude of a thunder and lightning storm is another observed atmospheric phenomena called TLE (transient luminous event), believed to be electrically induced forms of plasma. Sprites and blue jets are nice and long events between 40 and 80 km up. However as soon as we hit 100 km, the plasma is shaped as a 400 km wide flat halo. What could be up there to cause the plasma discharge to flatten itself into a wide halo and dissipate in 1 millisecond? Something solid (and transparent).



Elves are plasma discharges that hit the glass at 100+ km up.

+++

There is a lot of this stuff in the Libyan desert stretching over 10s of kilometers. The transparent-to-translucent pieces are clear-to-opaque white or yellow-to-green in colour,because of the varying degrees of its meteoritic metal content (iron/nickel/trace cobalt) which is never higher than 2% of the overall material (98%+ silicon dioxide) and is the purest “natural” glass found anywhere in the world. A few have dark colourings in them which consist of these same meteoritic metals.



A typical piece of Libyan glass of 98% silicon dioxide.

The shape of the glass is unlike any other type of tektite (except Asian ones) in the world. This piece looks to have been chipped off another layer of glass.

The glass is very clear and pure with validated meteoritic dust inside a few of them.

No iron content in this translucent piece.

+++

The consensus is that the glass is of meteoritic origins

Meteoritic origins for the glass were long suspected, and recent research linked the glass to impact features, such as zircon-breakdown, vaporized quartz and meteoritic metals, and to an impact crater.

+++

However, this is very vague (except the impact crater part, which we will see later is false). It doesn’t say if the glass came down with the meteorite or was formed by the heat and pressure of the meteor impact melting the sand. Despite heated controversy throughout the decades, the consensus theory for other normal tektites is the impact one.

Libyan glass however throws a spanner in the works. Saharan desert sand is 7% aluminum and 4.5% iron oxide. And the Nubian sandstone on which the glass rests is even more varied in composition with 15% Iron Oxide, with carbonate (carbon) and feldspar (potassium, sodium, calcium and aluminium silicon oxides) present! This is confirmed by another source stating that there are also small amounts (page 46) of siderite (iron carbonate) and chamosite (iron, aluminum, magnesium silicon dioxide).

The sand in the area has a reddish hue… …the red sand indicates a high iron content in the rock.



The Libyan glass field is an elliptical 130 by 50 km shape and rests on Nubian sandstone which stretches across the Libyan and Egyptian border.

The red colour of Nubian sandstone is because of the 15% iron oxide present.

But every single piece of Libyan glass, all 1000+ tonnes of it, is 98% silicon dioxide and some of it is clear with no colourings demonstrating that there is no iron present at all (100% glass). Some pieces are as big as a football and weigh over 25 kg. All other tektites around the world are tiny (1-2 inches) in comparison, are only 60% glass, and occur in distinctive shapes as dumbbells, rods, spheres, disks, and teardrops; which Libyan glass never does.

Silica glass has been found at other known meteor impact sites, but the glass there is blackened and fragmented, and is embedded in a matrix of fused and broken rock. LDG seems too clear and pure to have been created this way.

and

…most Libyan Desert glass is much more dense and homogeneous than the well described porous and impure “impact” glass (impactite) found in such craters as Henbury in central Australia, Wabar in the Rub’al-Khali of Saudi Arabia.

and

The glass cannot have been fused from the local exposed sandstone.

+++

Of course it didn’t! Libyan glass and Nubian sandstone have different chemical compositions and ratios.

+++

There are also no impact craters in the area, but maybe they haven’t been found yet in the sand?

… there are no meteor craters detectable from satellite photos with a resolution of ~5m within 150 km. No Libyan Desert Glass has been found at the nearest meteorite crater, located in Libya, ~150km to the west.

+++

One attempt to place a large crater nearby has been dismissed by an expedition tourist visiting the site, who said:

In the photo, many bands and layers of sedimentary rock can be seen. This is not a hard cap of crystalline melt sheet on top of softer rock. I do not think that this is a crater site.

+++

So where does all this glass come from? It can only have come down with the meteorite; and since the meteoritic dust is found in the glass, this means that a meteorite must have met glass somewhere up there in the heavens. This is 100% silicon dioxide due to the many transparent and translucent pieces strewn about the place. The iron content of the white hot meteor blended with some of the glass to create the pale green/yellow effect, with a small part of the meteor cooling down enough (under 1600-1700 °C) to be trapped in the glass rather than being blended throughout.

So what is at least 1000+ tonnes of glass doing in the sky? Glass that is by far the purest form of “natural” glass ever found. In fact, the only other sources of naturally occurring glass in the world are normal tektites with 60% purity, fulgurites formed from lightning strikes on sand being 90 to 99% pure, and the volcanic rock obsidian which is 70%+ silicon dioxide and has a composition similar to granite.



A variety of volcanic obsidian rock very similar to granite.

Saudi Arabian tektites created from the Wabar meteor hitting the desert. Notice they are small, black and differently shaped.

A typical fulgurite shape – a knobbly hollow tube.

Fulgurites are hollow where the lightning burrowed through the sand.

The purity and structure of Libyan glass gives it some other remarkable properties with which man-made glass finds tough to compete.

This purity give the glass some remarkable properties. It can be heated up to 1700°C before it begins to melt, over 500°C higher than other natural glasses. It can be dropped into water when red hot and it will not disintegrate. High technology glasses struggle to do better.

+++

I bet.

The only reasonable conclusion is that this glass is not natural. It has to be man-made. It is a technology. Now, what is a technology doing 100 to 110 km in the sky around the entire Earth? Who built this technology and why? I’ve no idea about the first question, but I can answer the latter.

Apart from glass, the only other object in the heavens which can be demonstrated to be valid is the Sun. The moon (and possibly the planets) are likely optical illusions; and the stars are probably super hot ionized bits of the Sun (asteroids) stuck in the Earth cavity. This only leaves the Sun. This means all meteors/asteroids/comets must come from ejections from the Sun. We need to study meteorites and take out the silicon dioxide part and see if the remaining materials can shed light on what the Sun actually is… but more on that in the next article.