UFO No Longer Unidentified

WTAE TV 4

PITTSBURGH -- Dozens of people called officials and WTAE Channel 4 Action News on Saturday morning describing bright lights and trails of light in the eastern skies around Pittsburgh.

The National Weather Service said they thought what people saw was remnants of the Gemini Meteor Shower from earlier in the week.

NASA, however, said the sighting was nothing extraterrestrial, but that of a rocket launched from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 7 a.m.

A NASA spokeswoman said people could see the rocket because the skies were so clear.

She said the rocket was also spotted by people in Washington DC and southern North Carolina.

The four-stage Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket was carrying two experimental satellites.

The rocket carried the Air Force's TacSat-2 satellite, which will test the military's ability to quickly transmit images of enemy targets to battlefield commanders.

Also on board was NASA's GeneSat-1 satellite, which carries a harmless strain of E. coli bacteria as part of an experiment to study the long-term effects of space on living organisms.

The 69-foot Minotaur I rocket soared from the launch pad at 7 a.m., after teams spent the week resolving a software problem in one of the satellites that cause officials to scrubbed a liftoff planned for Monday.