The Tromsø site did little to attract public attention until December 9th, 2009, the night before Obama accepted his Nobel peace prize in Norway. For three minutes, people in the North of that country and in Northern Sweden saw this in the sky.

Just outside of Tromsø, Norway, is a transmitting facility that is part of EISCAT, (European Incoherent Scatter), a multi-site research institute that studies the Sun’s effect on the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere. The spiral occurred very close to Tromsø and precisely when an experiment was scheduled, part of Project TEQUILAsunrise (Transient Effects Quantification Under Ionospheric Low Angle sunrise).

So, the mesosphere is filled with echoes and the blogosphere is filled with explanations. It is a weather manipulator that can turn a category two into a category five. It is a wormhole. It is a massive mind-control device (timed for the first time in a bazillion years that a US president was in Norway). It is a holographic projector to fake an alien invasion or the second coming of Christ. It could be any of these things. It could be all of these things. The only thing I’m pretty sure it’s not is a Russian missile.

I would not have been alarmed had EISCAT simply said, “that crazy spiral you saw? That was just us messing with the Polar Mesosphere Winter Echoes”, but they didn’t. Even if the Norway spiral is, as I’m inclined to believe, a well-intentioned if not entirely safe ionospheric heating experiment, we were still lied to and that’s not okay.