Pilots of around 30 aircraft reported to Calcutta airport about “a fireball and lights” in the sky on Saturday evening.
According to airport sources, pilots of around 30 planes flying on Calcutta Air Traffic Control airspace, which includes even parts of neigh-bouring states, reported about having seen such lights between an altitude of 30,000 to 39,000ft.
“We have reported the matter to the Met office, the Indian Air Force and the Defence Research and Development Organisation. But we have not spotted any such thing,” said an airport official.
Sanjib Bandyopadhyay, the deputy director general of IMD, Calcutta, said: “I don’t have any such report.”
Airport officials said DRDO officials had told them that they had not got any such reports either.
Sanjib Sen, director of the Positional Astronomy Centre in Salt Lake, said “stray granular particles coming of orbits of meteors can burn because of friction after entering the earth’s atmosphere and cause similar flashes of lights”.
“But this could not have been a meteor shower. An annual meteor shower is supposed to take place on April 21 and 22,” he said.
Senior airport officials said they did not remember getting similar reports from pilots in recent years.