Those strange radar sightings over Maine were probably caused by military planes dumping ‘chaff’

“It was definitely some kind of not precipitation but some other kind of chatter. It was chaff more than likely,” he said.

He said he’d seen it before.

“It happens from time to time,” he said. “It can happen in different places all across the country. I worked in Florida, and we would see it sometimes down there, too, especially over the ocean.”

“It’s not super-rare,” he said, “it’s not especially common, either.”

He said “it was probably some kind of aircraft exercise of some kind but we don’t know exactly.”

Chaff is used as a decoy for military planes that could be targeted by radar-guided missiles. Chaff consists of tiny strips of aluminum or zinc that the aircraft releases. These clouds appear as separate targets to the missile’s radar and confuse it, thus permitting the aircraft to escape, according to Britannica.com.

Maine Air National Guard spokesman Captain Carl J. Lamb said Thursday in an e-mail, “Maine Air National Guard aircraft did not deploy countermeasures of any type over Maine on Wednesday, December 12th.”

An e-mail message seeking confirmation from the Pentagon’s Press Operations Center was not immediately returned.

Chaff released from a C-130H aircraft piloted by the 130th Airlift Wing of the West Virginia Air National Guard during a training operation also was noticed over southern Illinois on Monday, the Washington Post reported.

A 2015 study by scientists from the weather service, the University of Louisiana, and the University of Alabama noted that a 2013 chaff release near Huntsville, Ala., had garnered much media and public attention, which was “exacerbated” by the military’s “initial reluctance to confirm the chaff release.”