Columbia

I'm just now reading this thread so I don't know what others have said. Forgive me if I'm redundant here.

Columbia exploded right over our house. We all heard the boom from the explosion at about 8 AM but we didn't know what it was. We knew Columbia was coming in and our news people said we might be able to see it, so an amateur videographer captured the event. Of course we were all shocked when it exploded. The videographer's tape was the one NASA used to study the explosion. It was also the one y'all saw on national news that evening.

It was flying at several thousand miles per second and was at a higher altitude than the normal commercial aircraft cruising altitude of 30,000 ft. It shattered into bits and left a trail all across East Texas and on into Louisiana. There were sizable pieces all over the place, and human body parts were found. My boys wanted to be a part of the recovery mission, but since they were under 18 and humans were involved, they were not allowed to go.

A commercial aircraft is about 60 feet tall and about 200 ft. long. It would have to be diving nose first with full throttle from Space to go completely into the ground without much of a trace. And to be traveling from space into the Earth's atmosphere, it would have dematerialized long before impact.