Gawrsh. Color me confused(again; lots of material here). It would seem as though Frank's hypothesis has been more or less proven??? And a question I asked way up this thread those months ago, why can't/don't we see this from the ground; even on a bluebird type day? Just a thought: these things are tiny by most any measure, so we wouldn't actually see the initial vaporization. By the time this vaporizaton is large enough to see, it's so thin as to be virtually invisible???
Anyway, thanks for an interesting update.
FGS
It took the better part of twenty years after Frank and his then-student ruled out pixel dropouts to convince the numbnuts who rejected it in a knee-jerk manner. :') My guess is, the Defense Dep't had already figured this out before Frank saw the data (that the dark spots were natural objects) and wanted some kind of confirming study, rather than just ignoring the "dropouts", as a matter of national security.