LOOK: Huge Fireball Caught on Camera, But Experts Say 'Not a Meteor'
As this little ol’ planet of ours goes hurtling through space at some brain-bending speed, it encounters all manner of galactic objects. And, more often than we’d like to admit, we ram right into them.
For the most part, these collisions are harmless. Our atmosphere chews up and spits out just about everything that it comes in contact with, and there have only been a few incidents in the modern era where anyone was injured by some wayward asteroid.
This week was one of the rare weeks in which a specular show occurred in the night sky, but there appears to be some debate about what folks in the midwestern United States were actually looking at.
An object described by news outlets and witnesses as a “mysterious fireball” briefly shot across the sky early Wednesday, raising widespread speculation about what it might have been.
Residents – and experts – throughout the Midwest are weighing in with speculation.
Reports of unidentified flying objects are hardly new, although some seem to be ranking what looks like a blazing ball shooting across the sky particularly high on the highly-scientific awesome scale.
And while many quickly turned to the Orionid meteor shower as the likely culprit, there was dissent among the expert skywatchers.
However, the American Meteorological Society came to a different conclusion than the Channel 4 weatherman, noting that the sighting “was not a natural fireball” but instead appeared to be “the re-entry of an unknown satellite or spent rocket body.”
The Boston-based society said it received more than 80 reports Wednesday about the fireball, including video and photos, from Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Pensylvania, Tennessee, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Ontario, Canada.
The video is below if you’d like to judge for yourselves.
