SOUTHWESTERN FIREBALL

On Sept. 21st around 09:01 pm MDT, a dazzling fireball glided across the skies of New Mexico and west Texas. "We’ve been getting a lot of calls in the newsroom about an object – maybe a meteorite – falling from the sky," says Peter St. Cyr of KOAT TV in Albuquerque. An all-sky camera outside Santa Fe caught the object in flight.




Note: In the movie, the stationary light is the full Moon, the moving light is the fireball.


"It took 23 seconds to cross the sky and was nearly as bright as the full Moon," says Thomas Ashcraft, who operates the camera. "The fireball made a sonic boom loud enough to be heard inside above fan noise and household din. At first I thought it was thunder."

After passing over New Mexico, the fireball apparently continued on to Texas. "At 10:05 pm CDT, my wife and I witnessed a slow moving fireball coming from the west," reports Matthew Byrd of Amarillo. And then a second fireball appeared: "About 7 or 8 min later we saw another fireball moving in the same direction directly over Amarillo. It was bright white and shedding white sparks."

US Space Command reports no satellites or pieces of space junk decaying at the time of the sightings. This was probably a random meteoroid--and maybe two--disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere.


http://spaceweather.com/ September 23, 2010



Now who is to say that was not a craft shot out of the sky by the Navy Space Command???