recent headlines:
Sunday’s meteor that blazed across the Texas sky
213 reports were submitted to the American Meteor Society of a fireball in the sky Sunday night. Published: Jul. 26, 2021
A witness description:
It was a bright glowing orange circle that was on its way down, like falling, like an orange full moon. …. I have seen shooting stars and this object moved slower.
Details released by The American Meteor Society:
The fiery streak lasted about 4 seconds
This was likely NOT part of (a) Meteor Shower because it was…. “going too slow”
The “slow” speed suggests it was a small piece of an asteroid
******
The news report (above) reminds me of a sighting of mine in 1944:
It was summer.. About an hour into the soft darkness of full night. I was walking north, along the sidewalk in front of my house in Sheffield, Alabama.
For some reason – I didn’t hear anything, but I seemed to sense something – I looked up.
There, almost directly above me, was a large orange fireball, traveling northward through the cloudless, dark night sky.
This fiery object made no noise. There was no trailing tail of flame. Just the glowing orange of a ball of fire.
Color? a little more distinctly orange than the sun.
Brilliance? equal to a bright full moon.
How big was it? How do I describe the size of an object in the sky? With no immediately adjacent reference to compare it to, it becomes a matter of degrees of arc subtended by…, aw, heck, it was about as big as a tennis ball held at arms length.
How high was it? Same problem , no reference … but regarding the remembered image, I’d guess it was high. Is that vague enough?
It was moving fast, and lasted about a second – its travel covered about the distance of three or four times its own diameter. Could I suggest forty degrees of arc?
Then it simply vanished.
Gone.
No flash, no smoke, no embers, no falling debris. And no noise.
The image of that ball of fire remains ever with me, and I ponder occasionally … and will ever wonder.
You tell me — I don’t know.
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