You were positioned facing a college girl in a hot tub.
You were facing the right direction.
Odd that this thread was resurrected just now. Only a couple of days ago, my wife and daughter and I saw a meteor with a greenish color… looked a little like a Roman candle, but coming straight down from a point around 45 degrees above the horizon. The green appeared, faded to white, then appeared again. As other posters have noted, it looked like it was not too distant, but it probably was.
I twice saw bolides in my youth, with other witnesses. Once on an summer evening when I was about 8. It was at summer camp and a counselor was directing us through some activity when several of us looked up in response to a noise to see a crackling, bluish white fireball in the sky which soon went out like a match. It was not very bright, and did not illuminate the surroundings like in the Peekskill videos. Those of us that looked up made eye contact, but the counselor did not even notice it. It was weird because it was completely amazing to me.
When I was about 16 I saw and heard a very similar one at a friends Ranch. We were pretty exited about that one. Still I have heard very few other reports of people hearing bolides.
That time frame and description sounds about right. It was getting towards evening but it was still daylight. It was just so big and bright. I don’t remember a trail but it was huge! Thanks everyone who responded to my childhood memory
It is weird that so many people remember seeing these as kids. I did too but the time-frame would have to be sometime around 1978 because that is when we built our house and I saw it from the front yard one night. I was only about 5 years old. It was a huge orange fireball and moved quickly but not so quickly that I didn’t get a good, long look at it. My parents told me it was probably a space-craft and that sounded good enough. For all I knew back then, they passed by every couple of days. This was in Northwestern Louisiana were there was a lot of Cold War military activity but it could have been a spacecraft or a large meteor.
I always wondered about it have never seen anything like it sense. I would love to know. I am fairly certain I didn’t just dream it up.
I think that’s just because kids pay more attention to their environment, and are open-minded to accept that they just saw something out of the ordinary. Adults who haven’t forgotten how to look up see these things plenty often, too.
I have an almost identical memory of playing in a friend’s front yard in early summer in the evening when we saw a huge fireball pass through the sky heading north. We never saw any mention of it in the papers or any confirmation of what we had seen. I was about 12 at the time. It was quite large, seemed very close to the ground. I thought it must have landed in the town just to the north of us. It was fiery and orange, yellow, red in spots. It looked pocked like with craters and was unevenly shaped. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. First time I have heard anything else about it. Our parents thought we were imagining things.
I was 11 and we lived in Bethesda.
I sort of remember something like that. Not seeing it, but reports of a meteor being seen and believed to have landed far away. I saw several ‘shooting star’ meteors back then on the summer nights we camped out. Without all the modern light and particle pollution, on a clear summer night the stars were brilliant and distinct. Far out in the country the sky was densely filled with stars. The Milky Way was clearly identifiable down near the horizon. There were so many stars it was hard to pick out the constellation patterns. One of the most interesting things I saw must have been in 1969 where some kind of atmospheric tests were conducted. Huge colored circles that appeared as large as the moon grew in the sky, then slowly dissipated.
That one hit the car of someone I knew. I lived just a mile outside of Peekskill. It was the middle of a rainstorm over the area. When the rain stopped someone went outside and noticed the hole in the fender, and the still hot blob of rock under the car. She sold the car and the meteor together for a good price.
I was out driving that night. On a side street, otherwise deserted, there was a loud crack and the side view mirror of my car shattered. That happened about 5 miles from where the meteor landed. I like to think it was a piece of the meteor that broke off and hit my mirror. There’s no reasonable evidence that it did. But it’s not out of the range of possibility.
And here it is caught on video.
Ya don’t think maybe she noticed some slightly more significant damage do you?
http://www.nyrockman.com/pages/peekskill-today.htm
Actually the trunk lid looks worse than it did at the time. It wasn’t so raised up an seperated. That happened later, maybe from opening the trunk to look for pieces of metorite, or an intentional embellishment.
It was crazy to read to a friend what you had written because it mirrored my story I had recounted to him just minutes earlier. I had decided to look on google and put in the words “asteriod 1967” and saw your story.
We lived in Maryland, outside on DC. It was a nice afternoon and we were playing ball. I ran down the street to geet a ball that had passed by me and when I came up, there it was. A large object on fire moving across the sky, fast but not like a streek, but like a large, close, foreign object. It was moving from the right to the left of what ever direction I was facing. I remember running in to my house to tell my mom what we saw. We were sure we saw something from space. We listened the next day trying to find out about what we saw and I think I remember hearing something about a Meteor landing somewhere up north. My memory is very vague there. I’m glad to hear the story from someone else.
The memory of this meteorite has haunted me my whole life and I am glad to find others to have seen it too.
I was about 8 years old living in Devon, CT when me and 2 friends saw a huge fiery orange meteorite moving across the sky which was getting near dusk.
It seemed to be moving slow and we tried to follow it on our bikes down the street in order to stay with it a little longer.
I can remember seeing craters in it - the thing was big.
My parents just thought I saw a shooting star but as we all remember, it was a significant event and if it happened today, the world would be buzzing.
This meteorite probably did land in Canada, because it seems as though Canada is an meteorite magnet.
I have a hankering to visit Lac Manicouaga which is a monster sized impact crater filled with water in remote Quebec, but somewhat accessible.
Yeah, sometime around 1966-67 I remember seeing a meteor coming down that was so bright it lit up the sky for about seconds. I was in suburban Toronto, and it appeared to be going straight down in the north direction. This would have been around 8 or 9 at night, but it was already dark.
The news reported no actual landing site found, so maybe it completely burned up.
Would this have been after 1997? Sounds like you saw an Iridium satellite, which have big, bright, flat solar panels that reflect a beam of sunlight, and if you’re in the middle of that beam as it passes, it’s bright enough to cast a shadow. I can’t imagine a meteor being that bright.
Weird, but I have a vague recollection of seeing this when I was a young’un in NJ. Probably was in the 60s, and it was more of a large, slower fireball than a streaking meteorite. Of course, me being little, it being New Jersey, and the level of scientific understanding at the time, we were probably staring at a Texaco sign through chemical laden swamp gas.
Bolides are not infrequently brighter than Iridium satellites, and bright enough to cast a shadow. However bright bolides are not really all that common; I’ve only ever seen one, and it was many years ago.
One aspect of these reports is quite interesting; several observers report seeing craters in the objects as they pass by. In fact these bolides are mostly ionised gases in a kind of shock wave around the meteor, which is actually quite small and several miles away, too far away to see craters, even if any were present.
Whatever they saw almost certainly wasn’t craters.
I’d be willing to bet that there was a SciFi TV show about a meteor that aired around this time… Kids and their confabulated memories.
Here’s a non-Washington-Post-archive source for the April 1966 fireball **samclem **mentioned in 2009. Apparently *Life *and Sky and Telescope published pix.
If a meteor passed close enough to see craters or any other feature of it, it’d be moving through your field of view too quickly for your eyes to track, and you’d only see at most a blurred streak. Or more precisely, a very loud flash of light from the impact.