I was living in Southwestern PA when I sighted the meteor that I believe is the same one others spotted in 1967. Me, my older brother and about 5 of my buddies were outside playing baseball when we all saw a huge flaming ball of fire going across the sky. It wasn’t moving extremely fast but was an amazing sight. It was in the early evening, my guess around 7:30 or 8PM or so. It was still daylight. We were facing the South and the fireball was going right to left at a downward angle. We lived in a hilly area and the fireball disappeared over the horizon. We thought it landed a couple of miles away. Being around 9 years of age, we thought it was a burning spaceship. One of the guys got out his AM radio and we listened for awhile, thinking that there would be something on the news. My older brother and I were so scared because our parents weren’t home yet and it was dark outside by the time they arrived home. I will never forget this awesome sight.
Whatever you saw it wasn’t a ‘huge asteroid’ ‘boulder-like’ thing. Something that naked eye big would have been a mulii-megaton explosion when it hit the ground.
You may have seen a bright meteor, spectacular even. But you’ve attached something from the movies or tv to it and now have a false memory.
In 1966 I think- I was in third grade, living in South Jersey, I don’t remember the time of year but it was early evening and my parents sent me out to a shed about 100 yds from the house to fetch something or other. I got about halfway back and looked up at the sky to see a ball of orange fire zoom over some clouds, heading west to east. I think I covered that last 50 yds in about a half a second.
In the summer of 1967, I’m not quite sure of the year. I was 13, living in Wyoming, MI. Several friends and I were riding bikes across an abandoned airfield that was being converted into an industrial park. We were riding in an easterly direction. There were no lights operating, it was dark. Suddenly from the south we saw a very large fireball heading directly north. This was not the size of the average meteor it was much larger. If the object was 20ft from you it would appear the size of a tennis ball. It was flaming red with a yellowish orange long tail. I did not hear anything as I watched it streak across the sky parallel to the ground. Seeming to cross from the southern to northern horizon in 2 ½ to 3 seconds. Finally hitting or exploding to the north, it lit the sky with a flash of light enough to appear like daylight for a fraction of a second. When I got home I asked other family members if they had seen it, no one had. News reports the following day were of a meteorite hitting in northern Canada.
I am not sure but I may have saw the same object. I only remember it was spring 1967 or 1968. I came home from a little league baseball game and it must have been around 8pm. I lived in Mt. Vernon, NY 1 block, from the Bronx. What I saw was similar to what you had seen but with a couple of differences. I walked out on my porch and looked to the west. I looked up, probably at a 45 degree angle. I saw this gigantic object in the sky. It was traveling from south to north and not very fast at all. It wasn’t the high off the ground, guessing, maybe 1000 ft. It looked like a rock or a chunk of charcoal, all ragged edges. It was dark navy blue. The tip was glowing orange and it was leaving a long white contrail. It wasn’t making a sound. I listened to the news that night and what I recalled was just a tidbit was said. They mention that a meteorite hit in CT. I thought it was very little said considering what I saw was hugh, I mean hugh. That was the last I have every heard about this.
I had a similar experience in May of 92. It was a Thursday night, between 9:30-10pm, Eastern Time. I can pinpoint that exactly because we were having carpet installed, I was nine years old, and the television was moved into my room underneath a large west-facing window during the installation, and I was watching Wings when I saw a streak of fire pass from south to north in the west. To me, it looked like a flaming rocketship or airplane streaking across the sky. I asked my grandfather what it was, and he said it was likely only a satellite. I never had any opinion on it, since I assumed someone else would have had to have seen it and it would have been on the news or in the paper…but I have never heard anything else about it.
I saw a fireball/meteor about eight, nine years back, while out looking at the stars with my then-wife. It was quite a sight, and more than just a shooting star; you could make out its fiery trail.
That said, even when they’re close enoguh to be that spectacular, they aren’t close to you at all. They’re much further away than you think. The Chelyabinsk meteor, if you watch the videos, looks like it’s exploding practically right over the buildings. In fact, it exploded about 20 km up, far above, say, an airliner’s cruising altitude.
I lived in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada until June 1967 when I moved to Michigan. So, the meteor sighting was definitely before that date. Hamilton is about 45 miles west of Niagara Falls. I happened to be looking out our LR window, facing due east, in the early evening and saw the meteor streaking across the sky. It appeared to be only a few miles away, but the next day I heard it landed somewhere in Upper New York State. It was pretty impressive, it looked kind of like pictures I’ve seen of Halley’s Comet. I worked at CHML Radio Station at the time so I immediately called the Newroom. They scoffed a bit when I belted out, “I just saw a UFO.” It was soon confirmed that a meteor had landed in Upper New York State.
In still pictures, maybe, but note that viewing a comet live looks completely different from viewing a meteor live. A meteor is a brief streak (a few seconds at most) and then is gone, while a comet will stick around for weeks or months.
I came across this thread the other day after the Chelyabinsk meteorite reminded me of an event from my youth and I started doing some Googling. I saw the same “asteroid” or meteorite that wonder9 wrote about in June 2009 (and that dwcoolhead also said he saw). It was around 1967, late spring or early summer; it was daytime, and I was outside my house in south Arlington (Va., the Fairlington housing development) outside DC hanging out with buddies. What I remember distinctly is that I was facing the opposite direction from the object streaking across the sky, but turned around because I heard something (presumably it) hissing. It moved at what to me at the time seemed like a surprisingly leisurely pace, had a multi-color trail, and I, like wonder9, assumed it hit somewhere nearby. I also heard later that it came down in the northern U.S. or Canada.
The hissing sound cannot have come from the meteor directly, since it will have been many miles away from your position and the sound wouldn’t reach you till later. Note that the shock wave associated with the recent Chelyabinsk meteorite arrived two minutes and fifteen seconds after the flash.
However many observers of meteorites report hissing or crackling sounds simultaneously with the visual sighting; this is one of those mysteries that no-one has solved yet.
I too am very interested in sky watching, much of which also comes from early boyhood experiences from watching the sky. I believe I shared the same experience as “Si Amigo” during the early summer of 1971 (June I believe). Instead of Dayton, Ohio, I was living in nearby Springfield, Ohio when I had just stepped outside of the front door of our house and was greeted by a huge green streak of light that seem to go from horizon to horizon. Not sure what to make of it then, I am confident that what I saw was a meteorite (shooting star) pass over head. Although Wright-Patterson air Force base & Rockwell experimented with a lot of things, this was no rocket. It was probably between 9:30p-10:00pm.
I’ve learned from studying the make up of meteorites that they get their color in the sky from the materials they are made from. the most common meteorites are stony and emit a white, yellow, orange hue as they burn up. Every now and then, if your lucky enough to witness a Iron meteorite, you’ll ne treated to a bright green streak that is like no other. In an earlier blog “Sailor” experienced this same phenomenon.
In 2000 I went out to the Grand Canyon by car and on the way back, I stopped by Winslow, Arizona to visit Meteor Crater. An amazing sight!! At the museum there, they have pieces of the large Iron Meteorite that struck there that made the huge Moon like Crater in Winslow. Iron meteorites have a density far greater than normal Iron on Earth, which is why they last so long when they enter the earths atmosphere,…and often times if large enough, strike the earth. They don’t burn up as easy, like their stony counter-parts.
In 2001, I managed to witness the annual Leonid Meteorite shower from 11:30pm to about 3:00am. The deal with the Leonid shower is that about every once every 40 to 50 years it is more active and spectacular than other years. The previous one was back in 1966 (missed that one) and then the recent one in 2001. Meteorites were streaking large every 3-5 minutes. Large streaks,…as long as a yard stick at arm’s length. And when large meteorites do fall close enough to the Earth, you do hear “Hissing” sounds,…kind of like what a firework sounds like taking off,…but these are the noises of meteorites burning up in the atmosphere. And you can hear them when they are large,…because some get very close to our surface. Some have been know to also create sonic booms.
ah yes, well that’s one way to hear a meteorite…
But there is another reason you can hear a meteorite… even when its far away. This reason is explaining unusual whistling, crackling, popping
that arrives instantaneously with the light (that is, not delayed 3 seconds per km … not delayed to arrive with the “boom” or explosion) … That cause of meteorite sounds is VLF EM… Very low Frequency EM.
See
( I had Dr Keay as a professor !)
Its not easy to be sure you have a meteorite - just because it looks like ‘iron rock’ , or tests as magnetic, doesn’t make it a meteorite… The iron meteorite is high iron concentration meteorite, as in getting close to pure iron, so density is not a sure test… You might also find iron ore, eg hematite, and confuse it with meteorite material.
I believe that i saw the same thing. It was around the same time frame. I was living in Augusta, Ga and went outside one night around 7:00-8:00. My whole family saw this object. It was almost directly over our house. It was huge and you could see what looked like gases moving around it. The object itself looked very dark but you could see what looked like fire inside of what looked like cracks. You could see small pieces falling off of it in flames and you could hear what sounded to me like a blow torch burning. It was moving slow enough that i saw my friend from across the street and ran out to see her. She and her dad were watching it, too. We were amazed at what we were watching. We stood there and watched as it disappeared over the horizon. It was traveling from SE to the NW. This seemed to take at least a 1-2 minutes. I will never forget it and have never talked to anyone else since that time that could tell me what it was. It was not in the newspaper or on TV that i could find. I was 11-12 at the time. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen and I am always looking at the sky at night. You never know what might be out there. I believe if if it had hit the earth it would have been devastating.
A ‘typical’ meteor is said to be about the size of a grain of sand. Fireballs (also called bolides), which is what I think you’re describing, are seen* thousands of times each year and, while larger, are still pretty small (maybe pebble size, but almost always smaller than a basketball).
*the Wiki link claims that there are actually around 500,000 annually but most are not observed for a variety of reasons
A couple years off, but Comet Ikeya–Seki (1965) was one of the brightest comets of the past thousand years. It was bright enough to been seen in daylight.
I missed the 1966 meteor, but my sister saw it and told me about it. Don’t remember exactly when it was, but we were still living in MI so it had to have been before Jan 67, when I moved to IL.
I saw it right after the sun went down and we were being called in for dinner. It could have been 1966 which would put me in the third grade. I saw it, then heard it rumbling across the sky from south to north I lived 30 miles east of Manhattan at that time in Wantagh. I remember thinking to myself, “why is the sun up again and moving across the sky?”. That was the size of it, it could have been the moon. It’s absolutely incredible to me that a million people didn’t see this thing as it must have crossed right over Kennedy airport!
I must have been one of the lucky few because I saw something like that in eastern Belgium in the late 80s.
Me and my dad were out in our garden looking at the stars. It must have been around 9-10pm. We turned back towards our house to go back inside as it was getting cold when we saw this bright light zapping across the sky right above our house. It was an intensely white, roundish shape with a trail that turned to bright green just before disappearing.
We’d seen plenty of shooting stars before and we immediately agreed that this was different, unusual and very impressive. It was brighter, seemed bigger and lasted longer.
I too was also 9 years old in Southeastern Pa. in 1966 and have vivid memories of this thing too.There for a while though I was beginning to doubt if I had really seen it or was just a figment of my imagination because I couldn’t find anything anywhere related to it on line or through local newspaper archives,till I found this Message Board. My memories are almost exactly the same as those posted.It was early evening,still bright out.I was outside playing with friends when I heard something like a low flying jet off in the distance.I remember seeing a long smoking tail behind what appeared to be a giant green glowing boulder with white,yellow and orange sparks flying off of it.Quite unforgettable!As it came closer I could hear popping and crackling noises coming from it as it flew almost directly overhead!It moved very slowly and low,so low that I remember seeing quite a bit of detail.It had a definite presence in the sky!I watched it from horizon to horizon for what seemed a long time till it was gone from sight.It was one of those things that your not sure it really happened after it was over.When I found this Message Board I just had to reply.Well that’s my story and thanks for listening.It,s true and really happened.I wish I could see it again! Kenny H.