Without plugging the date, time, and location into an astronomy program to see if the stars were right [del]for the rise of mighty Cthulhu[/del] for the shower to be in the right position, you might have possibly saw an especially bright June Lyrid.
I can’t get the web page for NASA’s sky observing network to load right now for some reason, but you can see the daily report at Space Weather. For July 19th, they saw 46 fireballs. Maybe if the site is accessible later, you will be able to find your July 18th one. You could report it here.
I’m thinking we saw the same thing. I was seven years old then, and what you describe matches what I saw pretty closely. Mine made a noise, though. I was about three miles east of the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood, just south of the Playboy Mansion.
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I’m thinking we saw the same thing. I was seven years old then, and what you describe matches what I saw pretty closely. Mine made a noise, though. I was about three miles east of the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood, just south of the Playboy Mansion.
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It could have been the same bolide, but it doesn’t have to be. These things aren’t as rare as some people seem to think. For instance, this site has 419 sightings with at least 5 reporters each just for the US and just for the year 2016.
I can’t reread this entire thread until tonight. Do bolides make a noise? Mine made a classic Doppler-shifted noise, just like a bomb dropping in a Roadrunner cartoon.
They can make noise, and nobody knows exactly why (here is a recent idea.)
(That is the weird “hearing it the same time you see it” noise that doesn’t make traditional sense–if it is big enough, it can also make the normal “see it, then hear it some time later” noise. Look at this compiled video of Chelyabinsk fotage–in the long clip with the woman giving the voiceover, she has been looking at the smoke trail for a minute or two before the sound reaches her location–and is loud enough to set off car alarms.)
eta: if you look at the reports list I linked earlier, there are columns where the submitters enter wherther or not they heard a delayed sound or a concurrent sound associated with the bolide. There are a lot more nos than yesses, but there are yesses.
I do picture of the object quite frequently in my mind flat the front and fireball behind we sat at the traffic light and just stared at it it was amazing
Hey man, you don’t know how long I’ve been trying to find someone who saw the same thing I did. Do you think what you saw was around 1967 give or take a couple of years? It was at night, and I was in Hoboken, NJ, I saw around 4 or 5 colorful explosions in the northeastern sky, looking toward Manhattan, they looked like if you dropped some oil in water, they exploded and then just dissipated, then another would do the same thing, about 4 or 5 times. I never knew what the hell it was, it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. That’s awesome that you saw the same thing from Maryland? I’m guessing, if that’s the same Bethesda I’m thinking of. Cool, thanks.
Little late in responding, but… I too am looking for some validation. It was in the 60s. I was just a kid -9 yrs(?). We were in a symphony (I think), out door amphitheater, concert. We saw this meteor, or fireball, coming right at us. Of course, it went over us and disappeared behind us. Scared the crap out of me. Next day our dad, reading the newspaper, confirms it was a meteor.
We were in California…if my memory serves me right.
I did a little googling, but the description is really too vague to pull up anything. An exact date would help, but I realize you aren’t likely to be able to supply one. No reason to question that it happened, though–bright meteors happen somewhere or another a few times a year. All I can tell you is whatever you saw didn’t put any known rocks on the ground, because California has only fiveconfirmed falls, the earliest from 1973.
Just noting that the OP was in D.C. So that fireball clearly was different from yours.
Which, as noted here and there, makes “validation” of such events quite difficult. I saw one in the mid 60s in yet another state. So that was a different one. Etc.
If you saw a report in the newspaper, then that’s the best resource for finding out more. See if the newspaper archives are online somewhere and searchable. (Certain ones are publicly available, others are pay only, and many are not available at all.)
We lived in Cheltenham Md. It was a summer night. I was playing ball in the street. I ran to get a ball that went passed me and looked up and saw this massive ball of fire traveling through the sky. It wasn’t light a streaking Star, but like a massive burning ball of fire. We watched it go across the sky and out of sight. It was the evening, I would say 6: to 7:00 or that’s what my recollection would be. It was an amazing sight.