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Remarks |
My gaze was first drawn to the sky by fast, white flashing which I mistook for lightning reflected off the trees/ground/house next to me, even though I knew there was zero cloud cover and lightning was highly improbable. I immediately looked straight up. My initial impression on seeing this fireball was that I was seeing a stray firework that had never exploded and was errantly shooting over me. In other words, there was an illusion of very little distance between myself and the phenomenon, as the speed of the fireball was such that it appeared as though the object was only several hundred feet in the air, moving at several hundred miles per hour. The fireball varied widely in light intensity, producing flashes that rivaled the brightness of very close lighting, perhaps 5 or 6 flashes per second. I noticed that the intensity of the short trail appeared positively correlated to the intensity of these flashes. As such the trail appeared not as a single straight extension from the back of the fireball but as a series of short tails that varied slightly in their position behind the fireball as it traveled. The feeling that I was seeing a stray pyrotechnic was overwhelming. In fact, I doubted that this was a real meteor until I heard a boom several seconds later. The boom was witnessed by myself and a friend who I called out of the house, and sounded as though it came from a direction relative to the fireball\'s last appearance. It did not sound like it came from the sky, but rather from a point on the eastern horizon past my line of sight (and also obstructed from my view). |
