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My wife and I were on our evening walk on January 19th, 2002 at around 6pm on a very clear, dark, cold night. When we saw this huge almost triangular red-orange object high to our left going at great speed at a high angle up over our left shoulders. For a moment l thought it might be an airline jet passenger plane on fire because it almost looked like it was in the process of exploding at one point, but then I quickly realised it could not possibly be anything man-made, whether passenger plane or military aircraft. Also it was way too bright and travelling too fast. It passed in a really long arc but the fieriness diminished as the arc dipped down in the sky towards the horizon and the colour gradually changed from fiery orange-red to a yellow-orange or even yellow colour. It left no trail that we could see and we heard no sound at all. We are both in our late 50s and we had never seen anything like it before. The path it cut in the sky seemed to imply it had passed over Tamworth, or at least Wilnecote, near Tamworth, passing perhaps between the skies of to the general East between the towns of Nuneaton and Hinckley. Our interest in astronomy is only at the level of basic- for example we have used Starry Night software on our PC and have astronomy apps on our phones, mostly just for observing planets and stars either with our naked eyes or good quality binoculars plus zoom camera (partly because, as a musicologist, I am a leading expert on the orchestral classical masterpiece 'The Planets' by Gustav Holst). Anyway, on returning home a few streets away from the viewing site on our walk, I checked my phone and computer to see if anyone else had witnessed what we had seen. So far, we haven't heard of any other reports, which we find astounding. But we nevertheless Googled for many videos of confirmed fireballs in recent years, and it completely matched what we had seen. I just wish I had had my phone's video camera to hand. Anyway, we feel very luck to have seen such a thing.. BTW - the 6pm timing could be out by around 5 minutes either direction (sadly, in all the excitement and amazement, we forget to note the exact time, but then knew it had happened around 6pm by the time we got home)..The whole sighting last between 20 and 25 seconds, I would estimate, but I think we may have witnessed two things in one: a fireball and a bolide. I say this because for the first couple of seconds the high-speed fiery red-orange glow was kind of oval with a short tail, but then it seem to explode fire and became bigger and more triangular, almost looking as if it had fiery after-burners in addition to the whole object looking fiery (hence, why I momentarily thought it might be a passenger jet on fire and in the process of exploding). But then the further away it shot, and the smaller and more yellow it became to our eyes, it returned to being more like an oval with a short tail (comet-like). If there is anything anyone knows or can help us shed light as to exactl |
