More than 100 people from New Jersey to North Carolina reported seeing a bright streak of light with a tail shooting through the night sky late Friday.
“It looked a lot brighter than a shooting star,” German Osorio wrote on InsideNova.com’s Facebook page. “Maybe only a few hundred feet up and it had that color that propane gets when it burns.”
Kseniya Ledbetter of Fairfax said she spotted the fireball as she drove along Braddock Road east of Va. 28 around 10:15 p.m. “The most beautiful thing I ever saw! It was changing colors and then went out right above Hampton Chase neighborhood.”
NASA, the FAA and the National Weather Service have yet to weigh in on the sky phenomena, but the website “The Latest Worldwide Meteor/Meteorite News” had more than 100 posts Saturday about the fireball from people in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Maryland and North Carolina.
The American Meteor Society had 56 reports of a fireball sighting, again from New Jersey to North Carolina. Most reports came from Virginia and Maryland.
“Big and blue with a red tail. Looked like a meteor to us,” Jessica Guido of Stafford wrote on our Facebook page.
Witnesses reported seeing the fireball between 10 and 10:30 p.m. All described it as very bright and very low.
“It was awesome, bright as could be with a hint of blue green,” wrote Michele Janke, who saw the fireball along Prince William Parkway.
According to the American Meteor Society, fireballs are very bright meteors, about as bright as Venus in the morning and evening skies. About 10 to 15 meteorites fall to Earth each day, but sighting are rare since streaking fireballs often fall over the ocean, or during daylight hours when they can’t be seen.
Fireballs are sometimes accompanied by sonic booms, as happened in Texas on Wednesday.
More than 200 people from Texas to Oklahoma reported a streaking fireball that night. A dash-mounted camera in a police cruiser captured the meteor’s descent. Many also reported a loud boom as the fireball approached the ground. Watch the video here, courtesy of WFAA TV in Dallas-Forth Worth.
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