A bright green fireball zipping across the night sky at 58,000 mph was seen in four states before it disappeared above a city park in Texas, NASA officials say.
The meteor was first spotted 54 miles over the town of Malakoff, Texas, at 10:32 p.m. Friday, June 21, but it covered a great distance very quickly, NASA’s Meteor Watch said in a Facebook post. It traveled 61 miles northwest in 3.8 seconds, disintegrating over Everglade Park in Dallas.
Nearly 100 people reported seeing the “extremely green” fireball streaking overhead, from south Texas to northern Oklahoma, and across Arkansas and Louisiana, according to the American Meteor Society.
Fireballs can appear in a variety of colors depending on what they’re made out of, according to the AMS, and green usually means a lot of nickel is present.
An Oklahoma man driving home to Yukon witnessed a “bright ball … so close I thought it was a missile,” he wrote in a report.
“I was ready to hear an explosion,” he said, but the flaming object didn’t make a sound.
People weren’t the only ones to take notice, according to a woman in Grand Prairie, Texas.
“Dogs in the neighborhood barked while it fell,” then went completely silent as soon as the “super bright” ball burned up and vanished, she wrote.
Some witnessed the fireball breaking apart as it flew by, sending “broken orange chunks” in its wake.
“It was incredible,” a woman from Austin wrote. “I had never seen something shoot across the sky and explode like that.”
Aside from numerous witness accounts and some video, there’s likely little to nothing left of the fireball, according to NASA.
“The object producing the fireball was too small and too fast to have generated any meteorites,” the agency said.
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