A brilliant fireball streaked across the sky Tuesday evening, drawing almost 200 reports to the American Meteor Society from six states, with the heaviest concentration in Texas.
The event, logged by the society as 9570-2025, was spotted around 6:45 p.m. Central Time in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico.
Witnesses described a fast-moving object glowing in vivid blue-green-white hues.
The American Meteor Society is investigating reported sightings of the fireball by skygazers in Cedar Park, Dallas, Frisco, Fort Worth, Tyler, McKinney, and other Texas cities.
“I have witnessed multiple meteor showers and rocket launches. This was not a rocket. And was by far the biggest, brightest, fastest thing I’ve ever seen in the sky,” one observer from Nocona, Texas, reported to the society, per Fox 4 KDFW.
Another witness leaving a school parking lot in Oak Point, Texas, said the fireball appeared to drop straight down ahead of the car.
“We had just turned out of my son’s school parking lot heading west when this fireball dropped straight down out of the sky in front of us. It was large, bright, and glowing blue-green-white. It moved slower than a typical shooting star but still fast, and it was incredibly beautiful, it took our breath away,” the observer wrote.
A viewer in Mustang, Oklahoma, called it only the second fireball seen in a lifetime and compared its bright white descent to a green one spotted a decade earlier in Virginia.
The American Meteor Society classifies fireballs as meteors brighter than magnitude -4, roughly the brilliance of Venus at its peak. Some events escalate to bolides that explode with visible fragmentation.
Dashboard and coastal webcams recorded the meteor’s brief, colorful trail. One network suggested the object may have been an early arrival ahead of the Geminid meteor shower, which is expected to peak this weekend.
