A meteor is the most probable cause of a bright, colourful fireball witnessed by people in a wide swath of the southwestern United States, according to Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL. Residents from Southern California to Arizona to Las Vegas reported seeing a streak of light move rapidly from west to east around 7:45 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, Sept. 14. Read more
In a hunt that makes the proverbial needle in a haystack look like easy quarry, scientists have begun the search for remains of a suspected meteor which lit up the skies over the south-western US this week. Read more
What exactly was seen in the skies across the Southwestern U.S. Wednesday night? Was it a meteor, a falling satellite or, perhaps, something more mysterious? A streak of light that some are describing as a fireball, was seen shooting across the night sky and law enforcement and media from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Las Vegas were fielding calls of the reported sighting. Read more
Reported meteor was probably small piece of asteroid
The fireball seen streaking across the southwestern U.S. sky Wednesday night probably incinerated before striking the ground, an expert told The Times. Thousands of people from Phoenix to Los Angeles reported seeing what they believed was a bright-green meteor. But the object was probably a "near-earth asteroid" no bigger than a basketball, said Don Yeomans, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory Fellow who manages NASA's Near Earth Object Program. Read more
A real UFO flew over the Coachella Valley on Wednesday. It was most likely a fireball - a fragment of an asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere - a NASA scientists said late Wednesday. Experts and residents offered conflicting explanations, though, about the bright light the streaked through the Southwest. Residents spotted it soaring across the sky about 7:45 p.m. It looked like a falling star that continued crashing toward a mountain, a Desert Sun reporter in Palm Springs said. Read more