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Fireball sightings stretch to Wyoming

On June 2, Dayne LaHooe was driving on a gravel road through Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming when something caught his eye.

"It was the most spectacular thing I've ever seen - I have never seen anything like it before. It shot across the sky and looked like it landed right behind the Tetons" - Dayne LaHooe .

LaHooe, who works in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, figured it was about 9:30 p.m., because the stars hadn't even come out yet.

From Minnesota
Errol and Chris Johnson, who are from Chewelah, Wash., were in Roseau, Minnesota, on June 2. They were celebrating Errol's uncle Glen Johnson's 86th birthday. It was about 11:30 p.m. and Errol and about five other family members were sitting in the breezeway of his uncle's home when they heard some distant booming noises.

"My wife said it sounded like a baseball bat hitting the side of the house - like a sonic boom, I thought. Almost immediately, I saw two large fireballs with tails fly by, moving from the south-southeast as they appeared to descend to the north. As far as the angle off of the horizon, I am thinking I had to be looking up about 60 to 75 degrees as I looked directly east" - Errol Johnson.

Using Google Earth, Johnson was able to find the exact longitude and latitude of where he was standing when he saw the fireballs, which were 48 degrees, 50 minutes, 34.68 seconds north latitude and 95 degrees, 45 minutes, 38.84 seconds west longitude.

Over in North Dakota
At the same time that Johnson saw the fireball, Leann Weber was in a tractor cultivating a field about 3 miles north of Cando, N.D. It was about midnight and there was no moon.

"All of a sudden, the sky just lit up. As it was falling, you could see debris coming off it and it started breaking apart. I've never seen anything like it, and probably will never see any like it again. I guess it's a good reason to keep cultivating late at night" - Leann Weber .

She said the fireball stayed in the sky for about a minute.

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Blobrana


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The Manitoba Museum has been flooded with phone calls from people who spotted a strange object in the sky.

Resident astronomer Scott Young said the museum has received at least 100 calls about an eerie green light that appeared in the sky on Friday night. Young believes the object was either a small asteroid or a chunk of comet that shattered into several pieces after burning up in the Earth's atmosphere.

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Blobrana


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The mysterious light seen over the Northland on Friday night was an especially bright meteor seen in at least two states and Canada.

"Anyone who saw it should count themselves as lucky -- they are probably not going to see another one like that in their lifetime" - Scott Young.

Young is an astronomer and manager of the planetarium and science gallery at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. The museum is collecting reports of sightings of Friday's fireball, which travelled from south to north over the Northland about 11:35 p.m. Friday.

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According to witnesses, Friday's fireball broke into several pieces.
Many people compared it to fireworks travelling horizontally rather than vertically, and was visible for as long as 15 seconds. Many witnesses described the fireball as being green or bluish-green in colour (common for a stony meteor), turning to red near the end of its flight.

The fireball was seen from places such as Brandon, Manitoba (more than 100 miles west of Winnipeg), northwestern Lake of the Woods 37 (where it appeared to pass directly overhead and where a sonic boom was heard), Orr, Eveleth, Duluth, the Lake Mille Lacs area and Danbury, Wis.

94.70530W_49.04159N
Latitude 49.366675° Longitude -94.866928°

"There was a sonic boom heard over the Lake of the Woods area, and that generally means that it has penetrated very low into the atmosphere. If it does that, then generally pieces can survive" - Scott Young, astronomer and manager of the planetarium and science gallery at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg.

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Blobrana


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Manitoba Museum wants to hear from people who spotted "eerie green fire" in the sky late Friday.
Resident astronomer Scott Young said the spectacle occurred about 11:30 p.m. when a small asteroid or chunk of comet burned up in the Earth's atmosphere, shattering into several pieces.

A sonic boom could be heard in the Whiteshell area about five minutes later, meaning the object was "nice and low," Young said.

He said it was visible from Winnipeg as far east as Lake of the Woods, and some pieces may have made it to the ground.
Vaporising materials in the object, which burned up at 4,000 C to 5,000 C, produced the green colour.

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Wendy Zeka was travelling near the Orr Transfer Station, Minnesota, US, at 11:35 p.m. Friday when she saw a green object as large as the moon sailing across the treetops parallel to her car.

Zeka said the object emitted a tail of sparks before "disintegrating."
Zeka doesn't know what the object was.

"I've seen shooting stars, and no shooting star is green" - Wendy Zeka .

Andy Tingler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Duluth, said radar didn't show anything unusual in the sky over the Iron Range on Friday night. However, shooting stars, or meteors, are typically too small to be caught onscreen.
Tingler said the description of the object wasn't characteristic of a meteor, but he said he wouldn't rule out the possibility.

Some mysterious sky sightings get attributed to burning balls of swamp gas, but Howard Mooers, a geology professor at Minnesota Duluth, said it was "extremely unlikely" that this was the case.

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