At around 8 p.m. Friday night, a meteor flashed across the East Coast skies, with witnesses reporting sightings from North Carolina to Maine. People in the tiny states of Delaware and Maryland seem to have gotten best look (The first video was recorded by the security camera at a car dealership in Seaford, Delaware), but the fireball was also clearly visible above New York:
NASA spokesman Bill Cooke said that what people saw appeared to be “a single meteor event” with a brightness equal to that of a full moon. “The thing is probably a yard across,” he said. “We basically have [had] a boulder enter the atmosphere over the northeast.” Astronomer Derrick Pitts thinks that the “space rock” was more modest in size — he compared it to ” a softball or volleyball” — and explained that experts “can’t be 100 percent certain of what it was, unless it actually fell to the ground and we could actually track the trajectory,” though he added that the hundreds of descriptions received by the American Meteor Society and others were “absolutely consistent” with a meteor. It’s probably better not to know for sure, since the last meteor to touch Earth injured 1,200 people in Russia earlier this year.
