Huge Planet like meteor streaks accross sky

I frequent a disney message board and this morning I woke up to this (ironic i know) -

"Did anybody see the meteor last night around 10:30ish?"

We were having a campfire last night with clear skies and sometime around 10:30ish we look up and see this huge meteor going across the sky. It was preceeded by 2 or 3 little ones that looked liked regular shooting stars, exept slower. The big one was yellow with a long, long tail. I'm telling you, it looked exactly like the scene in Armegeddon when they are watching the meteors go across the sky. There were 4 adults and 2 kids who saw this and it took a good 15-20 seconds to go across the backyard sky. Actually, I was kinda freaked and one little boy with us started panicking. The only thing I could find on it was the annual Bootid Meteor Shower from the tail of comet Pons-Winecke. Maybe we saw the actual comet, that is why it was huge, yellow and slow. When I say big, I mean like planet bright/big vs. star bright/big.

Well, anyone else see this last night? It was freaky, but cool.

I've seen other meteor showers and if you don't actually SEE the "shooting star", you miss it. This was so slow and bright, we all just followed it across the sky, as if it was in slow motion. It was as slow as a plane crossing the sky!! But no plane, that's for sure... it had a huge tail behind it and three smaller meteors w/tails in front of it. I swear it was exactly like Armegeddon.

That person was from West New York. This next one from Pennsylvania.

"YES!!!!! We saw it!!

We thought we were either spotting some secret government experiment or simply going crazy!!!

We were heading home and I made DH pull over and get out of the car. By the time it got to central PA, it must of broken up if it was a meteor. We saw a group of seven or eight bright streaks followed by a dimmer group of three or four. They were moving pretty slow, almost looked like a jet's pace, but a bit slower. They were going from west to east!!

Did you read anything about this before hand or today??

And this one I dont know where they live.

OMGosh Karen. That;s so wild that you saw it too. Tom and I were sitting in the hot tub when I said "What the hell is that!! Quick turn around!!" Tom caught it just in time. There were 3 (1 VERY bright and 2 small ones).

There are very few new stories about it and one media story is saying it was space junk, but IIIII dont know... The only reason they changed their space junk story in Washington because some hit peoples houses!!!

spaceweather.com...

Don't let that change your mind. I dont believe it for a minute, but I have to post all the info not just some of it.


I never expected the disney message board to pick up on anything.. This is getting freaky.

well the asteroid Itokawa did it's Near Earth pass last night at approximately 5 Lunar Distances. Itokawa is a sizeable asteroid and it was really close by, so that could be the huge object.

Sounds like it could be a satellite re-entry. Meteors are way to fast to last 20-30 seconds.

Check Nasa page an see if a satellite came back last night..

some russian equipment burned up over the eastern seaboard late last night. here's an ATS thread on it: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Mynaeris
well the asteroid Itokawa did it's Near Earth pass last night at approximately 5 Lunar Distances. Itokawa is a sizeable asteroid and it was really close by, so that could be the huge object.

no. even when an asteroid comes between the earth and moon it is still not visible because of it's small size. the only way to see an asteroid is when it occults, or passes in front of, another object. most common this is with stars. for more information visit: www.occultations.org...

EDIT: added link

[edit on 6/27/2004 by cmdrkeenkid]

Sounds like a fairly large meteorite... "large," here being a relative term. Ones that make spectacular multi-state fireballs are unusual but far more common than you'd think. And yes, they are occasionally mistaken for UFOs. There's some very famous footage of one that was initially identified as a UFO spacecraft.

How big are those that create the fireballs? The June one that startled Washington state was about the size of a small house. It didn't land intact; as with most of these, it exploded miles above the ground:
seattletimes.nwsource.com...

Originally posted by Mynaeris
well the asteroid Itokawa did it's Near Earth pass last night at approximately 5 Lunar Distances. Itokawa is a sizeable asteroid and it was really close by, so that could be the huge object.

Actually, no.

That's like blaming a car accident in New York City on someone driving down the road in Lexington, Kentucky.

Itokawa is smallish. It's a LONG way away (even though they classify it as a "Near Earth Asteroid." It is, as you said, about 5 times as far away as the moon is (that's at its CLOSEST approach.) These NEO's don't just suddenly switch directions and orbits and attack the Earth like a bunch of kamakazi mosquitoes.

I saw it

I was in my friends backyard late in the evening around that exact time pretty much, about 15 minutes to 11:00pm, when he pointed something out in the sky.

If I had to describe it, i'd say it looked like a huge red/orange flaming ball, with a really long red/orange trail behind it. It seemed to have been going down at an almost 45 degree angle, moving really slow. The whole thing lasted about 20 seconds, then I lost sight of it.

I didn't see anything trailing beside it, like other smaller fragments of whatever it was. Just that one.

Click here to see a picture of what I'd say looks closest to what I saw. The only difference between this picture and what I saw is the following:

What I saw was going down from right to left, from where I saw it. In addition, the colours...this picture shows a white trail and object, while what I saw was orange/red, like it was on fire.

Colors suggest strongly that it was re-entry of satellite or rocket booster.

Originally posted by anjeeeee
If I had to describe it, i'd say it looked like a huge red/orange flaming ball, with a really long red/orange trail behind it. It seemed to have been going down at an almost 45 degree angle, moving really slow. The whole thing lasted about 20 seconds, then I lost sight of it.

That reminds me of the time recently when most of us Texans could see the Space Shuttle re-entry... no not that one. It was very fireballish, orange, red, and yellow; and lasted a good while right before sunset. A lot of people called all the radio stations reporting a UFO (which it was to them). They acted like they didn't know what was going on to the callers, very humourous.
That's to be expected, as it filled more of the sky than any other object I've ever seen, disregarding Sun and Moon. It was very majestic. Someone else here has seen a re-entry as well and will verify that's exactly what it looks like.

I drive around everynight and see shooting stars/meteors all the time out here; and some of the slowest ones I've seen last no more than, if even, two seconds. Twenty seconds, that's not a shooting star.

BTW: Numbers are only usefull in relation to something. 45 degree angle to what?, the horizon, towards you, away. Any thing could fall from the sky and be at a 45 degree angle to something or another. Also, where (approximately) are you at.

I saw a shuttle rentry one morning. I live in south Texas. I was car pooling with my wife at the time. So that would be between 94 - 96 time frame. The orange tail was very long. All I could say was "What the hell is that"?
It was stunning. It was all over the radio and news that morning.

When I was 15 I had a paper route in Tucson. It was about 5:30 AM when my brother, myself, and my friend (all paper boys) where taking the trash from our paper stacks to his garbage cans in the alley. We turned the corner towards his back yard and the whole sky lit up. We all looked up and saw a large blue and red object coming down from space. Then we heard a large "Poof" and it was gone except for a long fading white trail.
Later that night the newspaper reported that that Meteor was the closest to hit the city, ever. I'll never forget those two events.

It's a draco reptilian observation station with millions of reptoid warriors onboard! Ahh!! The humanity!!!











Ahem... Sarcasm...

Originally posted by icelid

BTW: Numbers are only usefull in relation to something. 45 degree angle to what?, the horizon, towards you, away. Any thing could fall from the sky and be at a 45 degree angle to something or another. Also, where (approximately) are you at.

I like in Etobicoke, it's about 25 minutes away from downtown Toronto (heading west).

I was standing in my friends backyard, looking South, as I saw it. 45 degrees is just a guess, it was probably more like 35...anyways it was coming from top right, to the bottom left...this info should give people a better idea of the siting, coupled together with what i already said describing the actual thing.

Sorry for the super long wait for a response...well, it's not like you were waiting for it, this thread probably just faded into the distance with time..

That's apparently the only picture anyone's taken of what we saw..

Doesn't really look like what I saw, but it must be it...two things like this in the same night, i doubt

The picture is also of a pretty low res

One thing that i don't get is why you dont see the long tail in the picture...
that was one of the things i noticed about it the most...it was huge

I thought some meteors / meterorites could 'graze' the atmosphere for quite a few seconds before skipping back off again.

I've seen a few awesome meteors. I saw one explode like an aerial bomb high in the sky and light everything up for a few seconds until the fragments burnt out.

That picture looks like it was taken from a mobile phone camera.

This probably explains more what it was...

Asteroid 2004 PT42 is flying past Earth this week. It's big, about 1 mile wide, and just bright enough to photograph through backyard telescopes. Here's a short video captured on August 17th by Mike Holloway of Van Buren, Arkansas

From spaceweather.com... And just scroll down its right below the earthshine news.

didn't someone post somewhere that Nostradums predicted a comet would hit Athens on August 19th?

I live in NYC and saw nothing - I'm always missing out on the good stuff.

here you find another thread were people discuss the comet that will hit us today.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 19/8/2004 by rai76]

I think he predicted something like "The sky will burn at (900 degress?not sure) at latitude (not sure) and longitude (not sure)" and there was more to this quatrain but i cant remember off the top of my head.

I doubt very much that a comet would hit Athens today but if he did predict something like a comet hitting Athens it would probably a missile of some sort eg rocket.

I live in England so i miss everything i wanted to see the perseid meteor showers but i couldnt because of the clouds!

Before anyone goes and says this has anything to do with the notrguessius/athens thing, Look at the date this post started. This was witnessed back in late June and has nothing to do with anything going on now.

This does remind me of when I was younger, about 15 years ago. I have also seen something that appeared to be a meteor but was way too large and too slow for what I have known a meteor to be. I was around the age of 10 at the time this happened so I had no way to really find out what it was or could have been since myself and a friend were the only ones to see it out of the group that we were with.

I know that people want to pass it off as a comet, meteor, or satellite re-entry but I can not believe that any of those could have been what I saw. It was too close and too large to be any of those. I can clearly remember it being a comparable visual size to a full moon.

I saw a meteoroid go by about a foot or two over my house when I was about nine. This was twilight time in the summertime. My father and a next door neighbor were outside talking, we looked up because it was all of a sudden lighter and heard a swish sound, then there was a meteoroid about the size of a basketball flying right over my house. It had a bluish-white tail, fairly long, and you could see little crators in the object. It was not going too fast to see this. I believe that they slow down the closer that they are. Anyway, it landed about 5 miles away in a little boy's yard that I went to elementary school with. He gave the meteorite to the Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History. I'll never forget that. It was the neatest thing that I've ever seen.

Tiza