Fireball Sparks Speculation in South

Giddy Southerners speculated Wednesday that everything from falling rocket parts to a Russian experiment caused a fiery object to streak through the night sky. Scientists said it was a meteor.

“It was a fireball . . . an incredibly spectacular meteor,” said Ed Albin, an astronomer at the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta.

People in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee reported seeing a large burning object flash across the sky Tuesday night, and some said they heard loud booms at the same time.

John Wilson, a Georgia State University astronomer who saw it, said it broke into three pieces, all burning.

Witnesses called radio talk shows Wednesday morning to report seeing the object drop near their houses. Georgia State took one report seriously enough to send two astronomers to a suburban home to examine a rock.

“It doesn’t look like a normal rock and it wasn’t there last night,” Michel Lowther of Smyrna said before scientists checked it out. “It looks like a lava rock in a gas grill, only with rust on it and a little light ash.”

University scientists said the beige object is an ordinary rock.

John Dolusic of Tupelo, Miss., said he thought what he saw was the huge space mirror being set up Wednesday by Russian scientists in an experiment to reflect the sun’s rays to dark parts of Earth.

“Maybe something fell,” he said. “Or maybe while they’re lifting that mirror up, it accidentally reflected some of the sun.”

Others thought it was a piece of a navigational satellite that the Air Force launched Tuesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

But Bob Roper, a Georgia Tech astronomer, said radar around the world tracks all man-made objects in space and would have reported debris from any of them.

A meteor is a piece of rock that catches fire as it falls through Earth’s atmosphere. It is called a meteorite after hitting the ground.

Meteors are common but usually are small. People away from city lights generally can see five to 10 small meteors an hour every night, Roper said.