Green/Blue streak in the sky spotted all over east coast including Upstate South Carolina

Are there any pictures of the streak?

Hi there, are you positive it was a meteor, because my sister and many other people saw it too, an almost neon greenish light in the south-west. We live in Belgium.


Greetings

Originally posted by burntheships
Did you check the RSOE link, this was spotted over many states. It must have lasted visual longer
than a few seconds.

Yes, I had a look. Thanks.

It's not uncommon that bright fireballs are seen across multiple states. Firstly this is because when they first become visible, they are at around 100 Km altitude, and secondly because they are so bright. I don't think there is any reason to suspect that witness reports of the duration are off the mark, unless there is wide variation.

In case you have not already seen it, more reports can be found here.

Originally posted by burntheships

I have yet to find a verified photo. The one from WeatherSpace.com is shown as dated January 19th, but it does not state where that picture came from.

If that is an actual picture from last night, it seems to match the long train photo you posted.

I'd be weary of any photos that have little or no information accompanying them. I've seen many fake or misleading photographs crop up after reports of large fireballs in previous years.

Photographs of actual fireballs tend to be quite rare since the event itself is so fleeting, but photographs of the resulting train/trails are a little more common since people have had a bit more time by this point to get out their cameras and snap a photograph. We may yet see photographs or footage surface of one of these events, but I would not hold my breath. If one of the all sky camera meteor networks had caught anything I would probably have heard by now, but so far I have not heard anything, so it's not looking likely.

Originally posted by netwarrior
The one I saw was blue/green. No trail, though. It was moving way too slowly for that.

Too slow to be a meteor

It's likely what you saw was a bit of space-junk reentering the atmosphere (as I said in your thread), but the slowest meteors can also be very slow, and hard to tell from space-junk based on speed alone.

Re-reading your thread again, I noticed that you also stated that you thought the object was low in altitude, and you also estimated the size and apparent velocity. The trouble with estimates of the type you made is that there are no reference points or cues which can give you clues as to what the true size/velocity/distance is.

Our brains are wired up in a way that is geared to everyday life on the ground, where there tend to be more visual cues which enable our brains to work out distance/velocity/size with a fair degree of accuracy. However, without those cues, our brains have to make assumptions, and these are based on the assumption that what we are seeing is in a common every day situation (ie on the ground), which is not the case, and consequently, our estimations are usually off by a long way.

People seeing bright meteors and fireballs are especially vulnerable to this effect/optical-illusion, since our brains use brightness as a cue for the size of an object - a bright object/light is perceived as being close, where as a dim object/light is perceived as being far off. BUT, fireballs can be exceptionally bright, even though they are high up in the atmosphere and a long way off. The brightness also gives us cues as to the size of an object, since the brighter it is, the larger it looks, but this is also misleading when it comes to meteors.

Also, when we see something that appears to be "only just above the horizon", this is also quite misleading, since in the case of a meteor, it can be high up in the atmosphere, but if you are a few hundred miles away from it, it will look like it is close to the ground because Earth's surface is curved and not flat. For example, if you have ever watched the Moon rise above the horizon, you know that it is many, many Km away, but it still looks as if it's hovering just above the horizon.

All of the above contributes to people saying things like "I saw it fall just over the hill" or "it came down just beyond those trees", but we know this can not be true since we know that even large meteoroids are usually slowed down to the point where they are no longer luminous below 30 Km altitude in the vast majority of cases.

Since we are all hard-wired in the same way, we see reports like this with virtually every large fireball that is seen by many people over a wide area. If it was the case that people were actually seeing fireballs close to the ground, then you would expect them to be heard since to be luminous a meteor has to be traveling much faster than the speed of sound, and any object exceeding the speed of sound will produce a sonic boom/booms. You can usually tell if you are close to a meteorite fall-site since booms would likely be felt/heard in the surrounding area.

Originally posted by reD3vil
Are there any reports of satellites entering the atmosphere? Perhaps this was simply just an old satellite crashing back into earth? while burning up in the atmosphere.

No reports that I am aware of. Junk is usually ruled out quickly in such cases. The descriptions don't fit with space junk though. Space junk is slow and long lasting in most cases. It also tends to visibly fragment. All the reports I have seen say that it was short lived, and there has been no mention of any fragmentation.

Originally posted by 7thsignofthezodiac
Hi there, are you positive it was a meteor, because my sister and many other people saw it too, an almost neon greenish light in the south-west. We live in Belgium.

It would not have been the same event (you are a bit too far away), but it sounds like you also saw a bright meteor. What time was it when you saw the meteor?

It may be a related event that you saw, but bright fireballs are not all that rare, so there is a good chance what you saw was not directly related to the events being discussed in this thread.

There has been a major increase in the number of fireballs over the past six years; you'll find the data summarized here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

The simple fact is that the average number of fireballs reported to the American Meteor Society has increased from 466 (1.28 per day) in 2005, to 948 in 2010 (2.94 per day), and 89 so far this year (4.94 per day). With the increase in numbers has come a proportionate increase in average size.

reply to post by LeTan


That sounds more like a transformer blowing than a meteor. They can also produce bright flashes that can be seen for many Km in most cases. As there was a blackout at the same time, it would seem to be the most likely explanation in this case.

The American Meteor Society has received 39 reports of seven separate fireball events over North America on January 19th. Two of these were widely seen events. Both of these events occurred near 21:00 EST. The first occurred over the northern Midwest and southern Canada. There is some wide scattered timing of this event and the possibility exists that this may be more than one fireball. The second occurred over the southeastern states and was seen from Florida north to North Carolina. There is good agreement for the timing plus it seems to been a bit brighter with a majority of those reporting that the peak brightness exceeded that of the full moon.
For more details please visit the AMS website at

Refer to reports 83 and 86.

www.amsmeteors.org...

Some reports say this exceeded the brightness of the moon!

David Batch, director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University did not see the green light in the sky and so he can only speculate what it was. But he has seen shooting stars and meteors of every color.

The fact that it was seen to come down diagonally is typical of them, he said.

“It often appears horizontal unless you are right in line of its path,” he said. “There is a sideways velocity.”

“Bigness” he said, doesn’t count. Brightness does.

The average shooting star seen in the night sky is likely the size of a grain of sand. The light comes from the air surrounding it and its speed, Batch said. Although most meteors are whitish or faintly yellow, colors of green, red, or orange aren’t unheard of.

Green however, is somewhat rare.

Something that can light up the whole sky is likely the size of a fist, he said..

“For the color to have been seen so vibrant, it had to have been quite bright,” he said. “Stars are colored but color can be detected only in the bright ones.”

Meteor or not, it was eerie.

“I saw this, swear to God,” Rachel Fussman McClintic of Mt. Pleasant, wrote in an e-mail. “I was driving home from a meeting last night at this time. It WAS green...and I was driving down Mission, southbound, toward campus.

www.themorningsun.com...

Wow. Thats really cool. Havent seen anything in main stream news sites. They are to busy reporting more interesting things. Like George clooney on marriage. Come on CNN if we want to know about that crap we would watch rubbish like the e channel. They should be telling us what is really going on.

Meteor over alberta! (Best footage)



Meteor Over Alberta, Canada The Great Daylight 1972 Fireball

Is this what caused the goo? Any connection?


Green/Yellow Goo Falls from skies

reply to post by zorgon


It does look like an aurora. Is it possible that with the shifting of the earths axis we will begin to see the northern lights and such from the midwest too? Dont mean to sound dumb but just asking as it is something I have always wanted to see with my own 3 eyes.

Also how long before this begins to affect us?
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/d61a483390a0.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by antar


I'd say it's already effecting us.

reply to post by Smell The Roses


Good grief yet another odd event and the 'experts' say

"Ornithologists at Cornell agree the goo could be bird droppings... "


We are DOOMED... because if these 'experts' are our front line... we are so TOAST

Originally posted by apacheman
There has been a major increase in the number of fireballs over the past six years; you'll find the data summarized here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

The simple fact is that the average number of fireballs reported to the American Meteor Society has increased from 466 (1.28 per day) in 2005, to 948 in 2010 (2.94 per day), and 89 so far this year (4.94 per day). With the increase in numbers has come a proportionate increase in average size.

An increase in the number of reports does not equal an increase in in the actual number of events.

You would expect more people to make reports as more people find out that there is somewhere where they can make reports, and as people become more aware of these events happening. Both these factors are fed by the growth of the internet and a notable increase in media coverage over the years. That in turn is since we have had an explosion in the number of cameras, and therefore footage of these previously very rarely captured events. Without footage, the mainstream media often don't cover these events as it's not much of a story without the all important footage.

All of this is changing gradually with time, and over the years we will continue to see more and more reports even though the rates of these objects remains relatively constant over time. Besides the reports from the general public, we also have data from other sources (meteor camera networks and amateur/professional meteor observers for example) which we can compare the data from the public with, which is why we know that there has not been a real increase in these events over the years.

reply to post by zorgon


Lol yeah I know, I feel the same way.

Now we are at the point of blaming bird poop.

Person = "OMG guys look its a UFO!!!!!!!!!"
Government = "Weather balloon theory doesn't carry much weight anymore. We will feed them the bird poop story!!!!"

Just stuning, AMAZING what a rock coming
from outerspace into our atmosphere can really do.
I love to see a *shooting star*
I wish I could get my hands on one.
You know they are magnetic!
Would be one hell of a refigerator decoration!

reply to post by Smell The Roses


Well you do know where the term "swamp gas" came from right?

Its all "swamp gas"...

Dr. Hynek,
the one who debunked many legitimate UFO incidents when he functioned
as the scientific member of the very public Project BLUEBOOK. Dr. Hynek
is the man responsible for the infamous 'it was only swamp gas'
statement.

www.thewatcherfiles.com...