Tasmanian police and firefighters are unable to explain the source of a beam of light which reportedly fell from the sky and formed a circle of fire in a Hobart suburb.

Early yesterday morning police and fire crews received calls from concerned residents in Carnegie Street at Claremont, who reported seeing a bright light igniting a fire in a nearby paddock.

Tasmania Fire Service officer Scott Vinen says the blaze was quickly put out, leaving an obvious burnt patch.

He says the bizarre incident has everyone baffled.

"Once we put the fire out, we kind of walked through the fire and tried to find something," he said.

"We thought a flare or something may have landed there, but we couldn't find any cause."

The Fire Service says it will not investigate further.

WDBJ7 has gotten several reports through social media of people seeing a fireball shoot across the sky Thursday night.

We have checked into the reports and found that the object, likely a meteorite, was visible from Virginia to North Carolina.

Mena Hobs saw it and posted this on the WDBJ7 Facebook page.

"Last night around 9:41 pm a huge ball of orange light in the sky. You could see it beyond Roanoke Electric Steel. It dropped below the horizon and appeared again briefly."

More than a dozen shared their story on the American Meteor Society website. The website tracks and archives fireball reports from around the country.

Meteors and fireballs are very common, and fall even during the day.

The term meteor actually refers to the streak of light caused by a piece of space debris burning up in the atmosphere. The pieces of debris are called meteoroids, and remnants of debris that reach the surface are called meteorites.

Another 'mystery boom' in the sky, this time over Vermont. The military claimed responsibility, but locals don't seem too convinced.

Surfside, Texas - Texans in the Houston area noticed a fiery glow light up the sky Wednesday morning.

Captain William Lowery was on his boat in the Freeport area when he saw a meteor fly across the sky in a brilliant orange flash around 3 a.m.

"Nothing like that magnitude," said Lowery. "I've seen shooting stars, but this lasted three to four minutes."

After the Russian meteor exploded across the sky, it prompted scientists to better identify large meteor and asteroid threats.

Source: KPRC/NBC

Tucson, Arizona - Something caused some shaking, rattling, and rolling over many parts of Tucson Wednesday night. It happened about 7:45 p.m.

Tucson News Now was inundated with calls from people asking what it was. We made calls to several law enforcement agencies and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. D-M says it was not one of their aircraft that caused a sonic boom.

Capt. Adam Goldberg from Northwest Fire District says all the area fire departments received about 100 calls. The Tucson Fire Department says most of their calls came from the west side of Tucson.

Tom Peine with the Pima County Sheriff's Department tweeted, "We checked with variety of places to include mines, DMAFB, Pinal Army Nat. Guard, TIA, SW Gas, El Paso Gas, TEP/So far all negative."

Kanawha emergency dispatchers were fielding dozens of Tuesday after a loud boom rocked several homes in Charleston and eastern Kanawha County.

Dispatchers began receiving calls a little before 5:30 p.m. from concerned residents wondering about the sound.

People in the Ariel Heights and Falling Run Road areas, both near Oakridge Drive, told dispatchers they heard a loud booming noise and felt their homes shake. Dispatchers said those callers reported their power still was on and they had not seen any smoke.

Callers reported hearing the sound on Garrison Avenue and feeling it in Fort Hill. Dispatchers said calls came in from all over the county but no one had been able to pinpoint where the noise came from or what caused it.

Dispatchers said first responders were on the lookout for anything that could have caused the noise but the source remained unknown.

A meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Charleston said there was a "zero percent" chance the sound was thunder and that the office had not received any reports of any possible earthquake.

In the fall of 2012, Red Pill Press published a book called The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes, by Laura Knight-Jadczyk. It is a collection of internet essays concerning the appearance of comets, asteroids, meteors and fireballs in our earth's history and the recurring nature of these celestial bodies in our solar system. This book has one essay that contains a thorough timeline of encounters with these astronomical objects recorded throughout history. Although not entirely exhaustive, as it is likely that many fireball and meteorite encounters were witnessed and not recorded in times past, the timeline is as complete as one will find by searching the records and literature of ancient cultures up to the present day.

This timeline is the subject of the video above, starting from 10700 BCE and the formation of the famous Carolina Bays, up to the very recent overhead bolide explosion witnessed in Chelyabinsk, Russia on February 15th, 2013. Set to classical music and using real-life video clips and images of comets and fireball sightings, Crowded Skies serves as a primer for the detailed analysis and meticulous research presented in Laura Knight-Jadczyk's work, including Secret History of the World and Comets and the Horns of Moses.

Rather than being a once in a millennial event, the author shows us how cyclical encounters with near-earth objects have had catastrophic consequences many times throughout history, and that we are overdue for another wave very soon. This is evidenced by the numerous fireball sightings and sonic booms that have increased dramatically in just the last ten years.

So, darken the lights, put your headphones on, play the video in full screen and enjoy the show!

© LunarMeteorite*Hunter / Google Earth

    

Initial Meteor Sighting Reports

27 February 2013 - Lucas, Wilmington, North Carolina 20:30

4- 5 seconds duration. South to north direction. Light green and yellow color. Brighter than Venus. I didn't see any fragmentation, but the tail was quite long.

27 February 2013 - Nick, Charlotte, NC 20:12

2-3 seconds duration. It travelled straight up to the horizon. Northwest to southeast direction. Blue colour, as bright as a car light. No tail and was about 1/4 the size of the moon.

A meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this month likely hit Earth after a long trip from beyond the orbit of Mars, scientists say.

Astronomers and the public were caught off guard by the Russian fireball, which damaged thousands of buildings and wounded more than 1,000 people when it detonated over the city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15.

But some YouTube-aided detective work suggests that the meteor's parent body belonged to the Apollo family of Earth-crossing asteroids, whose elliptical orbits take them farther than one Earth-sun distance (about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers) from our star at some point, researchers said.

The meteor that exploded over the steppes of southwestern Russia sent a low-frequency rumble bouncing through the Earth, giving scientists new clues about the biggest cosmic intruder in a century.

The big boom over Chelyabinsk on February 15 also produced a wave of sound thousands of times lower than a piano's middle C -- far below the range of human hearing, according to the international agency that watches for nuclear bomb tests. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization said that sound wave showed up on sensors from Greenland to Antarctica, making it the largest ever detected by its network.

Scientists then used that wave to calculate the size of the small asteroid that plunged to Earth, said Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer at Canada's University of Western Ontario.

The duration of the wave -- about 32 seconds -- let scientists estimate the energy of the blast at between 450 and 500 kilotons, the size of about 30 early nuclear bombs

From there, Brown said, they could calculate the size of the fireball; and using an estimate of the meteor's speed from the numerous dashboard and mobile-phone cameras that captured the scene, it was "first-year physics" to figure out the approximate size and weight, she said.

The latest estimate is that the Chelyabinsk meteor was about 56 feet (17 meters) across, weighed more than 700,000 tons and was moving about 18 kilometers per second (40,000 mph) when it blew apart, she said.