Fire in the Sky
The latest struck this morning, Tuesday, Feb 5, at 8:39 a.m. I felt it myself on the northwest side of town not far from Ina and I-10. I posted it on Facebook and the responses were immediate.
Faye DeHoff wrote, "first it was a major rattle...like a huge truck about to plow into my home...then the boom..that shook my windows...I was sure some of them were broken but they didn't...my dog jumped up! I'm at River & Campbell."
Ray C. Merrill wrote, "Oracle and Roger, it was shaking pretty good, and long enough for me to watch the blinds dance around, then get up and walk to the doorway, and it was still shaking."
There was a similar sensation last week on Thursday, Jan 31 at 8:51 a.m. The same phenomenon; a rumble causing homes to shake and windows to rattle. I felt this one too on the northwest side and once again, so did so many others on Facebook all across Tucson and surrounding areas.
A story that began in Mid-City, has taken crews to Harahan, River Ridge and Wagaman. Now we go to Lakeview, where late Monday night, the mysterious 'booms' were heard again.
"Loud boom, woke up startled, I thought a train car exploded," said Mariah Sandoval.
The surveillance video shows a flash of light, followed by the loud bang.
"If it was some kind of transformer, you would think Entergy would be out here," said Sandoval.
The event was recorded in the framework of the SMART project (University of Huelva), operated by the Southwestern Europe Meteor Network (SWEMN), from the meteor-observing stations located at La Hita (Toledo), Calar Alto (Almeria), La Sagra (Granada), Sierra Nevada (Granada) and Sevilla.
"It almost felt like an earthquake," Elizabeth Elliott said.
Neighbors have been taking to Facebook and Nextdoor to write about the loud booming sounds or blasts.
One said they lost power briefly, another said their lights flickered.
Neighbors said they thought the blasts could be coming from a North Carolina Department of Transportation project, widening 401.

The plume left by an exploding meteor above Cuba, on the same day as another meteor exploded above Chelyabinsk, southern Russia
According to the morning news report on a Cuban TV channel from Rodas, Cienfuegos, a region in the center of the country, a very bright light about the size of a bus was seen in the sky and it then exploded. One of the eyewitnesses, a fisherman, told the news channel that "about 8pm local time on Wednesday, I saw a light that crossed the sky and then turned into a very large flame, bigger than the sun, and after about 3 or 4 minutes we heard an explosion".
"The evidence seems to suggest that it was a fireball or bolide, fragments of rock and metal that enter the atmosphere at high speed" said Marcos Rodriguez, a resident of the region who presented himself as an expert on the phenomenon. A woman also claimed that the explosion shook the roof of her house. According to the news report, specialists were looked for fragments that might have fallen to earth.
Today, about 1,000 people were injured when meteorite fragments fell on the Urals region of Russia. The majority of injuries were caused by glass being blow out of buildings by the shockwave, according to the Russian Ministry of the Interior.
Comment: Six years later in 2019, Cuba has been rattled by the detonation in the upper atmosphere of ANOTHER large bolide in February!
Meteor EXPLODES, shatters windows in Pinar del Río, Cuba - after streaking over Florida Keys
Cubans quickly took to social media, sharing photos and video footage of the aftermath. Some have likened the explosion to the sounds of a plane. Early social media reports also suggested that the sounds might have been caused by a satellite explosion.
Comment: Maybe there's something to this concept of 'February Fireballs'? Earth passes through no particularly significant meteor streams - known ones anyway - in February, and yet we keep getting smacked by big 'uns in this month. Not only that, but Cuba in particular was hit almost 6 years to the day!
Flashback: Meteor explodes above Cuba, shockwave shakes homes - 13 Feb 2013, same day as Chelyabinsk blast in Russia
The meteor on this video was recorded over Spain on 2019 January 27 at 0:22 local time (equivalent to 23:22 universal time on Jan. 26). It was generated by a rock from a comet that hit the atmosphere at about 80,000 km/h. It began over the province of Albacete at an altitude of about 97 km, and ended at a height of around 65 km.
While we do not have a definitive answer what caused the rumble can likely be narrowed down to a few possibilities...
1. A sonic boom from a military jet over the Gulf of Mexico. While no aircraft were flying out of Tyndall... planes could have been flying over the Gulf from either Eglin or MacDill.
2. An explosion from an ordinance over at Eglin on the test range
3. Maybe a sonic boom from a meteor entering the Earth's atmosphere.














Comment: On February 6th, KVOA provided an update to the story. They spoke with Susan Beck from the University of Arizona's Department of Geosciences. The interview and a summary of her comments are below: