Last night, NASA's All Sky Fireball Network detected 17 Venus-bright meteors. The orbits of the meteoroids, color-coded by velocity, are shown in the diagram below. Earth's location is marked by a red starburst:
The green orbits correspond to Comet 96P/Machholz, source of the annual delta Aquarid meteor shower. Although this is a minor shower, it is fraught with interest. Some researchers believe that 96P/Machholz came from another star system. Every delta Aquarid that disintegrates in the night sky could be depositing material from across the galaxy into Earth's upper atmosphere.

Forecasters expect as many as 15 delta Aquarids per hour when the shower peaks on July 28th and 29th. The best time to look, no matter where you live, is during the dark hours before sunrise on Saturday and Sunday when the moon has set and the constellation Aquarius is relatively high in the sky.

Blue orbits correspond mainly to Perseids. The Perseid meteor shower doesn't peak until August 12-13, but Earth is already in the outskirts of the debris zone of the parent comet, 109P/Swift-Tuttle. By mid-August, rates could exceed 100 meteors per hour. The show, in other words, is just getting started.

Many Xiamen residents reported seeing an unidentified flying object flying through the sky at high speed on Tuesday evening, according to Wednesday's Xiamen Economic Daily.

A citizen surnamed Wang, who was walking on Dongpu Road at around 19:25 pm, said he saw the rocket-like UFO flying from south to north, blazing changing flames on its tail.

"The object flied above the cumulonimbus clouds at a pretty high speed, but there was no noise. At first, I thought it was fireworks, but then I noticed there were color changes on its tail, and its speed was getting faster and faster," said Mr. Wang.

Many posts about the UFO turned up on Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging platform in China, that day, and many netizens in nearby Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Zhejiang Province and Shanghai also reported seeing something similar.

If you live in the center of the peninsula and last night was awakened by a loud sound and saw how the sky suddenly lit up, it wasn't a dream. About 2:10 in the morning and about 30 or 40 miles above Earth, stellar fragments disintegrated in the atmosphere somewhere between Toledo and Madrid. "Everything points to a fragment of a comet,", Jose Maria Madiedo, professor of the Faculty of Experimental Sciences of Huelva told The Huffington Post.

"It was like a flash in the sky like a beacon light that came from heaven," said Rafael Rojas, a journalist who saw while working at his flat in Madrid and immediately tweeted what happened in search of an explanation, a little scared. His reaction is not surprising: "It was almost as bright as the sun, for a second day was done. Impressive," says researcher Huelva. They are still investigating the phenomenon. This type of very bright meteors are called fireballs.

The flash, the expert explained, had been so strong that it had even been noted in Sierra Nevada, 300 or 400 miles. Witnesses have spoken on social networks (where the phenomenon has been commented on under the hashtag # meteoritomadrid ) also [produced] a loud noise. "It probably been accompanied by sound, depends on where the observer has been located," said Madiedo. "In these cases you hear an explosion similar to that heard when an airplane breaks the sound barrier."

A solider at the Fort Sill, OK, U.S. Army post reports an early morning sighting of a "dull-green, glowing orb that slowly descended" toward the ground level on July 17, 2012, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The witness and other soldiers were preparing for a brigade run when the object was first seen.

"I felt a strong urge to look at the sky for some reason, a feeling I usually do get before a UFO is nearby," the witness stated. "Soon in the direction I was looking I saw a dull, green orb that seemed to come from out of nowhere off in the distance. You had to have been looking in the exact direction it appeared or you'd have missed it."

The witness described the object's movement.

"It descended slowly, dulled out almost entirely, and then it swelled up and glowed the most brilliant green you could ever imagine, stopped a moment as it did, then it began to speed up and shoot downward with a glowing, golden-yellow flame with a reddish, orange outline with a tail, almost looking like a meteorite burning up."

Firefighters say they are still trying to determine the cause of a fire that broke out on Desert Way between Rio Rangler and Alexander Lake just before 11:00 p.m. Sunday night. Witnesses tell News 4 they saw an aircraft crash at the site of the fire, but firefighters would not say if they found any pieces of aircraft and they suspect it could have been a meteor. Firefighters say airport officials have confirmed all planes are accounted for. The fire was contained at one acre. An investigation into the cause is being conducted.

File photo of a fireball lighting up the sky in Australia last year.

Translated by Agni, SOTT Forum Member

An unusual phenomenon was observed during the night between 15th and 16th of July in the Glubokoe district of Belarus. Numerous eyewitnesses say that the bright object flew through the sky and fell to the ground with a very strong roar.

Here is what school student Daniel Buka told a Westki journalist about the phenomenon: "In the evening, close to midnight I've heard a roar, windows shook, trembled and there was a burst of bright light. I thought it was a car accident somewhere, perhaps a car hitting a tree. I went outside to investigate, it was quiet and no one around. And today my friend called me from Gatouschina. His sister was walking down the street at night, and saw something in the sky that reassembled a comet with a tail that flew towards our shops."

May you live in interesting times

~ Ancient Chinese proverb

There were widespread reports from the Middle East to central Asia of a strange phenomenon in the late evening sky on June 7th. Emergency phone lines lit up as excited eyewitnesses reported a spectacular light display. Judging by the distribution of media coverage that followed, people in Israel and Lebanon were particularly excited about the event, reporting the extraordinary sighting of "multiple airborne objects". It was apparently unmissable across a vast area because there were also multiple reports in Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Jordan and several countries in the Caucasus. The earliest reports came from Lebanon where the daily L'Orient Le Jour reported that "meteorites were clearly visible" and LBCI News reported that "luminous objects and meteor bursts appeared over north Lebanon", before quoting Lebanese astronomers as saying they were the result of a large meteorite that exploded and left "visible trails of dust." Another Lebanese publication, Naharnet, described the phenomenon as a "meteoric downpour", while the state-run National News Agency reported that the objects were "clearly visible."

It's at this point that the story changed from being one of multiple 'meteoric' sightings to just a single fiery object that was "probably" a Russian missile.

The next day, Friday 8 June, the Jerusalem Post reported that Russia had carried out a successful rocket launch of an inter-continental ballistic missile the previous evening, Thursday June 7th. The Post went on to quote a spokesperson for the Israeli Astronomical Association as saying "the object reached an altitude of 80 kilometres." Sure enough, Russian news agency Interfax carried a report that cited the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces (RVSN) as saying they had successfully launched an RS-12M Topol ICBM from the Kapustin Yar range in the country's southern Astrakhan region missile at 21.39 local time on Thursday evening. The Russian Defence Ministry's spokesman for RVSN, Col. Vadim Koval, told Interfax that "the missile hit the simulated target at the Sary-Shagan range in Kazakhstan with projected accuracy." The RVSN's own website was updated to account for this missile launch.

That would appear to have settled the issue for most. I'm not convinced though.

Iquique - Residents of the Tarapacá Region of Chile reported seeing a luminous object fly through the sky on Monday, June 9. A cargo plane traveling to Calama via the Tarapacá region also reported the sighting. The Chilean Air Force ruled that the object in question was not one of their planes.

"The event which occurred Monday, June 9 did not correspond to air traffic belonging to the First Air Brigade situated in the Los Cóndores Air Base," stated a representative of the Air Force in an email, according to Chilean newspaper La Segunda.

Ricardo Bermudez, director of the Center for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA), the organization in charge of the investigation of the sighting, confirmed that the object in question "behaved like an astronomical phenomenon."

Bermudez also stated that CEFAA has not ruled out the possibility that the sighting was a meteorite.

Because of the limited scope of radar in the area, specialists say that it is possible that the phenomenon was not detected reliably by their devices. The only reliable observation of the sighting may have been recorded by the cargo plane traveling to Calama.

A New Jersey man says he was nearly hit by a small meteorite as he walked off of a baseball field Sunday night.

It happened about 10:24 p.m. at Votee Park on Palisade Ave. in Teaneck, N.J.

Pedro Dominguez says he was picking up bases and he saw something hit the ground about two to three feet in front of him.

He says the little rock, slightly larger than a pebble, was traveling at a pretty high rate of speed.

At first he thought someone on his team might have thrown something at him, but after realizing they were having a team meeting and hadn't done anything, he went back and found the rock.Dominguez says he assumed it was going to be hot, but said it was cool to the touch, even though the temperatures were quite that night.

He went home and did a little research and said that some meteors contain a lot of iron and will attract magnets.

The one he found was not very magnetic but a magnet did stick to the rock.

Dominguez says it could have really hurt him if it had hit him.

Friends told him he should sell it but he's not sure what he's going to do with the presumed space rock just yet.