OF THE
TIMES
People all across Maine, from Boothbay Harbor all the way to York County, claim they heard a loud boom last night shortly after midnight.
WMTW Channel 8 in Portland, ME says the American Meteor Society heard from about a dozen people reporting a meteor in southern Maine and western New Hampshire. One person described it to them as a "deep rolling."
United States Geological Survey hadn't reported any earthquakes in Maine or New Hampshire, according to the report from WMTW.
The TV station says Michael Coslet sent them a video of a light crossing his yard in Durham. While other people on Boothbay Harbor felt some shaking.
So what was it...a meteor or an earthquake? No one is certain yet. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest Santa may have been doing a test run on a new sled. Sure it sounds crazy...but at this point anything is possible.
Comment: Most interesting. Here's video footage:
Note that the news presenter described the glowing trail it left behind as a 'noctilucent cloud'. She's right, kind of. This kind of trail is itself a relatively novel phenomenon. Both rocket trails from outgoing take-offs and meteor trails from incoming space debris leave such glowing trails down on a regular basis now.
That's why meteor/comet fragment trails are so easily (and happily) conflated with rocket launches, and why we have such a hard time telling them apart...
See also: