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Dozens of people reported seeing what they thought was a meteor fall above the St. Louis area at about 11:40 a.m. Monday.Reports on social media surfaced about the sight, described by some as as a flash that fell from the sky and disappeared a couple hundred feet above the horizon.
Tom Stolze, who runs the website O'
Fallonweather.org, posted a video of a bright light falling in the sky (see video below) to the northwest of an outdoor camera in O'Fallon, Mo.
As of Monday night, the
American Meteor Society received 77 reports of a fireball seen over Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and Kentucky. Several of those reports were in the St. Louis area.
"It looked like one of the more expensive fireworks shooting down instead of up. I could have sworn it landed in the field I was driving by!" one report from Wendelin, Ill., in the eastern part of the state, said on the society site.
One person saw the flash above Berkeley: "I saw a streak of white light followed by a burst of yellow/orange before the object disappeared," he wrote.
Comment: The author seemed to be having something of a prophetic moment. In the fifteen years that have passed since this article was written, the number of fireballs and meteorites has continuously increased at an exponential rate. It's only a matter of time before one does a serious amount of damage that can't be covered up or explained away.
We wait and watch.