An amateur meteor spotter caught the moment when a fireball flew across Iowa's sky Thursday evening. Tim Cline says he has two cameras pointing at the sky at his Williamson observatory. He says the
footage shows a meteor flying north towards Des Moines. Consistent with witness reports, the timestamp puts the bright object flying by at 5:41 p.m.
Channel 13 received several reports of a colorful fireball across the metro and even on the Iowa/Missouri border.
The National Weather Service said they also caught some footage of it.
They later backtracked saying the moving object in their video was more likely Venus.
The evening sky was well described by our viewers. Mercedes Sholley posted on the
Channel 13 Facebook page, "I watched it change colors from the yellow red and orange to green blue and purple right before it sizzled out and went black and I watched it break off into at least 3 pieces."
Jakob Kranovich also described it, "I literally drove right underneath it. It looked like a giant firework going sideways. It gave off a bright green glowing color (I'm dead serious) and broke up and sparks showered everywhere and faded out. Happened too fast to get a picture and I was driving as well."
"It was awesome. Unfortunately no pics but I don't think I'll get that image out of my mind," Jamie Croatt commented.
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Comment: A 'mocked up image', 'expert' claims that bear no resemblance to eyewitness reports, and a warning about meteor fireballs "attacking us in 2014".... what a strange news report.
What we've generally found to date is that the media is reluctant to acknowledge fireball meteor sightings at all, nevermind that their numbers are increasing all the time. But lately, there seems to be some prestidigitation, some sleight of hand, going on with the news around this topic, something which really jumped out at us in the above article.
Here we have a local UK news outlet uncritically accept the explanation provided by 'virtual astronomer' that this 'bright light in the sky' was a 'fireball meteor', despite the eyewitnesses all stating that the object was stationary, and that it reappeared in the same spot in the sky on successive nights... so, obviously, they were not seeing a 'fireball meteor'.
We wonder in what direction the eyewitnesses were facing, because it rather sounds like it could have been the planet Venus. Along with Sirius, Venus appears in the evening skies this time of year, making them seem brighter than usual.
So why then would a regular newspaper
We suspect that what's going on here is a combination of ignorant people seeing stuff and the authorities playing on their ignorance to confuse the issue.