A daytime meteor fireball falls over Saudi Arabia, causing a sonic boom and chaos on the streets...

Eyewitness reports

20 January 2013 - Ellen Musahino, Tokyo, Japan 3:40 a.m.

2-3 seconds duration. East, very bright yellowish white. There was a flash and then a diving star bright as the moon with a long and beautiful tail. Little sparks along the tail. It was bright enough to be confused with the flash of a camera in a dark room.

20 January 2013 - A Shorb Nasu, Tochigi, Japan 2:42 JST

Around 5 seconds duration. Travelling West to East. A large flash of light like lightning followed by a bluish-green ball. Maybe as bright as the moon? It seemed very close. I've found some Youtube videos of the meteor, taken from from near Tokyo:

San Francisco -- A fireball lit up the predawn Northern California sky Thursday, according to reports from early risers.The possible meteor was reported about 5:25 a.m. by people across California and as far away as Fernley, Nev., about 30 miles east of Reno."Wow, what a sight to have seen!" David Rivas of Seaside (Monterey County) wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

He said he and his wife saw the streak as they were driving on Highway 1 north of Monterey. "It first appeared as a quick movement of sorts, maybe similar to a shooting star or quick lightning strike off to the east."Then, Rivas said, "it grew into "something shaped like a giant orange crayon."

Others described what they had seen on the American Meteor Society website.

It's looking more and more like a meteor was the cause of a loud mysterious boom heard Sunday night by people across western Nova Scotia.

Several witnesses are describing an object with a fiery green tail that flew across the skyline. David Landry was in Dartmouth when he watched the bright object hurtle across the sky over the Halifax bridges and towards the west shortly after 11 a.m. [?]

He said the object was "much bigger and closer" than any meteorite he had ever seen before.

Moments later people in western Nova Scotia reported hearing the booms and seeing flashes of light.

Shortly after 11 p.m. people from Liverpool to Yarmouth County and beyond reported seeing flashes of light and hearing booms. Some reported hearing two booms, a large boom followed by a smaller boom.

Unlike a lightning bolt, this flashing bluish light was reported to last for more than 30 seconds and the "thunder" was heard and felt for more than 100 miles.

Some meteorologists will tell you that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing could trigger a chain reaction that starts a thunderstorm in Manhattan.

But until recently it was thought that a 33-foot-wide (10-meter-wide) meteor crashing through Earth's upper atmosphere would have little effect.

Now an unlikely team of researchers and a million-to-one observance of such an event are telling another story: When meteors vaporize in our atmosphere, they leave behind much more debris than scientists previously thought.

This cosmic dust may, in turn, affect our planet's atmosphere.

At sea in August 1564, a Spanish priest in Pedro Menendez' fleet wrote of a "miracle from heaven" - a comet as bright as the sun, streaking west toward Florida.

On land, the hungry, miserable French settlers at Fort Caroline were stunned by a "stroke of lightning" that, one wrote, instantly "consumed about 500 acres and burned with such a bright heat that the birds which lived in the meadows were consumed."

The fire burned for three days. The river "seemed almost to boil." Enough fish died to fill 50 carts.

A retired University of North Florida professor thinks the Spanish comet and the French lightning strike were very likely the same thing - an object from outer space that struck at the edge of the St. Johns River in Jacksonville.

It could have been a meteor, asteroid or comet 100 feet across, says UNF's Jay Huebner. Most of it would have vaporized on impact, with trees and animals incinerated in unimaginable heat. Water from the river and marsh would have made a roaring waterfall as it rushed to fill the crater left by the strike.

That crater, Huebner theorizes, is today's Round Marsh in the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve.

Over the past 18 months, we've been growing increasingly concerned for the future of all life on planet earth. Sure, the signs that things have been going 'south' have been there for some time, but our concern began in earnest at the very beginning of 2011, when masses of birds began to fall dead from the sky around the world. The phenomenon continued for several months, and birds around the world are still dying for officially unknown reasons. None of the dead birds showed any sign of disease, but in several incidents birds were found to have 'external injuries' like they had been "hit by some kind of blunt instrument". All sorts of explanations for the deaths were offered (like fireworks or birds colliding with each other) including the predictable attempts by 'science experts' to downplay any significance to the bizarre deaths. But among the flurry of speculation, one report stood out.

NewsChannel5 Chief Meteorologist Mark Johnson decided to take a look at the the Doppler radar images from Beebe, Arkansas from the night when many red-winged blackbirds had fallen dead to the ground, and he discovered something interesting.

"There it was. This huge plume of turbulence over the Beebe birds just as they began their frenzied flight," Johnson said.

The turbulence appears above the birds between about 7,000 and 12,000 feet. Johnson realized there are only a few possible explanations for this phenomena.

Having homed in on the probable cause, Johnson then introduced some nonsense:

"Birds don't fly that high, and he quickly ruled out military action, a sonic boom, meteor shower or alien invasion."

While we can understand why Johnson ruled out military action or a sonic boom (there were no flights over the area at the time), Johnson never explained why he ruled out a "meteor shower", although we can understand the inclusion of "alien invasion" - to ridicule by association the idea of a "meteor shower" or other meteorite-related phenomenon.

Johnson then went on to say:

"Something in the atmosphere, something mysterious, occurred over Beebe, Arkansas that night... And I believe it was part of what caused those birds to fly and then die."

Indeed, but with the answer staring him in the face, Johnson lost the plot completely:

Johnson's research captured an unseen temperature reversal just above the birds' roosting area at about 1,500 feet above the ground. This temperature "inversion" acted like a megaphone, amplifying all the noises that occurred in Beebe at that time. As the fireworks exploded, the sound was amplified by the inversion and became much louder than normal. This appears to have startled the birds so much that they burst into flight, running into each other, and nearby buildings. Thousands of the now-disoriented birds then crashed to the ground, dying from blunt force trauma.

Temperature reversal? At 1,500 feet? But previously Johnson stated that the 'turbulence' occurred between 7,000 and 12,000 feet. He even produced a graph of the Doppler radar images that shows this. While temperature inversion does occur and can amplify sound, when birds are startled by noise they don't generally fly into each other and buildings in large numbers. What's most likely, is that the bird deaths of January 2011 (and later) were caused by an overhead meteorite or comet fragment (MoCF) explosion, with either the actual shock wave killing the birds (through blunt force trauma) or associated electrical effects 'frying' their 'circuits'.

This electrical effect can also explain the massive fish die-offs around the same time. Consider this report, just in today, about two children being mysteriously electrocuted to death as they swam in a lake in Missouri on 4th July. The thousands of dead fish found upstream from Beebe on New Year's Eve 2010 could well have had their circuits fried because of significant electrical discharge that accompanied the overhead MoCF airburst. Now check out this Tunguska blast simulation by Sandia lab. An incoming bolide exploding overhead would knock the wind out of anything within a radius relative to the extent of its blast. It would probably knock airplanes out of the sky too - more on that below.

This evening in the midst of Developing thunderstorms One of the flashes across the sky wasn't lightning! 1 large Bolide or Fireball came roaring to earth. Reports are coming in from Oklahoma Of sonic booms caused as the fireball streaked towards Earth.

A mysterious boom that shook portions of Appling late Monday was confirmed Tuesday as a minor earthquake, according to Columbia County authorities.

The event, which registered a 2.1 magnitude on the Richter scale, occurred at 9:26 p.m. and was located near Columbia and Appling-Harlem roads, Emergency Services Director Pam Tucker said.

The temblor was not listed on national earthquake monitors, but was confirmed by a seismologist at Savannah River Site, she said.

"This would explain the loud boom and shaking that many residents felt," she said.

Earthquakes occur periodically in the area, which lies along the fall line, where the Coastal Plains and Piedmont regions meet.

Was it a secret military exercise, the beginning of the Mayan prophesy or an alien invasion?

A loud boom, heard by Pocono residents and others throughout northeastern Pennsylvania the night of March 30, remains a mystery.

The boom, heard at about 10:10 p.m., shook cars and houses from Long Pond to Bushkill.

Pocono Record readers at the time speculated it was a tanker wreck on Interstates 80 or 380, a bunch of semi-trucks rolling down a quiet street or an exploding meth lab.

Some residents reported a bright flash in the sky that didn't appear to be lightning just before the blast.

But most readers agreed the sound was no routine thunder.