Fireballs
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Fireball 5

'Brilliant' meteor fireball seen flashing across skies of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana

Tanda Gmiter
MLive
Sat, 11 May 2019 07:22 UTC
Perseid meteor shower in rural Oregon in 2016.
© Mark Graves (file photo)The meteor "fireball" seen in Michigan on May 11, 2019 was reported to be even more brilliant than this image of a Perseid meteor shower in rural Oregon in 2016.
A flash of light from a "fireball" meteor had people buzzing across parts of Michigan early this morning.

"We are hearing about a brilliant meteor that was seen before 3 a.m.," the National Weather Service office in Grand Rapids posted on its Facebook page early Saturday. Sky-watchers were quick to respond.

Reports of sightings came in from Coopersville, Manistee and Muskegon. Most of the reports seemed to indicate the fireball was spotted about 12:45 a.m.

One person in Coopersville responded to the NWS, describing her fireball sighting: "Saw it while I was putting plastic over my garden boxes, (because of the frost) the light began flickering so I turned around to look at the light pole behind me and there was the bright green meteor streaking across the sky, crumbling into pieces as is fell towards the treeline. It was close enough to see the reds and oranges of the fireballs breaking apart and the flashing neon green light eminating around the fiery rock bits. The tail was a bright white streak being left behind it."


Comment: There are reports that the meteor was seen by some as far as Ohio, Ilinois and Indiana.

The Woodridge, Illinois police department posted video of the event on Facebook:



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Meteor

Loud boom heard in Kingman, Arizona possible meteor strike

Emily Black
Mojave County Rattler
Thu, 09 May 2019 13:23 UTC
Meteor fireball (stock)
© Ikonacolor/Getty Images (file photo)
Residents all over Kingman heard a very large boom last night about 9:15 p.m.

Reports poured in from Facebook with people saying the boom shook their house, their windows and scared their pets.

Anise Wight, from Kingman, said on Facebook that the loud explosion was sometime after 9 p.m.

"I live near Ames and Melody," said Wight. "I checked to make sure a neighbor's house didn't blow up."

Another resident, Kari LeeAnn, said she heard it and went outside.

"I saw what looked like lightning by the mountains from the northwest, so I thought it was just thunder," said LeeAnn. "I thought it was weird when I realized there wasn't hardly any clouds above me."
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Fireball 2

Bright meteor fireball reported over Mato Grosso, Brazil


Sott.net
Tue, 07 May 2019 06:31 UTC
meteor brazil
© YouTube / AMS (snimanje zaslona)
The American Meteor Society (AMS) has reported a meteor fireball over Mato Grosso on Tuesday, May 7th 2019 around 02:00 UT. A video of the event (2056-2019) was uploaded to the AMS website.

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Fireball 2

Bright meteor fireball lights up the skies from Wales to France and is recorded on multiple sky cameras


Sott.net
Tue, 07 May 2019 02:48 UTC
fireball uk 7th may
© UK Meteor Network/Clanfield Observatory
At 02:48GMT a meteor fireball lit up the skies at an estimated magnitude -5 brightness, apparently burning up over Cambridge, England. Multiple sky cameras from Cardiff, Wales to East Barnet in North London and Wimeraux, France captured the event.

It's believed that this particular sighting could be part of the Eta Aquariids which were spawned by Halley's comet. EarthSky.com writes:
Because Comet Halley has circled the sun innumerable times over countless millennia, cometary fragments litter its orbit. That's why the comet doesn't need to be anywhere near the Earth or the sun in order to produce a meteor shower. Instead, whenever our Earth in its orbit intersects Comet Halley's orbit, cometary bits and pieces - oftentimes no larger than grains of sand or granules of gravel - smash into Earth's upper atmosphere, to vaporize as fiery streaks across our sky: meteors.

It so happens we intersect Comet Halley's orbit not once, but twice each year. In early May, we see bits of this comet as the annual Eta Aquariid meteor shower.
While this brilliant sighting may be part of the Eta Aquariids, as SOTT's Fire In The Sky section has been documenting, fireball activity continues to increase with every passing year, and, throughout the year, at times when there isn't a known meteor shower occurring.
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Fireball 2

Falling meteor fireball captured on dashcam in Pretoria, South Africa


Rekord Centurion
Fri, 03 May 2019 11:52 UTC
Meteor fireball over Pretoria, SA
© Clinton Kruger
Social media went crazy last night after a Pretoria resident posted rare video footage of a shooting star in the city online.

This rare astronomical show happened just before 20:30 on Thursday evening.

In the video, taken by Clinton Kruger, a meteor is seen flashing through Pretoria's night skies.
i just saw a freaking falling star ❤️😭
- frafra (@Francinedoranxx) May 2, 2019
Speaking to Rekord, Kruger said it was astonished to see a shooting star in Pretoria.

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Fireball 2

17 meteorites hit Earth everyday

Richard A Lovett
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 02 May 2019 23:03 UTC
Meteor Over Minsk
© SERGEI GAPON/AFP/Getty ImagesA meteor crosses the night sky over a statue of Jesus Christ in the village of Ivye some 125 kilometres west of Minsk, in 2016.
Every year, the Earth is hit by about 6100 meteors large enough to reach the ground, or about 17 every day, research has revealed.

The vast majority fall unnoticed, in uninhabited areas. But several times a year, a few land in places that catch more attention.

Three months ago, for example, a small asteroid probably about the size of a minivan, flashed across the midday sky and exploded over western Cuba, showering the town of Viñales with falling rocks, some of which reportedly landed on rooftops.

Nobody was hurt, but it was a reminder that just as it's not safe to turn your back on the ocean for fear of being washed out to sea by an unusually large wave, space hazards are also capable of catching us by surprise.

To calculate how often such meteor falls occur, Gonzalo Tancredi, an astronomer at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, examined a database of incident reports, discovering that in the last 95 years people have directly observed 95 such events - an average of about eight per year.

To figure out how many others occur unobserved, Tancredi noted that people only occupy a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface - about 0.44% of its land area, or 0.13% of its total surface area.

That means that for every impact that is actually seen by someone, another 770 splash into the sea or fall in a desert, forest, or other locations so remote that nobody sees it happen.

"Some places on the Earth are heavily populated," Tancredi says, "but most places are very lowly populated."
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Fireball 5

Mysterious flash and boom in the sky 80 years ago terrified residents of Portland, Oregon

Douglas Perry
The Oregonian
Wed, 01 May 2019 08:07 UTC
1930 meteor
© The Oregonian (Archives)A 1930 "meteor fireball".
The flash of bright light surprised everyone who saw it. Hundreds of Portlanders reported spotting "a vast burst of smoke and spurting flame."

The explosion that followed was even more startling. The shock wave reverberated across the sky for miles, shattering windows and cracking walls.

A recreational mountain climber might have had the best view.

"I was standing still for a moment, looking toward Portland," recalled Thurston Skei, who was working his way up Mount Adams just before 8 a.m. on July 2, 1939. "I saw a trail of smoke coming down through the sky. There was a bright flash at the head of the smoke column as if a huge rocket had exploded."

A few people called police to ask if Martians had attacked. (This was nine months after Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast had confused and worried listeners.) Many more residents thought there had been an earthquake. (The Oregonian reported that the University of Washington's seismograph had remained quiet.)
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House

Houses rocked after 'unexplained big boom' in southeast suburb of Queensland

Judith Kerr
The Courier Mail
Mon, 29 Apr 2019 14:30 UTC
Loud boom in QLS, AUS
© The Courier Mail
Residents of a southeast suburb are scratching their heads after experiencing a loud "boom" and feeling the earth shudder early on Sunday evening.

Cornubia resident Shaun Pask said his West Coorang St house was rocked by the event which took place just before 6pm.

Mr Pask said he felt as if a large object had hit the roof of his house.

"My wife and I were inside when we experienced the house shuddering - it was so loud I could not image any handheld device could possibly create that amount of noise," he said.

"It was not a small object hitting a small part of the roof - it was like something fell from the sky and it landed on our whole roof at the one time.
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Fireball

Meteor Fireball seen streaking through skies in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


Meteor Shower Tonight
Fri, 26 Apr 2019 20:08 UTC
brazil meteor fireball april 26th 2019
Another big fireball was seen in Brazilian skies at 20:08 (23:08 UT) this Friday, April 26, 2019. This time, the bright meteor was reported in the north of Rio de Janeiro and east of Minas Gerais and recorded by BRAMON's cameras.

The space rock entered Earth atmosphere at an altitude of 80.8 Km over Rio das Flores, RJ, followed a northeasterly direction at a speed of 19.14 Km / s (68.9 thousand Km / h) before disappearing 5.67 seconds later, at an altitude of 38.4 Km over Argirita, MN.

Comment: Activity in our skies is really heating up:

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Book 2

A Book Review - Prehistory Decoded


Cosmic Tusk
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 01:13 UTC
Gobekli Tepe
© Wikipedia Commons
Any follower of Catastrophism the last few years has seen extraordinary confirmations of ancient cataclysm and novel contributions to our way of thinking. To the Tusk, three revelations have characterized the period: The discovery of an extraordinarily youthful late Pleistocene crater in Greenland; a series of popular, comprehensive and unrefuted major journal articles which exquisitely defined hard evidence for the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe; and the singular contribution of Dr. Martin Sweatman, as made in his fabulous book, Prehistory Decoded.

Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world's very earliest and most mysterious art.

Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman's initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world's first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.

Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth's precession.

(Don't you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)

It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).
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