There was a collective gasp as Doug Williams and many others around him looked up and saw what appeared to be a fireball shoot across the sky.
Reports of a fiery streak falling over the southeastern United States lit up social media Thursday afternoon, and the National Weather Service said the unusual object was visible in southern parts of metro Atlanta.
Williams said he was in a pool at Rigby’s Water World in Warner Robins when he saw it. At first, he said he thought it was a plane. But then a rainbow of colors spread across the sky around it.
That’s when those around him began to speculate it was a possible meteor.
“(It looked like) a really huge firework, and then it just disappeared. We didn’t hear any bang or see any smoke or nothing,” Williams, 39, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The American Meteor Society on Thursday received about 100 reports of fireball sightings from across Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. Most of the reports were in Georgia, according to its website.
The Peachtree City office of the Weather Service, on social media, said it was apparently “either a meteor or space junk” that shot across the skies.
Dylan Lusk, a senior meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Peachtree City, said although the agency doesn’t yet know what the object was, it did create a fireball and sonic boom as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
“We’ve had a lot of people who are reporting hearing a loud boom and then also feeling shaking, like their home shaking, or their window shaking,” Lusk told the AJC. “So that was likely a byproduct of whatever this was entering the atmosphere.”
The NWS in Charleston, South Carolina, said on X that “satellite-based lightning detection shows a streak within cloud-free sky” near the North Carolina and Virginia border, visible on the NOAA satellites.
The NWS reported it was “likely a meteor, and they believe more could possibly be on the way,” the Newton County Sheriff’s Office posted to Facebook. “At this time, we do not have any information on where the meteor may have landed.”
It’s not immediately clear whether the fireball or any fragments landed, but Lusk said the Weather Service received an unconfirmed report of possible bits crashing into someone’s home in Henry County around the time the fireball was spotted.
The county’s fire department confirmed to the AJC they did not respond to any related calls.
“It could have burned up in the atmosphere, and, in fact, likely most of it did,” Lusk said. “The chances of something making it to the ground are usually pretty low. Usually, it’s going to burn up as it moves through the atmosphere with the speed that it’s coming in.”
Calls flooded into the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville from residents intrigued by the possible meteor, museum marketing associate Lauren Rhodes told the AJC.
In 2009, a similar sonic boom was heard by neighbors as that meteorite crashed and tore a hole into a roof and ceiling of a Cartersville home. No one was at the residence at the time. But the homeowner returned to find the 297-gram meteorite on the floor of the house and contacted the museum.
“It just so happened that Tellus had opened just months prior, and they knew that we had the mineral collection and that we also had astronomy and space items, and they reached out to the museum, and we acquired it,” Rhodes said.
The museum now has the meteorite on display at the Weinman Mineral Gallery, which features exhibits of some of the state’s most prized minerals.
At the time, it was only the 25th meteorite found in the state.
Rhodes said the museum has a fireball camera on its roof, and she hopes it captured Thursday’s possible meteor. The camera doesn’t report in real time, so they plan to look Friday morning once the data is processed.
“We’ve had people calling us about it,” she said. “It’s not guaranteed that we caught anything on it … so crossing our fingers.”
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