David Eicher, editor and chief of Astronomy Magazine, said that while it's believed the fireball seen Wednesday night was a meteor, that wouldn't be known for sure until and unless it is found on the ground. Astronomers believe if the object landed, it would have come down in the Great Lakes area. There were no reports that it had been found.
"It was an extraordinarily bright meteor," said Eicher. "As bright as this thing was, the odds are that it didn't completely burn up before it hit the ground."
But he also couldn't completely rule out that what people saw were pieces of a falling satellite reentering the Earth's atmosphere as space junk.
He estimated that on impact a burning meteor could have ended up the size of a baseball. The amount of light that the object emitted indicted it was either a large chunk of stone or iron, he said.
Usually, meteorites that cause a streak in the sky tend to be only the size of sand or a pea, Eicher said. This one--assuming it was one--may have come from April's Lyrid meteorite showers as debris from a comet named Thatcher after the man who first discovered it in 1861.
"It was probably a very large chunk, relatively speaking, of cometary debris that was left in the wake, the trail, of this comet's orbit,'' he said.
While he could not point to the object and definitively say it was a meteor, he said circumstantial evidence points to it--chiefly, that the sighting came during the Lyrid showers, which will reach their peak Saturday.
According to lore, the Thatcher comet was regarded with fear when it was first observed because it came after the raid on Fort Sumter by Confederate troops that started the Civil War.
Reports of meteor sightings about 10 p.m. Wednesday came in to the National Weather Service from wide areas across the Midwest. News outlets from Missouri to Minnesota and east to Michigan reported sightings.
In a statement on its Web site, the National Weather Service office in the Quad Cities said:
"Just after 10 pm CDT Wednesday evening April 14th, a fireball or very bright meteor was observed streaking across the sky. The fireball was seen over the northern sky, moving from west to east.
"Well before it reached the horizon, it broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight. The fireball was seen across Northern Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Southern Wisconsin. Several reports of a prolonged sonic boom were received from areas north of Highway 20, along with shaking of homes, trees and various other objects including wind chimes. As of late Wednesday evening, it is unknown whether any portion of this meteorite hit the ground."
National Weather Service radar in LaCrosse, Wis., showed the object between 6,000 and 12,000 feet, heading from northwest to southeast over Grant and Iowa counties.
(The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences has a series of time lapse photos of the event as seen from Madison; an Iowa sheriff's department captured video of the flash that's been posted on YouTube.)
Christine McMorris was in her Woodstock home looking out her kitchen window as she washed dishes and talked with a friend when she noticed a bright light coming from the sky.
"All of a sudden out of the corner of my eye, I saw this huge ball of fire and a huge light,'' said McMorris. "I was like what the hell was that?"
She didn't believe the light signaled the end of the world because she had seen many shooting stars from her travels to the Western United States. But last night put those to shame.
"They are minuscule compared to this, it was enormous,'' she said.
She said as the object traveled closer to the surface, its intensity diminished until she lost sight of it after five to 10 seconds. She said it didn't have a tail.
"It was truly spectacular,'' she said.
Becky Hoffman, who lives on a farm near Dixon, said she and her husband were getting ready for bed when they looked out and saw a "big glow" in the sky. She found it strange because the air was clear of storm clouds. She said she is about an hour and a half from the Wisconsin border and noticed the light north of her home.
"We thought it might've been a transformer blowing up in the area,'' she said, but she dismissed that thought quickly because she and her husband did not hear any explosions.
She said the object had a reddish-orange glow to it. She didn't think anything of it until she turned on the radio this morning and heard that it probably was a meteor.
"That's what it was, I saw it,'' said Hoffman. "I thought it was pretty exciting, I just want to know where it ended up at. Did it disintegrate into the skyline or did it actually hit ground?"
