Early on the morning of Tuesday, October 12th 2017, reports started flooding in of a bright green fireball streaking across the sky over Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Eye witnesses claimed the object came rumbling down from the sky in a bright flash of white and green before it disintegrated in midair. None of the reports seemed to indicate there was any threat of danger, but they were more curious about what could have caused such a brilliant display.
NASA claimed they received well over 100 reports of witnesses seeing the event, which occurred roughly around 6:47 am. The areas in question would typically be under at least some surveillance from municipal cameras, but they were all turned off at that time of day to deal with the excessively bright morning sun that could damage their sensors.
The reports received by NASA from witnesses were the only evidence to create any explanation for what happened, but it was enough. According to the accounts of multiple witnesses that all lined up quite evenly, NASA was able to estimate the object was a meteor roughly 5 inches wide and weighing about 5 pounds.
They claim the object must have been traveling at nearly 89,000 mile per hour, and that it entered the atmosphere roughly 65 miles over western Alabama. Seconds later it disintegrated in the atmosphere about 40 miles above Mississippi.
It in uncertain where the object came from since no orbit can be calculated from the reports, but they confirmed it was a natural meteor that did not originate with the Orionid shower.
