Fireball in Sky, Probably a Meteor, Slows Traffic in East

A spectacular, fiery object that streaked across the night sky and mesmerized observers along the East Coast was probably a meteor, but experts will likely never be certain, officials said Sunday.

Police from Virginia to New York City said they received hundreds of calls Saturday night from people who saw a fast-moving ball of blue and yellow fire zip across the sky shortly after 7 p.m.

The Air Force said that, whatever the object was, it was not a satellite or a part of man-made space debris re-entering the atmosphere.

Residents of Washington, reported seeing a fiery green object that looked to be about the size of a car and had a orange-yellow tail. There was one report that traffic on the Capital Beltway nearly came to a halt as the object overshot the highway.

“When we have a phenomenon like the one last night, the only thing we can do here . . . is verify through our sensors that it was not one of the (man-made) objects we regularly keep track of in space,” Maj. Dick Adams of the U.S. Space Command in Colorado said Sunday.

Buhl Observatory director John French said that a fireball, or bolide meteor, is about the size of a pebble, while a regular meteor is the size of a grain of sand. They appear large because of the trail of ionized vapors they leave behind.