NASA reports that a screaming, 34,000-mile-per-hour meteor blazed past the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor on Tuesday, incinerating itself above the city.
New Yorkers and even the residents of nearby states reported feeling an earthquake-like rumble and hearing a loud ‘boom’ Tuesday morning — as the bright and plunging fireball burned itself into oblivion an estimated 29 miles above midtown Manhattan.
Multiple government agencies leapt into action to identify the mysterious, rattling explosion, including NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office and the United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Earthquake Information Center.
But NASA noted there was evidence for an alternative explanation.
‘There are reports of military in the vicinity around the time of the fireball,’ the space agency said, ‘which could explain the shaking and sounds reported to the media.’
Despite NASA’s caveat, however, Pentagon officials told NBC New York that neither the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), nor any other US military sensor network, had tracked anything that could explain the witness reports.
Astronomer and lead for NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, Bill Cooke, issued a statement on the limited facts about the event that are currently known.
According to Cooke, the daylight fireball was first spotted at 11:17 am local time near Greenville Yard, a freight rail yard located at the Port of New York and New Jersey.
‘The fireball was first sighted at an altitude of 49 miles above Upper Bay (east of Greenville Yard),’ Cooke said.
‘The meteor descended at a steep angle of just 18 degrees from vertical,’ he continued, ‘moving a bit east of North at 34,000 miles per hour.’
The NASA official thanked amateur sky-watchers with the American Meteor Society whose data ‘permitted a very crude determination of the trajectory of the meteor.’
Trackers with the nonprofit scientific group, founded in 1911, noted as many as 20 possible meteor sightings between 11:16 and 11:20 am. The society’s unconfirmed fireball reports were spread across the tri-state area, from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — and beyond into Delaware and Maryland.
‘It just caught my eye: a fireball just streaming through the sky,’ eyewitness Judah Bergman told local news. ‘I couldn’t believe it.’
