Fireball seen in county skies

Tuesday morning people as far away as Utah saw flaming object

It was a sight Visalia's Sheila Chartrand will never forget.
A fireball was streaking across the sky headed southeast Tuesday about 10:30 a.m. It appeared much larger than the sun, she said — larger even than a softball or CD held at arm's length.

"I just caught a glimpse of it as I stepped out onto my porch. It was the creepiest thing I've ever seen," she said. "It was so huge and so bright, all I could think of was, 'Oh, my god.' "

But her skeptical friends are having a hard time believing her story

"They all think I'm crazy," she said.

Chartrand wasn't the only one who saw the fireball, however. Reports flooded the San Bernardino County Fire Department dispatch center, and fire crews in Barstow also reported a flaming object in the sky.

The Tulare County Fire Department received no calls, but sightings of "an object as bright as the sun" came from as far away as Nevada and St. George, Utah.

Robert Lunsford, a volunteer who has spent 40 years tracking fireballs for the American Meteorological Society in Southern California, said the object may have been a distant cousin of the meteorite that some scientists believe flattened 830 square miles in Siberia — known as the Tunguska Event — almost exactly 100 years ago, on June 30, 1908.

Scientists believe the meteorite may have come from the Beta Taurid shower. Lunsford said Tuesday's object might have come from Beta Taurid as well.

"It's very interesting, since it happened just about 100 years ago today," he said. "This month is a good month for meteor showers in California."

Although the fireball may have been thousands of miles above earth, its brightness suggests it was probably the size of a small car, Lunsford said.

"Most people go through their entire lifetime never seeing a fireball — so to see one this large and this bright is extremely rare," he said.

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology's observatory in Palomar and the University of California, Santa Cruz's Lick Observatory near San Jose had heard no reports of a meteorite or fireball Tuesday afternoon.

According to the American Meteor Society, several thousand fireballs enter Earth's atmosphere every day. Most aren't bright enough to be visible.

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