Sky fireball mystery solved

That startling flash in the night sky that many people reported seeing early Monday morning wasn’t a fireball or meteor after all, scientists are now saying. Instead, it was a piece of space debris — something man-made — that burned in the atmosphere.

Martin O’Donnell, a spokesman for the U.S. Strategic Command, released a statement Monday afternoon saying the object was a rocket body that reentered the atmosphere. It has since been removed as a decayed object from the U.S. satellite catalog, according to the statement.

The military’s Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which issued Monday’s assessment of the incident, tracks more than 17,000 objects in space continuously.

David Dundee, astronomer for the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, said that at only 14,500 miles per hour, the object was traveling too slowly to be a meteor or a fireball.

"Looking at the video, the way it broke into pieces, it could be a piece of space debris," Dundee said Monday before the military's announcement.

“There’s a lot of old stuff kicking around up there,” he noted.

Dundee said there were about 120 eyewitness accounts of the flash, which was seen around 1:30 a.m. over Georgia as well as South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama.