Experts offer guesses on mysterious ‘fire ball’ sighting

Judy Kilgus of Stanardsville was driving on Route 522 near Culpeper Sunday night when she saw what she says looked like a burning ball of fire falling from the sky.
“It was me, my mother and one of my brothers, and we were on our way back from Salem,“ Kilgus recalled. She said they were about three miles out of Culpeper when the “ball” came shooting across (the sky).
“At first it gave the appearance of a shooting star,  and then it was just huge,“ she said. “This was not like some little light. The colors were brilliant, and it was flickering. It was falling and looked as if it was burning like a ball of fire - reddish, with the hint of a green tint.  It was frightening.“
Kilgus said that once the mysterious thing fell, “there was a big light, like an explosion.“ 
“I said to my mom, ‘Oh, my gosh, it hit something.’ I had never seen anything like it. It was traveling very fast. ‘“
Kilgus said that she stopped at the 7-Eleven in Madison—about 15 miles or so from where she saw the object—and then noticed an “eerie” odor when she got out of her car.  She says she’s not sure if the smell is related to what she saw earlier. 
Regardless, Kilgus is not the only one who witnessed a strange “ball of fire” and big boom that night.
Reports of a bright light and in some places, an explosion-like sound, poured into law-enforcement offices across eastern Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina on Sunday night.
“The phone is ringing off the hook,“ said meteorologist Sonia Mark at the National Weather Service’s Wakefield station.  All of the reports dealt with incidents that occurred about 9:45 p.m.
Several calls came to Richmond International Airport, but tower personnel did not see anything unusual related to aircraft, airport spokesman Troy Bell said.
It could have been caused by a meteor or even a falling part from a Russian spacecraft, experts said earlier this week.
“I know it’s one of the two,“ said Geoff Chester, an astronomer and public relations officer with the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. “I just can’t tell you definitively which one it actually was.“
Chester suggested that a falling Russian booster rocket caused the hubbub.
The booster - a steel cylinder about 25 feet long and 8 feet wide - was part of the Soyuz spacecraft that launched Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station.
The booster was expected to fall toward Earth on a path, headed east, that would have taken it across the Chesapeake Bay region Sunday night, Chester said.
The booster would have burned in the friction of the Earth’s atmosphere and, as it slowed below the speed of sound, it would have released energy that caused a sonic boom, Chester said.
“My feeling is this is what people actually saw,“ Chester said.
Stefan Bocchino, a spokesman for the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, said experts there do not think the light was caused by a manmade object. The Joint Space Operations Center tracks manmade objects that enter the atmosphere.
The National Weather Service has ruled out any weather-related cause.
Other experts said the light and boom sound like the work of a meteor. Meteors are bits of space rock or gravel that burn and create light when they hit the atmosphere.
“Some very bright ones are known to explode,“ creating a sound, said Phillip Ianna, a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Virginia.
Meteors typically burn up in the atmosphere. Much less often, a small piece of the rock will hit Earth.
Steve Chesley, an astronomer with NASA, said the Sunday phenomenon could be the work of a meteor the size of a television set or small car.
“These kinds of things hit the [atmosphere] once a month,“ Chesley said. They usually fall over water or less-populated areas and attract less attention.
NASA doesn’t track such small objects, Chesley said, and focuses instead on big ones - space rocks half the length of a football field or more - that are headed toward Earth.
“It’s the big ones we’re worried about, and we need to find them decades in advance,“ Chesley said.
The object on Sunday had to be unusually bright to be seen in urban areas, where artificial lights drown out most celestial objects, said David Hagan, a staff scientist with the Science Museum of Virginia.
At Record press time on Tuesday, experts were still offering various guesses as to what the occurrence could have been.
One thing’s for sure, says Kilgus: it’s something she won’t soon forget. 
“I was glad I saw whatever it was, but I kind of wonder what in the world is going on,“ she said. “I thought maybe it was a meteor, but whatever it was, it was strange.“ 

—Record Editor April Taylor contributed to this report