A fireball over Alberta, Canada - the remnants of a meteor hitting the earth's atmosphere at about 44 miles per second, and burning up at temperatures anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 degrees.
The flash of light is actually an illusion -- the particles and dust igniting after the meteor flames out. It might look like it hit the ground but so far no reports indicate any impact, and it most likely burned up about 20 miles above the earth.
The curvature of the planet creates the illusion of impact over the horizon.
KRTV spoke to Professor Art Alt, professor at the University of Great Falls, who says that scientifically, it's really not that unusual: "We're right at the tail end of the Leonid meteor shower and what that was, was a fireball - they're very small rocks, maybe two inches in diameter, they come through the atmosphere, they're going anywhere up to 40 miles per second, overheat by friction, and they gradually burn up, and this particular case it got so much energy it exploded."
The news of the meteor that streaked across the northern sky on Thursday evening is blazing across the internet as people from America and Canada marvel at what happened.
There are several videos posted on YouTube (one example) of the meteor streaking towards the earth, and as pointed out by some witnesses, it does indeed appear to be rather ominous in some respects; some claim that it even appeared to look like an incoming missile, or a "reverse" of what the space shuttle looks like when it blasts off.
But residents of north central Montana had particular interest in the story, owing to Great Falls' history of objects in the sky - whether real or imagined, dangerous or funny.
Great Falls, of course, is home to Malmstrom Air Force Base - and the surrounding counties contain 150 inter-continental ballistic missiles buried in underground silos. And until the mid-1990s, there were fleets of planes that regularly took off and landed at Malmstrom. And with any Air Force base comes alleged sightings of strange lights in the sky.
And back in 1950, Great Falls achieved a level of fame (or notoriety) for the Mariana UFO incident, in which the manager of Great Falls' baseball team claimed to have seen "UFOs" over Great Falls.
That incident led to the minor-league Great Falls baseball team adopting the name "Voyagers" along with an alien-like mascot just last season.
About a year ago, before the Voyagers unveiled their new name, logo, and mascot, a local marketing company created a "viral" ad campaign, complete with YouTube videos of "UFOs" in the sky over Great Falls.
So when people saw the streaking light in the sky on Thursday, followed by a blinding light, it was only natural for some to wonder if it had something do with the military - or extraterrestrials.
But, as with most such sightings, the truth turns out to be both more and less amazing than the theories. And in this age of camcorders, dash-cams, and sky-watchers, it didn't take long to figure out that Thursday's amazing sight was, indeed, a meteorite.
Stay tuned to Montana's News Station for eyewitness accounts.
The images used in the picture accompanying this story on KRTV are from the YouTube video, which is from a dashboard camera that was released to Global Canada.
(From the KRTV Archives, November 20, 2008)
The KRTV newsroom received several phone calls on Thursday evening between 5:30 and 7:30 from people who had seen something strange in the northern sky.
One caller reported seeing a bright flash of light and what appeared to be something streaking down from the sky north of Great Falls.
A second caller reported something similar, describing the bright flash as "golden."
A Great Falls blogger queried his readers asking if they had seen anything, and two visitors commented that they, too, had seen the strange flash and streaks. They described what they saw:
"I was heading home from hunting and saw a "ball of fire" streak staight down through the cloud deck. It was a reddish orange color. I was driving into a draw so I did not see it impact. It did look like the horizon lit up as if it did. The closest way I can describe it to is it looked like a video of the space shuttle taking off throug the clouds, except it was falling not climbing."
"(We) were just returning from the Sieben Ranch southeast of Cascade after hunting elk today...at approx 5:25pm, something VERY large fell from the sky...we watched this huge "fireball" fall straight out of the sky...lit up the clouds...and disappear(?) on the horizon (we were on a lower point of a dirt road, so it looked like it disappeared behind the hill in front of us) anyway, it lit up the sky and was really bright. We asked sis and dad (in their truck behind us in our vehicle) via walkie talkie "what the heck was that?" and they confirmed they had also seen it and had no idea...made the comment it looked like a missile."
So: was it a missile? Northern Lights? UFO? Swamp gas?
Well, probably not. A third person left a comment with a link to a Canadian Broadcasting Company article (CBC link) that reports of at least one meteor streaking across the Alberta sky had people buzzing. Another article - from CTV - even has a couple of pictures of the event, and the Calgary Herald reports that some people even heard a loud boom.
Mystery solved.
