March 31, 2007 |
A rock the size of three football fields may have crashed into the California landscape more than 35 million years ago, creating a 3.4-mile-wide crater west of Stockton, San Diego State University researchers reported this month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. The impact would have created a 1,500-megaton explosion.
April 25, 2005 |
A nighttime meteor shower sparked a flurry of frantic phone calls to police departments across New England from people who saw bright lights moving in the sky, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said. The meteor shower was seen as far north as Portland, Maine, and as far south as Long Island. Some witnesses apparently thought the meteor shower might be a plane crashing, the FAA's Holly Baker said.
January 20, 1992 |
Sky-watchers from Los Angeles to Inyo County reported a brightly colored fireball shower Saturday night, and authorities here said a San Diego man driving on California 395 claimed that something shattered a window of his car just after he saw the lights streak across the sky. The reports came amid other sightings in Inyo and Mono counties of what may have been a meteor swarm. A guide at Griffith Observatory said they received three calls from Southland residents reporting the lights.
July 8, 2004 |
A meteor shower lighted up the sky from Texas to western Tennessee, prompting a flood of reports to law enforcement officers throughout the region. The lights flashed across the sky in portions of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Tennessee. A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Fort Worth said the lights were caused by meteors passing through the atmosphere.
October 8, 1996
The meteor that caused a bright green flash in Southland skies Thursday evening probably landed in the Sequoia National Forest north of Lake Isabella if enough survived to reach the ground, according to meteor researcher John Wasson of UCLA. Previous reports had indicated that it probably landed much farther north of Los Angeles, but Wasson's estimated landing site is based on triangulation from more than 60 different sightings.
March 14, 2005 |
Dozens of residents in the Pacific Northwest reported seeing a bright streak of light flashing across the sky, startling witnesses from southern Oregon to the Seattle area, according to officials. Scientists said the flaming object was probably a meteor, and that it probably disintegrated before any fragments fell into the Pacific Ocean. Michael O'Connor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration's regional office in Renton, Wash.
June 4, 2004 |
A meteor about the size of a large suitcase flashed across the Northwest sky in the dead of night, setting off booms. Witnesses along a 60-mile swath of the Puget Sound region from the Tacoma area to Whidbey Island and as far as 260 miles to the east said the sky lighted up brilliantly around 2:40 a.m., and many reported booms as if from one or more explosions.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 2, 1990
A meteor streaked across the Southern California skies Tuesday night, flashing colors of orange and green, and spurring enough calls to authorities to jam phone lines from San Luis Obispo to Tijuana, officials said. Hundreds of people called Los Angeles' Griffith Park Observatory, particularly from the Ventura County area, saying that a green or orange object was moving through the sky in various directions, said observatory assistant Nicholas Read.
May 12, 1991 |
A "very loud whistling, whining, screaming noise" that a man reported to police was caused by a tiny meteor that landed in his garden north of London, Dr. Robert Hutchinson of the Natural History Museum said. The meteor was the first confirmed to land in Britain in 26 years. Hutchinson said Friday that the 1 1/2-pound black pitted rock probably came from beyond Mars before it landed in Arthur Pettifer's yard last Sunday.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 20, 1992 |
A meteor with the explosive force of 350 million tons of TNT struck a glancing blow to northern Argentina less than 10,000 years ago, skipping across the Earth's surface like a stone across water, researchers said last week. The scientists blamed the meteor for a strange series of depressions, each about 2.5 miles long by half a mile wide, arranged along a 35-mile corridor in the otherwise flat Argentine pampas.