Fire in the sky

Talk about it

WORTHINGTON — A few area residents reported seeing what appeared as a fireball in the sky in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Stan Heidebrink, who lives about 10 miles south of Worthington, was on his way home from working at AGCO in Jackson when the brilliant light caught his attention.

“I worked an hour later, or I wouldn’t have seen it either,” said Heidebrink, who checked the clock as soon as he got home and estimated the incident occurred at about 3:25 a.m. “There was a big flash of light, like lightning, only brighter. If you’d been outside, you would have seen it. If you had even been awake in the house, you would have seen it.”

Tim Stanley, a route driver for the Daily Globe, was dropping off papers on Oxford Street when he saw the big flash in the sky.

“It was like a lightning bolt going across the sky, kind of like that, but not lightning,” he described. “There was a big flash, and when I looked out the window of the van, it was there, then it was gone, like it just sped across the sky. It really caught my attention. I’ve seen a lot of falling stars, but nothing like this before. It was going straight, not falling down like a falling star. I didn’t really know what I was seeing.”

Laura Bosma of Ocheyedan, Iowa, was en route to work in Worthington when she saw what was “like lightning lighting up the sky.”

“When I looked to the west, I seen what looked like a jet stream (best I could describe the light) that glowed, blue/white light,” Bosma reported in an email to the Daily Globe. “Like a long skinny diamond — really like a meteor, you could say, but diamond-shaped. It glowed for a short while, then disappeared, but could still see the smoke … like you see a jet on a sunny day — a smoke stream.”

When Bosma called her husband, Dale, who was working outside in those early hours, he and a co-worker had also witnessed the strange light.

Heidebrink wasn’t convinced that the light had a natural cause when he stopped at the Daily Globe office to report the sighting.

“It stopped moving,” he said about what he viewed in the sky. “I don’t even know why I looked up that way. I just looked under the windshield of the car, and it was mostly blue, and just sat there. The next thing I knew, it took off, with like a jet plume behind it. It was headed west. I guess I’m thinking unidentified flying object. I’m just wondering if anyone else saw it.”

Odds are, however, that the strange light was a meteor. According to a scientific website, earthsky.org, the peak of the 2011 Orionid meteor shower will occur later this week, in the early morning hours of Friday and Saturday, although sightings are common after Oct. 15.

“On a dark, moonless night, the Orionids exhibit a maximum of about 15 meteors per hour,” the website explains. “These fast-moving meteors occasionally leave persistent trains and bright fireballs.”

The Orionid meteor shower occur each year in October as a result of the Earth passing through dust released by Halley’s Comet. The point from where the Orionid meteors appear to radiate is located within the constellation Orion, giving the meteor shower its name.

Tags: news, fireball, night, sky