Did you fill out the official fireball report?
May 17, 2016 2:28 PM   Subscribe

The AMS has received 425 reports so far about a fireball event over Northeastern US on May 17th 2016 around 12:50am EDT (4:50 UT). The fireball was seen primarily from Maine but witnesses from Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Ontario (Canada) and Québec (Canada) also reported the event.
posted by rtha (56 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:31 PM on May 17, 2016 [22 favorites]


Hm.
posted by Frowner at 2:34 PM on May 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


I saw a fireball once. Broad daylight. Bright green streak across the sky, insanely fast like nothing I've ever seen before. It was neato.
posted by Hoopo at 2:35 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Lucky bastards.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:42 PM on May 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


...Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
posted by The Tensor at 2:47 PM on May 17, 2016 [28 favorites]


Previously
posted by ymgve at 2:48 PM on May 17, 2016


Well thank God all my dinosaurs were safe inside the house.
posted by sexyrobot at 2:52 PM on May 17, 2016 [81 favorites]


Fucking Kryptonians fighting again.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:00 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


It doesn't look like it hit the ground.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:05 PM on May 17, 2016


I keep telling my partner that the way I want us to die is lying in our bed in each other's arms, and then a meteorite crashes through the roof and kills us both instantly without damaging the neighbors' houses unduly.

When she gets home tonight I'll have to tell her that the universe is trying, but needs to work on its aim a little.
posted by jamjam at 3:06 PM on May 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


I have it on good authority that there was also a fireball event in Brooklyn on the night of Sept. 9, 2014.

sorry
posted by mhum at 3:10 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


Big news here in Portland. Apparently the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum is offering quite a large reward if anyone can bring them a piece of it.

Stephen King could not be reached for comment.
posted by anastasiav at 3:12 PM on May 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


Goodness gracious.
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:12 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


RYLEH HAS RISEN FROM THE DEPTHS STOP SET CONDITION OMEGA STOP REPEAT RYLEH HAS RISEN
posted by humanfont at 3:15 PM on May 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


Alternately maybe the Norwegians launched a rocket to celebrate 17 May.
posted by humanfont at 3:17 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh god please let it be aliens that's the only thing that would stop this election coverage
posted by The Whelk at 3:17 PM on May 17, 2016 [41 favorites]


Well thank God all my dinosaurs were safe inside the house.

This is one of the wittiest things I've read in quite a while
posted by clockzero at 3:21 PM on May 17, 2016


I have it on good authority that there was also a fireball event in Brooklyn on the night of Sept. 9, 2014 .

With a little help from The Jello Mistress of Brooklyn you can plan your own fireball event.

posted by ActingTheGoat at 3:24 PM on May 17, 2016


Oh god please let it be aliens that's the only thing that would stop this election coverage

Are you kidding?

Clinton: We must develop trade, diplomatic relations, and military cooperation with these aliens
Trump: These are the WORST aliens I've ever seen, and I've seen all the best aliens out there
Etc.
posted by clockzero at 3:27 PM on May 17, 2016 [9 favorites]


Trump: "We're gonna build a dome. And Altair IV will pay for it."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:29 PM on May 17, 2016 [45 favorites]


Make the galaxy great again!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:36 PM on May 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


Sanders: Superdelegates? How about extra-terrestrial delegates.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:46 PM on May 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


We could be known as PLANET TRUMP. Do we really want to do that to poor old Gaea?
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:51 PM on May 17, 2016


so pissed that I missed up. Probably wasn't any good anyway. hmph.
posted by theora55 at 3:54 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


We're gonna have the most tremendous fireball you've ever seen, it's gonna be called the Trumpguska Event, it's gonna be huge, we're gonna fireball so much you're gonna be sick of fireballing
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:54 PM on May 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


Sorry, monkeys. One of my "crew" infestation thought it would be fun to Displace that Reagan guy's corpse up here and then throw him back at you really hard. In her defense, I will note only that she was really, really high. On drugs. Not just in altitude. Anyway.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:56 PM on May 17, 2016 [8 favorites]


"It doesn't look like it hit the ground."

Very, very few meteors (in the atmosphere) become meteorites (rocks on land) -- estimates vary widely, but it's in the dozens or hundreds worldwide, per year. The number of visible meteors is much, much higher. So the chance that any meteor you see will actually make it to the ground are so small as to be equivalent to zero.

Here is where I get to tell an interesting story. The father of a girl I dated in high school is renowned as probably the world's most successful meteorite hunter. He has the advantage of local access to a lot of land where wind erosion reveals meteorites and an uncanny eye for spotting them. He's been finding meteorites since the 60s and by 1980, when I was in high school, he'd become pretty famous (in certain circles) for it.

Amazingly, though -- and I just recently learned of this -- in 1998 there was a meteor near his home (a couple of miles outside of town), he and several neighbors heard the bolide, and parts of the meteor survived to strike the ground as meteorites, one of them crashing through his neighbor's barn. This is an incredibly rare event, the sort of thing that few people on the planet ever have a chance to experience, and it just so happened to occur over the head of the world's greatest living meteorite hunter.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:00 PM on May 17, 2016 [25 favorites]


...It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days...
posted by howfar at 4:02 PM on May 17, 2016 [9 favorites]


This was NOT the thing for me to be seeing immediately after reading the original WAR OF THE WORLDS for the first time.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:06 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


War of the Worlds was the first thing I thought of. We listened to the original radio play in sixth grade and it scared me more than almost anything else has since.
posted by skycrashesdown at 4:11 PM on May 17, 2016


War of the Worlds was the first thing I thought of. We listened to the original radio play in sixth grade and it scared me more than almost anything else has since. -- posted by skycrashesdown

Evidently so.
posted by jamjam at 4:26 PM on May 17, 2016 [8 favorites]


i hope it's not one of those mind-enslaving sentient meteors
posted by indubitable at 4:41 PM on May 17, 2016


Swamp gas. Move along, nothing to see here.
posted by goatdog at 4:48 PM on May 17, 2016


Burning balls of swamp gas. Which is also my stripper name.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:54 PM on May 17, 2016 [12 favorites]


Many years ago, the mister and I were outside our house smoking cigarettes. There was an amazing fireball and I was facing the wrong freaking direction. I could see that the night sky suddenly got very bright, but he got to see it. It's been almost ten years and I'm still mad. More so now since I live in the viewing area and didn't see anything last night.
posted by Ruki at 5:05 PM on May 17, 2016


I missed seeing it last night (gently snoozing), but a Portland, Maine police officer caught it on dashcam.
posted by Jubal Kessler at 5:23 PM on May 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


When I was 14, my mom was in a nursing home, just on the edge of death. After sitting with her for several hours that night, several of us went home to get a bit of sleep. Around 2 in the morning, we got a call that she was dead, so my sister and I got in the car to head over there. On the way, there was a particularly spectacular fireball that looked like it had sparks shooting off of it as it fell towards Earth. I had plenty of experience seeing meteors trails, since I spent plenty of time under dark skies as a kid, but that one was far brighter than any I'd seen before.

Having always been fairly..rational..I didn't take any deep meaning from it, but it was a happy bit of wonderment to distract from the seriousness of the occasion.
posted by wierdo at 5:27 PM on May 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


Oh god please let it be aliens that's the only thing that would stop this election coverage

Thanks goodness I'm not the only one. First thought when I read the title, "I hope it's aliens. We need some redirection of the crazy."
posted by Jalliah at 5:28 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


Don't get your hopes up. We've put in way more than 425 reports of lavaballing in southern New England, and do the transit companies do anything about it?
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:41 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


The chances of anyone voting for Trump, were a million to one, they said...
posted by quinndexter at 5:51 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


War of the Worlds was the first thing I thought of.

Somewhere out there some kids have probably rushed off and found a Blob already.
posted by octobersurprise at 5:56 PM on May 17, 2016


A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
posted by SansPoint at 6:04 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


So if 100 meteors a year make it to the ground as meteorites, then in 1 million years of Earth's history, that's 100 million meteorites. In 100 million years, 10 billion meteorites. Most of them probably fall into the ocean but that's still a lot of meteorites to hunt!!

And don't forget the catchy little TMBG tune. It's a round!
posted by freecellwizard at 6:32 PM on May 17, 2016



Here is where I get to tell an interesting story. The father of a girl I dated in high school is renowned as probably the world's most successful meteorite hunter.


I can't find my copy, so I can't check the index to confirm right now, but I imagine the odds are pretty good that he's featured - or at least mentioned - in my grandmother's book. Especially since she lived in Los Alamos when she was researching and writing it, it seems pretty likely that he and she at least crossed paths a few times.
posted by nickmark at 7:11 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


Burning balls of swamp gas. Which is also my stripper name.

That's why you never get any tips. well, one of the reasons anyway
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:13 PM on May 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


It was just a bright flash? Moving object? Pfft.

Call me when the east coast gets a steady, gigantic burning light that just hangs in the night sky casting shadows everywhere for, like, hours. "Unarmed Trident missile test fired from a submarine" my ass.
posted by carsonb at 7:20 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Fuck, Bernie's called in an old testament smitey-type angel.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:16 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thanks goodness I'm not the only one. First thought when I read the title, "I hope it's aliens. We need some redirection of the crazy."

This is, of course, the plot of Watchmen
posted by Brainy at 8:38 PM on May 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


I keep telling my partner that the way I want us to die is lying in our bed in each other's arms, and then a meteorite crashes through the roof and kills us both instantly without damaging the neighbors' houses unduly.

You just drop this into conversation?
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:26 PM on May 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


I suspect Vermicious Knids (warning autoplay ad)

Wonka also tells Charlie that shooting stars are in fact Knids who are burning to death, due to their stupidity or boldness in attempting to attack Earth despite the well-known warnings.
posted by boilermonster at 11:13 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


This is, of course, the plot of Watchmen

Not in the movie I saw!
posted by DigDoug at 5:18 AM on May 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Well played, y'all.
In the Blue, the only fireballs are the posters.
posted by rdone at 6:34 AM on May 18, 2016


And don't forget the catchy little TMBG tune. It's a round!

Dangit, as much as I love TMBG, I'm tired of them getting credit for the Ballads for the Age of Science.
posted by rlk at 6:48 AM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I missed this last night in part because I live in a horribly light polluted city and in part because I was not paying attention to the outside world because I was too busy conquering the galaxy in Stellaris. While not ironic, it is an amusing coincidence.
posted by Hactar at 8:05 AM on May 18, 2016


You just drop this into conversation?

Can you think of anything better to talk about?
posted by happyroach at 12:00 PM on May 18, 2016


Food's always good. Or sex. Or sex and food.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:16 PM on May 18, 2016


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