Series · Seasonal run
Three October anniversaries, posted a day or two ahead of each date: a meteor storm that alarmed rural Portugal, a "great fiery ball" in a Devon church, and the radio panic that newspapers built bigger than it was.
On the evening of October 9, 1933, observers across Europe counted hundreds of meteors a minute, and in rural Portugal the sight caused real alarm. American observatories heard about it by telegraph while it was happening, watched their own skies that night, and saw nothing.
Two shipyard workers told a Mississippi sheriff they had been taken aboard a craft beside the Pascagoula River. The sheriff left a recorder running when he stepped out. Fifty years on, the tape is still the strongest evidence, and the gaps are still there.
On a Friday evening in October 1992 a fireball crossed several eastern states while football crowds filmed it, then a 12 kg stone punched through the trunk of a parked Chevrolet in Peekskill, New York. It became the best-filmed meteorite fall of its time.
A fireball over the San Francisco Bay Area on 17 October 2012 was caught by NASA-supported sky cameras, the fall zone was predicted over Novato, and three days later a resident found a black stone after remembering a bang on her roof.
Listed in event order, oldest first.
