Series · Recurring series
Glowing spirals, "jellyfish," slow comets that cross half the state in a few minutes. Most of the mass sky-light reports that reach the ledger turn out to be launches, reentries or meteors. This desk checks those first, with times, and says so plainly when that check comes up empty.
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.
In the last hours of 1978 a TV crew on a cargo flight filmed bright lights off New Zealand's Kaikōura coast, and air-traffic radar logged returns. A government cable from January 1979, now at Archives New Zealand, shows scientists debunking one film, stuck on the other, and guessing at Jupiter or Venus.
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.
On the Tuesday before Christmas 2015, a bright, slow, fragmenting light crossed the evening sky from California to Arizona. It wasn't a meteor. It was the spent third stage of the Soyuz rocket that had launched a cargo ship to the space station the day before.
At 3:56 a.m. on June 2, 2016, a fireball lit up the Southwest, and sonic booms were heard across the Phoenix area. More than 400 people reported it. It wasn't a launch or a re-entry. Radar tracked falling stones, and fifteen meteorites were recovered. They were named Dishchii'bikoh.
At dusk on December 22, 2017, a glowing, branching cloud crossed the Southern California sky and stopped traffic on the freeways. The Los Angeles Fire Department had to explain it: a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg. AP reported it was seen as far away as Phoenix.
At 7:21 p.m. on October 7, 2018, people across metro Phoenix photographed a strange glowing streak in the western sky. It was a Falcon 9 launched from Vandenberg in California, lit by a sun that had set over Arizona more than an hour earlier, and its first stage flew back to land at the base for the first time.
Just after 7 p.m. on September 28, 2025, a long, glowing streak drifted across Arizona from Flagstaff to Tucson, and some people asked if it was a comet. It was a Falcon 9 that had launched from Vandenberg a few minutes earlier, lit by a sun that had already set.
Two October meteor showers peak this month: the Draconids on the evening of October 8 and the Orionids before dawn around October 21–22. Here's when to look from Arizona, and how to tell a meteor or fireball from a rocket plume or a satellite.
Listed in event order, oldest first.
