7 case files, newest first.
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 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.
At about ten on a Sunday night in October 1894, one brilliant fireball crossed Arizona Territory. Flagstaff saw it burst over the Elden mountains, Mesa “just this side of Superstition,” and Globe felt a detonation that “shook the earth.” Mohave County had it hit Wallapai mountain, and Tucson called it “the first dispatch from Mars.”
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.
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.
A golden-trailed fireball crossed the Salt River Valley at dinnertime on 6 October 1906 and broke up with a boom. Callers feared an explosion, the Weather Bureau observer timed it with his watch, and Tucson and Phoenix each said it passed right over them.
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.
