I saw a meteor once when I was a kid. I was on the beach and it streaked across the sky and exploded into a bunch of other things that streaked a little further and faded out.
I never really told anyone because it seem so preposterous that I wasn't really sure I had seen it at all.
It was well out over the over the ocean a number of kilometeres and up very high - zero chance it was fireworks and there weren't ny on that night anyway.
I saw a big one in the evening during army bootcamp. For a second or two it was as bright as day.
One of the guys says "wtf was that?" and another replied "it's a falling star" (literal term we use for shooting stars in our language).
A third guy asks, "so why do stars fall?". Silence.
I ventured, "uh, guys... stars don't fall. Stars are like the Sun, just really far away. What we saw was a meteor, a rock that flew through space and burned up when it hit the atmosphere."
Half the squad looked at me like I just said that babies are delivered by storks. I could tell they thought that was total bullshit but couldn't offer an alternative explanation and call me on it.
It was then that I realized how smart and educated the average person is. Army service was mandatory back then so everyone had to go.
Yeah, but a lot of the population is clustered around the average so many of those half aren’t really much dumber than the average person (and of course a large number on the other side aren’t much more intelligent).
Same in Poland - "spadające gwiazdy" - "falling stars". Even National Geographic uses this term[1] but exaplains in the lead: "Falling stars are meteores..."
I saw something similar, the weird thing is my brain hallucinated sound that couldn't have possibly been there. It was on dark winter night during a ferry crossing and the chunks intersected the horizon.
Black body radiation coming off that thing that's nearly sun-hot pumps a lot of energy out into the world. Everything that can absorb some of it does so, and twitches.
We tend to think of radio receivers as something special, but they're highly optimized versions of processes going on all the time all around us.
The clearest example I've personally experienced of this was out in the boonies watching a meteor shower with an astronomy club. After a few times hearing my glasses "hiss" just as I was seeing a meteor I asked about it and the fellow in charge (chair of the college astro department) filled us in. It was freakin' awesome.
I saw one of these as well, sitting on top of a mountain with a friend. We were there to watch the Perseid meteor shower and were seeing small ones every few minutes, then a much larger one came across the sky. The head of it was glowing orange and green and I could also hear a crackling/burning noise. My friend saw the same thing and we were both so freaked out by it that we headed back to camp shortly afterwards.
I'd be very surprised if that's the explanation and would rather suspect something like the "noisy GIFs"[1], where a strong visual cue may cause the brain to attach a sound that sounds reasonable.
That's also quite easy to verify - since we have visual sky surveillance, why not add microphones and confirm it really happens, no need to rely on random reports.
I was on a sailing ship in the Atlantic, on the middle of the night watch, when a large meteor streaked across the sky. It burned with several colours (white, green, red, maybe, can’t remember exactly) and made a strong fizzling sound, like something in a hot frying pan with too much oil. I know that couldn’t be from the meteor’s sound waves, so this is the first sensible explanation.
4:44am I think - would’ve been visible from Merewether
> Abstract
A very large meteor fireball passed through the atmosphere above the east coast of New South Wales early in the morning of 7 April 1978. It was seen at 04.44 AEST (18.44 UT, 6 April) by hundreds of people from the cities of Sydney and Newcastle who deluged the news media with telephoned sightings. The resulting publicity led to the collection of many reports, of which 19 were useful in defining the trajectory and ground track of the fireball. I define here the ground track, which is shown in Fig. 1, and include the locations of the eye-witnesses
I never really told anyone because it seem so preposterous that I wasn't really sure I had seen it at all.
It was well out over the over the ocean a number of kilometeres and up very high - zero chance it was fireworks and there weren't ny on that night anyway.