Mysterious Light,Explosion Rattles Nerves In Several States

Were they meteors? A comet? UFOs?

People from Maryland to Hampton Roads heard loud explosions and saw brilliant, streaking lights in the sky Sunday night.

There was no immediate explanation, the National Weather Service office in Wakefield said. The Virginia Beach 911 center had numerous calls waiting just before 10 p.m., a supervisor said.

The Weather Service said reports were made from Dorchester County, Md., to the Virginia/North Carolina border. People said they saw a streak in the sky and heard an explosion.

“It was orange, like a fireball,” said Steve Wagner, who lives in the Great Bridge area of Chesapeake and said what he saw was too close to be a shooting star. Wagner was outside cooking with family when he saw the streak. He said he went inside when his daughter called, then heard an explosion that sounded like thunder.

Chris Wamsley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Wakefield office, said there could be various causes of the explosions and lights. A team of people is looking into what happened, he said.

Lindsey Hosek of the Great Neck area of Virginia Beach was jogging along the water with her dog when the sky lit up, she said.

“The bright light at first terrified me because I thought somebody was shining a light on me, and then I saw it, and I was in complete awe because it was so beautiful,” she said.

Then she saw something that looked like a comet moving low toward the ground; it was blue in front followed by orange and appeared to be the shape and size of a refrigerator.

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Wavy.com is investigating the loud boom and bright flash in the sky witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people around 9:40 Sunday night.

People from Maryland to North Carolina have called 10 on your side and wavy.com reporting the flash.

Witnesses say they saw a bright light off towards the east and saw a bright light raveling across the sky in a west-south west direction.

Scientists from the National Weather Service in Wakefield say they have also been getting hundreds of calls.

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Emergency crews fanned out across the city looking for whatever caused a loud explosion Sunday night.

At around 9:45 911 dispatchers started receiving calls from people reporting a light in the sky followed by a loud boom.

Some reported that the explosion caused their homes to shake.

However, emergency crews could find no evidence of any kind of explosion.

No injuries, fires or damage were reported.

The National Weather Service had few answers.

Jennifer McNatt, a meteorologist said the service had been in touch with the Navy, Air Force and NASA, but none of those organizations had any unusual activity to report.

Officials at Norfolk International Airport had received reports of the light and explosion, but said nothing wsa out of the ordinary at the airport.

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Astronomers Baffled by Mysterious Light in Sky

It’s not a supernova. Nor is it a galaxy, or a black hole.

In fact, astronomers have no idea what the mysterious object that in February 2006 suddenly flared up in an otherwise barren patch of sky might be, or even what it’s made of.

Researchers working on something called the Supernova Cosmology Project had pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a very distant star cluster, 8.2 billion light-years away or more than halfway across the universe.

But they noticed something else — a point of light where there hadn’t been one before.

Over the next three months, the object got brighter and brighter until it was 120 times its initial luminosity.

Then it slowly got dimmer again, at about the same rate, until by the end of the year it was gone.

Astronomers led by U.C. Berkeley astrophysics grad student Kyle Barbary put the light coming from it through a mass spectrometer to see what it was made of — but couldn’t get signatures for any known elements.

“Because we can’t see anything we recognize in the spectrum, we can’t tell if it’s even in [our] galaxy or in another galaxy,” Barbary told New Scientist magazine in an article posted Tuesday morning.

It’s not a supernova, which would have flared up much more quickly, then died out even more quickly.

All the scientists know is that it’s no closer to Earth than 130 light-years away — and no further than 11 billion light-years away.

As Sky and Telescope magazine noted last week, “that leaves a lot of leeway.”

“We are hoping someone else might have seen something similar,” Barbary told New Scientist, “or might be able to shed some light on it.”

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