Mike Conley's Tales of the Weird: Fireballs in the sky nothing new

A mysterious fireball that recently streaked across the sky over Texas was not a UFO or an old satellite after all, according to experts. They maintain it was big meteor about the size of a pickup truck.
You might have seen the footage of the fireball burning through the Texas skies Sunday morning. The bright object alarmed numerous Texas residents who thought it might be a UFO or pieces of an old satellite falling to Earth.
But a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said the fireball was a natural phenomenon and not satellite debris. Preston Starr, observatory manager at the University of North Texas, said it probably was a meteor about the size of a pickup truck with the consistency of a chunk of concrete, according to the story by the Associated Press.
The Williamson County sheriff's office in central Texas reported it received so many emergency calls about the light in the sky that it sent deputies out in a helicopter to look for a plane crash. At first, the FAA said the fireball possibly was caused by falling debris from satellites. The FAA even posted a warning to pilots to be on the lookout for the falling pieces.
In the AP story, Starr said the object's trajectory was wrong for it to have been satellite debris. Such objects would be too small and moving too slowly to produce a flare so widely visible during the day like this one.
Starr said objects as large as his estimate for the one spotted Sunday enter the atmosphere about eight or 10 times a year. Despite its initial large size, if any of the object survived the fiery descent through the atmosphere, it would be smaller than a fist, he added.
We can rest easy knowing that a meteor the size of a pickup truck hurtling towards the Earth can disintegrate into small pieces once it enters the atmosphere. But that is not always the case.
About 50,000 years ago, a huge meteor about 54 yards across blasted into what is now the Arizona desert. It left a crater that today is about 4,000 feet in diameter and 570 feet deep. The impact from that massive meteor hitting the Earth's surface produced a tremendous explosion equivalent to at least 2.5 megatons of TNT. It was also equal to a large thermonuclear explosion and about 150 times the yield of the atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to a Web site.
If such a meteor could hit the planet 50,000 years ago, there's no reason why it couldn't happen today. And I doubt that there's anything mankind could do to stop it.
While last weekend's fireball turned out to be a meteor, some bright objects seen over the New Mexico desert 57 years ago this week might have been something else.
Just before sunup on the morning of Feb. 18, 1952, a photographer named C. E. Redman was driving through Albuquerque, N.M. on his way to take pictures at a wedding. While sitting at a traffic light, he saw two bright objects in the dark early morning sky.
"They were hovering above Tijeras Canyon," he later stated. "The one to the north was on its edge. The other was lying horizontally. They were bright, bluish white. It was probably the most astonishing thing I've ever seen. Those things were soundless. They were not jets or vapor trails. I've seen hundreds of jets and vapor trails."
Based on his testimony and the lay of the land, experts estimated that the UFOs were 20 miles away and four miles up in the air. They had a diameter of about 136 feet, according to a Web site.
At around the same time, another witness saw the same objects but from the other side of town.
W.S. Morris, a retired master sergeant of the Air Force, was out at that time of the morning when he saw the two weird objects over the Tijeras Canyon.
"I watched them for 12 minutes," said Morris. "They were a blinding silver, long and thin, gleaming all over. They hovered, one kind of above the other to the right. They seemed brighter than the sun, which wasn't yet over the Sandia Mountains."
He reported that the UFOs didn't move but just hovered in the air. Then, they suddenly dropped down behind a mountain and soon vanished from sight.
It is doubtful that these weird objects were meteors or satellite debris. Perhaps, they were visitors from another world.