A 1,000-pound meteor exploded through the Texas sky; watch the incredible event captured on video.
As if Americans didn’t already have enough unidentified flying things to worry about last week, a 1,000-pound meteor exploded over McAllen, Texas, on February 16, 2023. Even though the meteor exploded in a massive fireball in the sky, it was luckily a completely normal phenomenon, according to Futurism.com. NASA said that “The angle and speed of entry, along with signatures in weather radar imagery, are consistent with other naturally occurring meteorite falls.”
Still, though, the event was a major one. The meteor explosion was so big that it was actually picked up by the National Weather Service of Brownsville, Texas, whose Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) actually registered it as a large lightning strike.
There's been reports of a possible meteorite this evening west of McAllen. One of the satellite tools we use is the Geostationary Lightning Mapper & it measures lightning as observed from space. GLM detected a signal at 523 PM with no storms around. No official confirmation yet. pic.twitter.com/1NKRZTZU9C
— NWS Brownsville (@NWSBrownsville) February 16, 2023The GLM showed that “lightning” had been detected in McAllen, Texas at 5:23 PM, but there were no storms in the area whatsoever. This tool is made to measure lightning “as observed from space,” so it was very unexpected that it would pick up something from outer space itself.
NASA later released a statement about the meteor, saying that, based on “preliminary information from several sources,” the object in question was a “meteoroid about two feet in diameter weighing about 1,000 pounds.” They went on to say that it was certain that meteorites, or pieces of a meteor, hit the ground in Texas, meaning that someone, somewhere, is holding on to some pretty cool souvenirs right now.
The most frightening thing about the meteor in Texas may just have been its volume. The large chunk of space rock exploded with such a loud boom that it shook many houses, like the one in the Twitter video below.
Immediately after the event, 911 dispatchers received numerous phone calls from people saying that they had just heard “explosions” and that they were so loud that it rattled their windows and even walls. People were especially worried about what turned out to be a meteor over Texas since this event came just days after incidents of multiple UFOs being shot down from the skies by the U.S. military.
Luckily, it was “just” a meteor exploding, though, and residents had nothing to fear. Sheriff Eddie Guerra of Hidalgo County in Texas even made a joke at a news conference about the event, saying that one of his officers “almost fell over” when the epic boom startled them while they were out for a jog.
He also added that two pilots flying over the area had also seen the meteor when it was in the sky, which, admittedly, is a bit more worrisome.
NASA’s statement included a reminder that action needs to be taken toward getting some sort of meteor-monitoring system in place so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen without notice again. The meteor over Texas was harmless in the end, but it isn’t great that no one really knew about it until it was exploding overhead. NASA said that this is just another sign that it and other organizations need to work harder to “increase our understanding and protection of Earth.”
Meteors might sound cool on paper, but it is not so cool that the people of Texas had no clue about the one soaring over their heads until it exploded!
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