Southland residents Wednesday were still amazed at a mysterious fireball that streaked through the Southern California sky overnight, prompting hundreds of social media posts and plenty of speculation.
An official at the Griffith Observatory said it was either a meteor or space debris.
A colonel with the U.S. Strategic Command later confirmed to NBC News that it was some kind of “Russian space debris.”
The streak was reported and captured on video by observers from Arizona, Nevada and California.
The director of the observatory, Edwin C. Krupp, was prepping for interviews with broadcast reporters Tuesday night even as some commentators posted jokes about a second launch of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket, which managed a vertical landing in Florida on Monday night.
Others wondered earlier on Twitter whether the streak of light was from a missile.
Krupp told reporters that it was either a meteor or debris falling from space and burning in much the same way that a meteor would burn when it enters the earth’s orbit, according to an observatory spokesman.
The website CalSKY, which bills itself as “the most complete astronomical observation and information online-calculator on this globe,” reported that an SL-4 rocket body “either landed, decayed or docked” at 6:16 p.m.
— City News Service