When Bernard King and his wife check their doorbell video from overnight, they’re used to seeing neighborhood cats or coyotes. But when they woke up on Friday morning, they saw something completely different.
“It looked like it was something coming from space at a high speed and burning up pretty brightly,” King told NBC 7. “The flash was green. At least to me, that’s the way it looked.”
According to the recording device, the moment was captured at 2:38 a.m. on Friday, June 23.
When King, who lives in the Mission Hills area, looked at the footage, it appeared to show a bright object hurtling down from the night sky with a long tail following it like a wake. Then when the orb looks like it reaches the skyline, there is a bright flash and it disappears.
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“It could be space junk or space debris from a rocket launch, but it definitely looked like it was coming from space at a high speed,” King said, while explaining his assumption that it was most likely a meteor.
King went to report his finding to the American Meteor Society, an organization that was founded in 1911 and tracks meteor sightings across the globe. When he got to their website, he was surprised to see that more than one dozen other people had reported seeing the same thing, at the same time, from as far as Nevada and Arizona.
“My thought was that in the video itself it seems like it’s a lot closer like, ‘oh, it’s just in El Cajon or just eastern San Diego,’ when it’s actually probably hundreds of miles away,” King said. “It really puts in perspective how big this thing was and how bright it was.”
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Robert Lunsford, the person who sifts through reports of meteors at AMS, confirmed that what was seen was very likely a fireball.
“When you have meteors that are larger than normal, it only takes ones that is the size of a softball or larger to produce a flash equivalent to the full moon,” Lunsford told NBC 7. “They can be extremely bright. We must remember these fireballs are entering the atmosphere at speeds of up to 50 miles per second.”
Lunsford has spent his entire life studying the night sky, and said for those who were able to see this moment, it is very special.
“We need to remember that on a personal basis these are pretty rare, you have to be outside on a clear night, facing the right direction,” Lunsford said.
He added that the use of security cameras to automatically capture these moments is extremely helpful.
“A lot of folks think, ‘geez, the sky is falling, we’re getting more of these.’ No, we’re just able to record more and more of these and a lot of people don’t know they can actually report and help us advance science," Lunsford said.
According to Lunsford, there will be an opportunity to view a Perseid meteor shower in San Diego overnight from Aug. 12 to Aug. 13, if there is a clear sky.
