A bright Louisiana Meteor Fireball streaked across the skies of south Louisiana shortly after 5 a.m. Sunday, June 28, turning a dark pre-dawn sky into a brief flash that cameras and witnesses caught across a wide stretch of the South. The event was visible enough that people in several states reported seeing it, even though no sign points to anything reaching the ground.
Alex Jerome was among the people who captured it. He submitted footage from a security camera on his property in Denham Springs, while Katie Bownds sent video from her doorbell camera in St. Francisville. The clearest view came from the camera atop Our Lady of the Lake Hospital on Essen Lane, and other cameras in the Sky9 camera network recorded the bright flash the fireball produced.
That flash is what made the scene so dramatic. The American Meteor Society defines a fireball as an exceptionally bright meteor with a visual magnitude of -3 or brighter, about the brightness of Venus, and says it forms when larger pieces of space debris enter Earth’s atmosphere. Those pieces can range from pebble-sized to about a meter across, and fireballs can be visible over hundreds of miles, which fits the reports that came in from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas.
What was missing from the show was any sign of impact. The fireball lit the sky, drew reports from across five states and vanished without any indication that it survived its passage through the atmosphere. That leaves the same unanswered point now that the cameras have done their part: whether the object broke apart completely overhead or whether any small fragment made it through unseen.
