An apparent meteor shower Monday evening triggered a flood of calls to emergency authorities in widespread areas of Pennsylvania, with other reports coming in from Virginia to New York.
"We originally got a report of a plane crash and now it seems there were multiple meteors coming down," said supervisor Tara Dolzani of the Schuylkill County communications center.
A Montoursville state police dispatcher said people reported seeing a "big red ball" streaking across the sky. There was one report of broken windows north of the station from the concussion.
People reported seeing the flaming meteors in a number of places in Luzerne and Schuylkill counties, in the Harrisburg area and as far west as Westmoreland County. There were reports of explosions in Pottsville and in Tioga County. Some callers felt their homes shake and others feared a plane crash or thought it was thunder.
In Pottsville, James Mennig, 22, and his friend Brian Faust, 21, said they saw the spectacle at about 6:30 p.m.
"It looked like a plane that was totally engulfed in flames. It was about the size of that Jeep Cherokee," Mennig said, pointing across the street to a parked vehicle. He ran inside and told his mother what he saw, he said, but she didn't believe him.
"His mom thought he was on some kind of nasty drugs or something," said Faust, who was holding his 1-year-old daughter, Krista.
They said they drove to the place where the object, which was followed by a trail of smoke had appeared to go.
"There were about 13, 14 cars in the area, and there were cops everywhere," Faust said.
Meanwhile, in Cape May, N.J., Joe Poole was driving through town around 6:15 p.m. when he saw a meteor over an inlet. It was moving toward the horizon in the northwest, said Poole, who watched it for about 10 seconds before it disappeared.
"It seemed to be a very pinkish red with a white center," said Poole, 55, a Cape May resident who designs sea search and rescue gear. "There was some blue and green in its tail."
"It was like a Roman candle," he said. "And it was large."
At McGuire Air Force Base in Wrightstown, N.J., Airman Sharon Carpenter was on break around 6 p.m. in the air traffic control tower when she looked up and saw an orange streak north of the base.
In less than a second, the westbound streak was gone, seen by no other air traffic or radar controllers in the tower.
"I spent the rest of the night trying to prove to them that I wasn't going crazy," Carpenter said.
In Buffalo, N.Y., National Weather Service observers received reports of a bright meteor seen Monday evening in the western and southern regions of the state.
"We got our first call at about 6:25 from the Monroe County Sheriff's Department," said Dave Sage, a meteorologist with the weather service in Buffalo. "Then the calls just started coming in."
Sightings were reported in Easton, Md., in the Wilmington, Del., metropolitan area, as far south as Alexandria, Va., and as far east at Cape May, N.J.
Alexander Wolszczan, an astronomy professor at Pennsylvania State University, said that the thunder or house shaking that people felt could be the result of a sound wave produced by the meteor exploding in the Earth's atmosphere and breaking up.
Such an event also produces a spectacular light display, and is called a meteor shower, Wolszczan said. Normally, a meteor shower is a silent event, he said. But for a meteor to create a concussive sound wave, or even hit the earth, is a "matter of size and speed and composition."
Often, a meteor can be composed of rock hundreds of feet in diameter before it burns up in the Earth's atmosphere.
"It would mostly be rock, of course," Wolszczan said. "But if you envision a rock 300 meters in diameter, then the impact of something like that would have consequences that I wouldn't want to envision."
[This message has been edited by Wendy Forsyth (edited July 24, 2001).]
