It came from outer space: Fireball streaks across Canadian Prairie, crashes

By USA TODAY
Added: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Titania for the link.

Reposted from:
http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/11/it-came-from-ou.html

The Canadian Prairie is still buzzing about a giant fireball that roared across the sky last night and slammed into the earth with a bright flash.

Witnesses described the fireball as red, green, white or blue.

Aliens? Not so far, anyway. Just a meteor.

"It's a massive fireball; it's one of the brightest that we've seen in the area. And it almost certainly dropped meteorites," Dr. Christopher Herd, a University of Alberta earth and atmospheric sciences professor, told CBC News. "It looks somewhere around the Alberta-Saskatchewan border."

The Edmonton Sun reports that fragments may have landed in central Saskatchewan. Scientists have begun searching and reviewing footage from Web cams

See for yourself in this video from the dashboard camera of an Edmonton, Alberta, police car:

Check out other video here and here.

The fireball was spotted around 5:30 p.m. MT (7:30 p.m. ET) and was seen in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, western Ontario and even North Dakota.

"It seemed like fireworks or a missile coming down. The sky lit up greenish and yellow," said Shawn Mitchler, who was pumping gas in Radisson, about 40 miles northwest of Saskatoon. "My heart just started racing because I didn't know what it was."

Despite its size and the noise it made entering the atmosphere, the meteor was probably no bigger than a grapefruit, Edmonton space educator Randy Atwood told CTV Calgary. The meteor may have broken into small pieces before hitting the ground, or it may have burned up entirely before touching down.

"It was a beautiful show, and some people might have thought it was just over the hill, and that it was the size of a house," he said.

Here's what The Edmonton Sun reported last night, along with the The Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Herald.