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More than 30 people in Southern California reported seeing a giant fireball flash across the night sky on July 25, but what caused it is still a mystery.
The American Meteor Society received 34 reports of witnesses seeing the fireball over the San Diego area at around 9:20 p.m.
The fireball was also reportedly seen by residents of New Mexico, eastern Texas, and across the border in Mexico.
Video of the mysterious object in the California sky was captured in San Marcos by a security camera owned by a woman named Rebecca Woods.
“Our camera is facing south and the object flew from west to east,” Woods told NBC 7 News. “I first thought it might be a Starlink launch because this is the exact trajectory I’ve seen in previous launches, but there was nothing scheduled.”
On Tuesday, Eric Sandquist, a professor and the department chair of San Diego State’s Astronomy Department, told NBC 7 News that he believes the fireball may have been caused by “space junk” though, as of Tuesday, UPI still says it is “unidentified.”
“The object appears to be the same one in this news story from Mexico. It is believed to be a Japanese booster rocket from a launch in 2010.”
Sandquist went on to say that the west-to-east track the fireball was on “supports the idea that it was an orbiting object that re-entered (as most launches go eastward to make use of Earth’s rotation). The relatively slow speed also generally rules out a meteor (as a meteor would probably be encountering the atmosphere at a much higher speed).”
The object Sandquist was referring to in New Mexico reportedly flew across the sky in the Mexican state of Chihuahua on the same day that reports came in from the San Diego area.
Are they really the same thing? No one, so far, can say for sure.