Hundreds report rarely seen fireball meteor over northwestern Missouri Monday night

More than 200 people reported seeing a fireball meteor in the sky over Missouri Monday evening, according to the American Meteor Society.

The bright meteor was seen in Missouri about 8:40 p.m., but the American Meteor Society also received sighting reports from people in Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska.

Dana and Keith Jenkerson, who are from south of Kansas City, captured the event on an American Meteor Society camera.

The video showed that the velocity of the object was low and that it was fragmenting, suggesting the meteoroid passed through Earth’s atmosphere, according to a post about the sighting by Vincent Perlerin of the American Meteor Society.

To see an interactive map of the event, click here.

Fireballs — very bright meteors — occur frequently. Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude fly through the sky each day. The majority of them occur over oceans and uninhabited regions and are masked by daylight, according to the American Meteor Society’s website.

Those that occur at night also have little chance of being seen because of the lack of people out to notice them.

Experienced observers could watch the sky for 20 hours and see only one fireball or watch for hundreds of hours and see only one larger one, the website says.

This story was originally published August 28, 2018 at 9:50 AM.