The article below was published in the daily newspaper Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, on November 26, 1986.
Defense experts Tuesday eliminated "space junk or any man-made object" as an explanation for a mysterious meteoric fireball that streaked across the Pacific Coast.
The object, sighted at 8:22 p.m. (CST) Monday, dazzled stargazers from the California-Oregon border to the Los Angeles area.
"It looked like a long, green meteor but it lasted way too long, arcing across the sky toward the ocean, then it just blew up," Roy Jackson of Mountain View, Cal., said.
"It wasn't space junk or any man-made object re-entering the atmosphere, and we don't track meteors," Del Kindschi of the North American Aerospace Defense Command at Denver said. "We heard about it but there weren't any satellites or man-made space objects entering the atmosphere at that time." (UPI)
