Mystery as flaming object spotted flying over several US states

A possible fireball was spotted flying across the sky over multiple US states, sparking fears and questions.

Dashcam footage recorded from a highway in Anderson, South Carolina, showed a bright object with a tail streaking through the blue sky and toward the ground. The mysterious object disappeared behind a row of bushy trees, in the clip obtained by FOX Weather.

More than 100 reports of a fireball were submitted to the American Meteor Society coming from South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, between 12.15pm and 12.30pm ET on Thursday.

‘It just came out of nowhere,’ one of the reports stated.

A firefighter in East Tennessee said on X (formerly Twitter) that he saw a ‘huge ball of fire fall from the sky’.

‘I’m not crazy!’ he wrote. ‘Anyone else see it? Right around 12:20pm ET. Very cool but a little unnerving given the current times!’

The object, or a chunk of it, reportedly crashed through a roof of a home south of Atlanta, Georgia, and cracked its laminate floor.

Officials with the National Weather Service in Atlanta recovered the material and were not immediately able to confirm if it was part of a meteor or ‘space junk or a broken piece of satellite’, said meteorologist-in-charge Keith Stellman.

‘It happened around the same time we started getting reports of a possible earthquake and some people saying they were hearing thunder,’ he told The New York Times.

The National Weather Service office in Peach Tree City, Georgia, investigated reports of an earthquake.

But the US Geological Survey did not record any quake happening around the time that the fireball was seen.

A fireball is an extremely bright meteor, according to the society, a nonprofit scientific organization founded in 1911 to support meteor astronomy research.

The weird sighting occurred more than a year-and-a-half after a flash lit up the sky and created a sound near Minnesota that prompted NASA researchers to look into whether it was a meteorite or UFO.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.