Green Fireballs, Part I

A Personal Experience, and an Interesting Discovery

I thought I might start things out with one of my own firsthand experiences. I was living in Ft. Worth, Texas in the Fall of 2001. I lived in one of the many apartment complexes that clog the Hulen Street area, south of Interstate 20. It was the evening of Monday, October 15, and I was watching a football game. I was camped out on the couch. (The Cowboys v.s. the Redskins. Both teams were 0-4, and the resulting game was one of the worst—and funniest—I’ve ever seen.) Our apartment patio, which I could see from the couch, more or less faced east/north-east, towards Interstate 35, leading towards the center of Ft. Worth.

At some point during the game, I was vaguely staring out the sliding glass door into the “darkness” (it is never really dark in a city that size) when I saw, very clearly, a huge green fireball shoot across the sky. It was parallel to my line of sight, which means it would have been moving from south-southeast to north-northwest. I could judge neither its size nor its altitude with precision at the time, though it looked huge, far bigger and slower than any meteor or shooting star I’ve seen. It threw off showers of green and (to a lesser extent) golden sparks, like a giant sparkler. If I were forced to guess, I would put it somewhere in the vicinity of I-35.

Given the proximity to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, my first thought was “They’ve shot down an airliner!” I rushed outside to the patio, but could see nothing more.

Obviously, no airliners had been shot down, but I later learned that I was not the only observer. A number of people mentioned seeing it, particularly a secretary I knew from work. She was out in her front yard in Burleson, about fifteen miles south of Ft. Worth when she saw the object shoot directly overhead, heading straight for Ft. Worth. Her observation would confirm my impression that it was somewhere near the I-35 corridor.

It was some weeks later when I visited the Half-Price Books on Hulen and picked up an paranormal encyclopedia by Jerome Clark. I was very surprised to learn that these green fireballs are nothing new, and, despite decades of sightings, no one seems to have the foggiest idea what they are. Dozens of sightings have occurred in the southwestern United States since at least the 1940s. They seem to appear most often in New Mexico (Clark stated that the farthest east one had been seen was Lubbock, TX—I think I can revise that a little farther east), and had a nasty tendency to show up in close proximity to secret nuclear research and design facilities. No fireball had, to the knowledge of researchers, ever reached the ground. The only physical evidence of a fireball’s passage was the presence of tiny particles of copper in the air, something almost completely unheard of in a normal meteorite.

Recently, I picked another encyclopedia by Clark, this one devoted entirely to UFOs, where he provided more detail on the history of the phenomenon. There, he quotes from a 1949 Air Force Office of Special Investigations list which described the fireballs’ “common characteristics” as:

"a. Green color, sometimes described as…yellow green [inapplicable colors omitted]. b. Horizontal path, sometimes with minor variations. c. Speed less than that of a meteor, but more than any known type of aircraft. d. No sound associated with observation. e. No persistent trail or dust cloud…"(Clark, 257).

This describes my sighting with such accuracy that had it not been for the fact that I am positive that I had never encountered a description of the phenomena before I saw it, I would wonder if I was somehow constructing my sighting subconsciously.

Given the sheer number of observed and recorded occurrences, I would think that the existence of the fireballs should be established beyond reasonable doubt. Having seen one, it certainly is for me. The question then becomes, of course, where do these fireballs come from?

Continued in Part II....

References:

• Clark, Jerome. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1998.
• "Green Fireballs." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fireballs
• Image: Painting by Mrs. Lincoln LaPaz based on her own sighting, http://www.project1947.com/shg/articles/lifemag52.html