A mysterious bright fiery object light up the skies of Georgia Monday morning, stunning hundreds of witnesses. Conspiracy theorists had jumped to the conclusion that it was UFO (unidentified flying object) but NASA scientists have confirmed that it was just a space junk and not even a meteor.
Over 100 people, who witnessed the bright fireball fly across the skies of several regions, including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee on Monday, reported to the American Meteor Society, suspecting it to be either a meteor, space junk or UFO.
"I honestly thought it was a plane that had caught on fire and was about to crash," Stacey Alexander, 39, told ABC News. "It looked like it just kept getting closer to the ground and was on its way to crashing when it disappeared."
Witnesses said that the fireball flew across the skies with lights streaming behind it and vanished after a few minutes.
However, NASA scientists have said that it is nothing but space debris re-entering the earth's atmosphere and five meteor cameras located in the southeast part of the U.S. had caught the fireball 1:30 a.m. ET moving at a speed of 14,500 mph.
"14,500 miles per hour is pretty fast, but it's too slow to be a meteor. It was possibly re-entry of space junk," William Cooke, lead for NASA Meteroid Environment Office, told ABC News.
Cooke went on to say that the bright object was not even a meteor, as objects have to move at a speed of 20,000 miles per hour or faster to be classified as a meteor.
"Every once in a while the earth runs into these objects as we're moving around the sun," David Dundee from the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville told WSB TV. "On the average I see two or three reports every month of a bright, really bright fireball."
However, Scott C. Waring, editor of UFO Sightings Daily, has claimed that it is not a space junk but a UFO, pointing out that the object was moving slowly.
"The news is trying to say this is space junk, but if it was, then NASA would know what it was and would have predicted its entry into our atmosphere by now. The track all near Earth objects. This however was very slow and passing through our atmosphere as if traveling to some out of the way location...perhaps the ocean, where it's base is located," wrote Waring.
"Space junk burns up fast, this object moves slowly and continued to be seen over four states, maybe more! So no...not space junk. Its a UFO."
