UFO Sighting In Georgia? Mysterious Appearance Of Fireball Explained

Jun 30, 2015 01:54 PM EDT

(Photo : Getty Images/Christopher Furlong) On June 29, at about thirty minutes past one in the morning local time, a fiery object was seen flashing across the sky in Georgia, leaving several witnesses baffled about the unknown space entity.

Residents of Georgia freaked out after allegedly spotting a UFO on June 29. At about thirty minutes past one in the morning local time, a fiery object was seen flashing across the sky leaving several witnesses baffled about the unknown space entity.

According to the witnesses who saw the object in question, it appeared to be a bright fireball with a long smoke-like tail and was moving from west to east before it disappeared. The mysterious appearance of the fireball was seen by the locals living in Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama, RT.com revealed.

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The fiery ball, however, was not a UFO or a meteor. Experts said it was a piece of space debris that is something man-made, which burned in the atmosphere. As said by U.S. Strategic Command spokesman Martin O' Donnell, the object was a rocket body that reentered the Earth and has since been removed as a decayed object from an American satellite catalog, AJC.com has learned.

Aside from O'Donnell, the military's Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California also issued an assessment of the incident. Carterville's Tellus Science Museum astronomer David Dundee said the object was travelling too slowly, which was at 14,500 miles per hour, to be a meteor or a fireball.

As described by the American Meteor Society, a fireball is a very bright meteor generally brighter than magnitude -4, about the same magnitude of the planet Venus as seen in the morning or evening sky. A bolide, on the other hand, is a special type of fireball that explodes in a bright terminal flash at its end, often with visible fragmentation.

Meanwhile, a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson said the object, which was seen over Walker County in Alabama, was a meteor. However, NASA officials resolved the mystery on Monday saying it was indeed a space debris, which was captured by its five meteor cameras in the southeast part of U.S., Northwest GA News reported.

"14,500 miles per hour is pretty fast, but it's too slow to be a meteor," NASA Meteoroid Environment Office head William Cooke told ABC News. "It was possibly reentry of space junk."