A COUPLE driving outside Bantry tonight were among a number of people around the country – and in the UK – to report a strange 'fireball-like' object falling from the sky.
On the road between Bantry and Drimoleague, Fiona and Tim O’Leary said they had a very close encounter with what appeared to be a greenish-red fireball, which appeared at first to be coming straight for them.
‘We were absolutely terrified, we were screaming – I was full sure it was going to hit us,’ said Fiona afterwards. ‘We saw it fall to earth and explode in flames, but we are not sure where exactly it landed as it was completely dark.’
The couple were heading towards Drimoleague just before 6.30pm when they had the frightening experience, about three miles on the Bantry side of the town.
‘I have seen lots of things in the sky over the years, including shooting stars and meteorites but I have never, ever seen anything like this,’ Fiona told The Southern Star.
Fiona and Tim were not the only ones to report such a strange sighting tonight.
Twenty minutes earlier, a member of the public posting on the X site reported seeing a ‘white fireball in the night sky to the east’ as they walked down Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork city.
Within minutes there were similar reports from all over the country, including Navan, Carlow and Monaghan – and some similar reports from the UK also.
An hour later Aontú leader, TD Peadar Toibin said he thought he had seen a meteorite rite in the sky over Navan.
The Astronomy Ireland page on X said it had many reports of people seeing a ‘bright meteor’ at the end of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite run. The Starlink satellites had been spotted in the sky over Skibbereen the previous night.
Think I saw the #meteorite in the eastern sky tonight from Navan.
— Peadar Tóibín TD (@Toibin1) January 18, 2024
Others believed it may have been connected to the failed moon landing which had been launched the previous week in the US.
On Monday CNN reported that the Peregrine spacecraft was headed back to Earth and expected to make a fiery re-entry after a ‘critical fuel leak’ dashed its lunar ambitions.
It said that Astrobotic Technology, the company that developed the Peregrine lander under a $108m Nasa contract had made the decision to ‘dispose’ of the spacecraft by allowing it to disintegrate midair while plunging back toward Earth.
The Peregrine spacecraft is also carrying various mementos, letters and even human remains that customers paid to fly on the mission, CNN said.
