On Sunday night the American Meteor Society received a number of calls from four states in the HPPR listening area—Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas—about a strange explosion in the sky.
As The Amarillo Globe News reports, the disturbance was evidently the result of a meteor crashing through the atmosphere, somewhere just south of the Texas Panhandle.
A member of the volunteer fire department in Snyder, Texas, said he saw a bright light and heard what sounded like thunder. One observer in Lubbock reported seeing an orange light accompanied by a “loud boom.” In that moment, said the Lubbock witness, the sky lit up like daytime.
The “thunder” was evidently produced by a sonic boom created by the meteor. Only about one percent of meteors will actually produce a sonic boom. It’s likely that several smaller meteors survived the fall.