Experts: Meteor seen over RGV likely fell in pieces

The cosmic debris that whizzed past the upper Rio Grande Valley, causing a loud booming noise late Wednesday afternoon, likely did not hit the ground fully intact, the American Meteor Society said Thursday.

The police departments in Mission and Alton, just west of Mcallen, were inundated with calls from residents who heard what sounded like an explosion around 5:30 p.m. Home security cameras showed the earth shaking.

“When it entered the atmosphere, it probably was the size of a beach ball,” said Robert Lunsford, the journal editor with the American Meteor Society, a nonprofit meteor research group. “Being slower than normal, … chances are that a few fragments may be found.”

A spokeswoman for NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory did not return requests for comment. Calls to NASA were not returned.

On Wednesday evening, Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. “Eddie” Guerra posted on Twitter that federal authorities confirmed Houston Air Traffic Control had received reports from two aircraft that saw a meteorite west of Mcallen. Meteorites are extraterrestrial objects that make impact with the ground; otherwise, they are known as meteors.

Lunsford said the object entered the earth’s atmosphere somewhere west of Mcallen and headed toward Nuevo Laredo in Mexico.

The National Weather Service in Brownsville said a tool it uses to measure lighting, the Geostationary Lighting Mapper, detected a signal at 5:23 p.m. The agency said the images captured by the mapper appeared to show a possible meteorite.

Scott Rudlosky, a scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, referred to the object as a bolide, a large meteor that explodes in the atmosphere.

In 2022 alone, the GLM detected 962 unique events, he said.