Wheaton, IL, USA
A large, comet-like oval green fireball with a short dark yellow tail passed overhead sotheast to northwest for about 5 seconds.
Report quality: Moderate55/100
This score reflects report-quality signals on file — how complete, corroborated, and precisely located the report is — not a claim about whether the sighting was a real craft.
- Duration parsed: 5s, a plausible sighting length
- Detailed witness text (128 characters)
- Location geocoded exactly
- No other reports from this city within 3 days
- When
- 2004-05-16
- Where
- Wheaton, IL, USA
- Shape
- Fireball
- Duration
- 5 seconds
- Geo
- 41.866, -88.107 · exact
- Slug
- fireball-over-wheaton-il-2004-63e8e4
Part of a wave
The Navy Encounters & the UAP Era
U.S. training ranges (Pacific off San Diego; Atlantic off Virginia), then worldwide reporting
The wave that renamed the subject. The USS Nimitz 'Tic Tac' encounter (November 2004: radar drops from 80,000 ft to sea level in seconds, pilot visual by Cmdr. David Fravor, FLIR video) stayed classified-adjacent until…
In context
- This is one of 21 reports logged in Wheaton, IL.
- This case is one of 220 Illinois reports filed in 2004.
- Fireball craft made up 5.5% of 2000s reports, vs 6.9% across the whole archive.
Report
Full narrative lands with dossier import for famous cases, or the NUFORC free-text summary above for standard reports. This shell is SSR-ready: one D1 row (including connections_json) per page.