Bolide

A bolide is an exceptionally bright meteor, sometimes called a fireball, that burns dramatically and visibly across a wide swath of sky as it disintegrates in the upper atmosphere — bright enough to be seen from multiple states at once and frequently accompanied by an audible sonic boom or ground tremor if fragments survive to lower altitudes. A single bolide event routinely triggers a scattered burst of independent UFO and "crashing object" reports across a huge geographic area within minutes, since observers hundreds of miles apart who each see only a brief streak and flash naturally assume the object crashed somewhere much closer to their own location than it actually did. Both the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania incident of December 1965 and the Flatwoods, West Virginia "monster" sighting of September 1952 began this exact way, as a widely observed bolide track visible across multiple states that was then followed, in each case, by additional, harder-to-explain reports from witnesses near the object's apparent landing point. Bolide events remain one of the more reliably identifiable UFO-report triggers precisely because they are also independently tracked by meteor and fireball observation networks, giving investigators an external data source to cross-check witness timing and trajectory claims against rather than relying on eyewitness description alone.