Mysterious fireball lights up Southern California night sky. What caused it?

A mysterious fireball streaking across the night sky over Los Angeles and San Diego on Wednesday night flooded social media with videos of what many called a meteor.

But experts at the American Meteor Society say it may actually have a less otherworldly origin, Newsweek reported.

“From the video and also the report we can tell this was most likely NOT a natural fireball meteor,” said Mike Hankey, according to the publication. “It appears to be ‘space-trash,’ a man-made object re-entry of some type.”

A note on the society’s online incident report says it may have been part of an old Delta II rocket used to launch a GPS satellite into orbit in 1989.

The fireball was reported at 10:23 p.m. Pacific time, the society reports. Dozens of people from San Diego to Santa Barbara reported sightings to the organization.

“At first I thought it was a missile attack because of the speed across the sky, the duration it stayed lit, and they way it looked clustered (maybe even more than 4-5 individual fragments in the cluster),” wrote one person who reported the fireball to the American Meteor Society. “This was by far the biggest and brightest event in the sky I have ever seen.”

Numerous people posted videos of the flaming object to Twitter and Instagram, many perhaps mistakenly calling it a meteor or a meteor shower.

“Y’ALL I was really thinking it was the end of the world.... This thing was huge,” read one Twitter post.

This story was originally published January 30, 2020 at 11:20 AM with the headline "Mysterious fireball lights up Southern California night sky. What caused it?."