10 case files, newest first.
A 20-metre asteroid exploded over the southern Urals, brighter than the Sun. The shock wave blew out windows in six cities and injured about 1,500 people, mostly from flying glass. Dashcams recorded it from every angle.
A fireball crossed six US states and Ontario; people in a Pennsylvania village said something came down in nearby woods and the military took it away. NASA later said it had boxed up records and lost them. The fireball itself was very likely a meteor.
A brilliant fireball over the Yukon and northern British Columbia dropped fragments onto a frozen lake. A local man collected them without thawing them, preserving one of the most primitive and organic-rich meteorites known.
A fireball over the San Francisco Bay Area on 17 October 2012 was caught by NASA-supported sky cameras, the fall zone was predicted over Novato, and three days later a resident found a black stone after remembering a bang on her roof.
On a Friday evening in October 1992 a fireball crossed several eastern states while football crowds filmed it, then a 12 kg stone punched through the trunk of a parked Chevrolet in Peekskill, New York. It became the best-filmed meteorite fall of its time.
At about ten on a Sunday night in October 1894, one brilliant fireball crossed Arizona Territory. Flagstaff saw it burst over the Elden mountains, Mesa “just this side of Superstition,” and Globe felt a detonation that “shook the earth.” Mohave County had it hit Wallapai mountain, and Tucson called it “the first dispatch from Mars.”
At 3:56 a.m. on June 2, 2016, a fireball lit up the Southwest, and sonic booms were heard across the Phoenix area. More than 400 people reported it. It wasn't a launch or a re-entry. Radar tracked falling stones, and fifteen meteorites were recovered. They were named Dishchii'bikoh.
Two October meteor showers peak this month: the Draconids on the evening of October 8 and the Orionids before dawn around October 21–22. Here's when to look from Arizona, and how to tell a meteor or fireball from a rocket plume or a satellite.
A golden-trailed fireball crossed the Salt River Valley at dinnertime on 6 October 1906 and broke up with a boom. Callers feared an explosion, the Weather Bureau observer timed it with his watch, and Tucson and Phoenix each said it passed right over them.
On the Tuesday before Christmas 2015, a bright, slow, fragmenting light crossed the evening sky from California to Arizona. It wasn't a meteor. It was the spent third stage of the Soyuz rocket that had launched a cargo ship to the space station the day before.
