17 case files, newest first.
On 6 October 2008 astronomers spotted a small asteroid 19 hours before impact and predicted where it would fall. It exploded over the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan. Students and staff of the University of Khartoum walked the desert and recovered about 600 fragments, named Almahata Sitta.
On 2 June 2018 a telescope in Arizona found a small asteroid eight hours before it struck Earth. It burned up over Botswana, and searchers in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve found pieces of it. Only the third asteroid ever seen before impact.
A stony meteorite hit the Altiplano near Lake Titicaca and blasted a water-filled crater. Villagers who went to look fell ill. Peruvian officials and scientists confirmed the impact; the illness is usually put down to arsenic-rich groundwater vapour and anxiety.
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.
America's first space station came down early, scattering pieces across the Western Australian outback. The town of Esperance jokingly fined NASA $400 for littering. A US radio host paid it in 2009.
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 cosmic body exploded over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia and flattened about 2,000 square kilometres of forest. The first scientific expedition arrived nearly 20 years later and found no crater. Today it is accepted as an airburst of a small asteroid or comet.
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.
On the evening of October 9, 1933, observers across Europe counted hundreds of meteors a minute, and in rural Portugal the sight caused real alarm. American observatories heard about it by telegraph while it was happening, watched their own skies that night, and saw nothing.
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.
At 7:21 p.m. on October 7, 2018, people across metro Phoenix photographed a strange glowing streak in the western sky. It was a Falcon 9 launched from Vandenberg in California, lit by a sun that had set over Arizona more than an hour earlier, and its first stage flew back to land at the base for the first time.
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.
At dusk on December 22, 2017, a glowing, branching cloud crossed the Southern California sky and stopped traffic on the freeways. The Los Angeles Fire Department had to explain it: a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg. AP reported it was seen as far away as Phoenix.
In the last hours of 1978 a TV crew on a cargo flight filmed bright lights off New Zealand's Kaikōura coast, and air-traffic radar logged returns. A government cable from January 1979, now at Archives New Zealand, shows scientists debunking one film, stuck on the other, and guessing at Jupiter or Venus.
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.
Just after 7 p.m. on September 28, 2025, a long, glowing streak drifted across Arizona from Flagstaff to Tucson, and some people asked if it was a comet. It was a Falcon 9 that had launched from Vandenberg a few minutes earlier, lit by a sun that had already set.
