Meteor causes stir in Utah on Thursday

A meteor passing over Utah Thursday morning caused a stir among skywatchers as the unusual occurrence moved across the sky toward the West, leaving a bright light.

Patrick Wiggins, NASA solar system ambassador for Utah, said someone e-mailed a photo to him showing a bright light with an ionized tail moving across the sky at about 8 a.m. "Someone also said a meteor went across at about 10 a.m., so I don't know if there was one meteor or two," Wiggins said.

Daytime meteors, he said, are not all that rare, but do happen occasionally. "I've never seen one. It's only occasionally they are bright enough to see during the day."

Wiggins said Thursday's meteor looked like "what you'd expect to see a comet look like at night, whitish with a bright tail against a blue sky. Meteors at night tend to have a train — ionized stuff behind it — that is lit up in the daylight."

An Army National Guard employee at Camp Williams saw a bright object moving across the sky approximately the same time as the meteor was reported and thought it was an airplane in distress, National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Brad Blackner said.

Soldiers searched the area for a possible downed airplane and filed a report with the North American Air Defense Command, which reported no aircraft missing, he said.

Wiggins said if a meteor had broken up over the Wasatch Front, it would have caused a sonic boom loud enough to be heard throughout the Salt Lake Valley.