Light, boom a mystery

By Jim Hughes
Denver Post Staff Writer

Jan. 12 - A mysterious object lit up the night sky up and down the Front Range early Sunday - then startled witnesses with a deafening explosion.

There was no official explanation about the object Sunday. Military spokesmen denied the object was a military aircraft. Local scientists speculated it could have been a meteor or an illegal firework.

Douglas County resident Gunter Harz witnessed the phenomenon around 12:15 a.m.

"All of a sudden, there was an impact that shook our house and then a double explosion immediately after the impact," Harz said. "I don't know if a meteorite makes that noise, but I do know that my house was shaking."

Residents from Colorado Springs to Denver flooded area police dispatchers and military operators with calls about the object.

But the phenomenon was not related to activities at any of the military installations around Colorado Springs, according to spokespeople for U.S. Space Control at Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Air Force Base.

"There was nothing that would have created a loud noise or explosion," said Lt. Jason Medina, a Peterson Air Force Base spokesman.

Katy Garmany, director of the University of Colorado's Fiske Observatory in Boulder, said the object could have been a meteor. But meteors normally burn up 20 to 40 miles in the sky and don't emit any sound.

"You have to consider the possibility that somebody was shooting off some high-grade illegal fireworks," she said.

Jack Murphy, curator of geology for the Denver Museum of Natural History, said he thinks the object may have been one of the rare meteors that infiltrates the atmosphere and burns up closer to the ground. And if that was the case, scientifically valuable pieces of the meteor may have landed in the area, he said.

The loud sound many people heard probably was a sonic boom, he said.

Murphy said it would probably take him a few days to identify the object.

"It's going to complicate my life for a few days," he said.

The last big fireball that came this close to the ground in Colorado was recorded by a security video camera in Colorado Springs in 1995, he said. That same camera recorded Sunday's event, too, he said.

The videotape, combined with testimony from witnesses, should help scientists figure out precisely what happened, he said. He is hoping that witnesses - particularly people east and west of Colorado Springs - will call his office.

If fireworks were the cause, they were bigger than most found at Fourth of July celebrations, said Atom Abbott, who said he saw the phenomenon shortly after midnight from Downtown Denver.

"It was a big, blue fireball," he said. "I thought it was a plane crashing, at first." Abbott's visual report was confirmed by others who claimed to see a white or blue light speeding through the sky early Sunday morning.

Larry Sanders of Denver said Sunday morning's event was more dramatic than meteors he has seen before, he said. He was driving in Weld County after midnight when he saw what he described as "a very large bright light that lit up the clouds and several smaller, secondary explosions." Although a variety of military installations monitor the skies over Colorado, nobody other than the occasional astronomer looks for incoming objects from space, said Cmdr. David Knox of the U.S. Space Command unit at Cheyenne Mountain outside of Colorado Springs.

"I don't want to say it was a meteorite, because I don't know," he said. "All I can say is it wasn't one of the 8,000 objects that we track." The agency monitors all objects "bigger than a softball" in Earth orbit, he said.