As the day was starting, at about 6:45am, from north Texas to the Gulf Coast, people were greeted with flash in the sky. Some report hearing what sounded like a sonic boom. Ashley Graham says she was walking her dog here in Houston.
"It was like a big flash and I thought it was lightning," she recalled. "It was a big light, and it was kind of scary, but I didn't think about it too much."
A lot of people are thinking about it now. A flash, a colored light -- reports are still coming in. It could be seen all around the area if you were up early enough.
"If we have a time when a people are outside when something happens, then we get all these reports," said Dr. Carolyn Sumners with the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Dr. Sumners missed the event. There is no definite explanation yet for the light and what appeared to be a trail across the sky. But for now she suspects it's part of a meteor as it hurtled through the earth's atmosphere.
She said, "The longer we go with no manmade explanation, the more we think it really was a meteor."
Meteors are common. We also call them shooting stars. In the lobby of the museum planetarium, there is part of a meteorite on display, composed of iron ore that burned across the sky.
On Friday afternoon the National Weather Service questioned whether it was debris from a Russian satellite as it re-entered the atmosphere. For now, it's a mystery, and a very intriguing one, just a few weeks before the Mayan calendar's prophecy of doomsday.
"It's getting closer to that day, and this big flash, and I didn't know what it was," Graham said. "Yeah, a lot of different things were going through my mind."
"It is a little scary and you think about all the other things that have happened over the months and over the years and it makes you think about a lot," said museum visitor Glenda Scales.
A week from today a meteor shower is expected to begin. Perhaps this flash across the sky was the prequel. So far the official determination of the flash across the sky has not been made.
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