Mystery Object Lights Up the Sky Over Parts of Georgia

Over 120 people reported seeing it early this morning.

ByABC News
June 29, 2015, 10:32 AM

— -- A slow-moving mystery object lit up parts of the Georgia sky early this morning.

NASA has five meteor cameras in the southeast part of the U.S. that picked up video of the object that was moving at approximately 14,500 mph at 1:30 a.m. ET.

William Cooke, lead for NASA Meteroid Environment Office, told ABC News today that “14,500 miles per hour is pretty fast, but it’s too slow to be a meteor. It was possibly reentry of space junk."

Cooke added that objects will typically have to be moving at 20,000 miles per hour or faster to be classified as a meteor.

Stacey Alexander, 39, saw the bright light move across the night sky for about a minute outside her work building in Rome, Georgia.

“I honestly thought it was a plane that had caught on fire and was about to crash,” she told ABC News today.

“It looked like it just kept getting closer to the ground and was on its way to crashing when it disappeared,” she added.

Alexander compared it to a long-lasting shooting star that never lost its shine.

There were more than 120 witness reports of lights in the sky, according to Cooke.