Gary Chepil meandered outside his Bitterroot Valley home Wednesday morning at about 6:30 a.m. to let his dog out. Chepil’s house between Florence and Stevensville is above the treeline. He says he had a great view of what happened next.
"I was standing on the deck, just had a blanket covering me waiting for my dog to come back in. There was this large flash in the sky and then there was kind of a bluish-like explosion.”
Chepil says he didn’t immediately know what it was. But the silent burst lasted a few seconds and was then followed by a spectacular show of sparkly fragments.
"The trailing of orange and blues and reds that shot across the sky — it was endless. It was just miles long. It was incredible," Chepil says.
The National Weather Service says a weather satellite picked up the signature of a meteor over southwestern Alberta at that same time.
The American Meteor Society says it received over 140 accounts of Wednesday’s fireball. Witnesses from Canada to Utah saw it.
So far, no reports of any fragments making it through the atmosphere.
