ST. ALBANS, W.Va. — Anthony Harmon was walking to catch a KRT bus just after 10 p.m. Thursday night to head to work at WCHS Radio in Charleston. While on the bridge over the Coal River, he witnessed the phenomena which had everybody in southern West Virginia talking and tweeting.
“I was just going to my usual spot, right across the St. Albans Bridge,” said Harmon. “I heard this big boom and I look up and I saw this big ball going across with flames coming from it.”
Harmon said he felt a slight shake in the ground after the loud boom, which he initially thought was a transformer exploding.
“It didn’t scare me, I just thought it was electrical or maybe even somebody putting off fireworks,” he said. “I looked up and flames were coming across and I thought, ‘Oh, it was a meteor.’ It was just this round ball with flames coming out of it.”
Harmon said the meteor was visible in the sky for a little over a minute and then disappeared.
Officials with the National Meteor Society are investigating the reports. The 911 centers in Kanawha, Boone, Lincoln, Logan, and Raleigh counties were all immediately swamped with calls from witnesses who either heard, felt, or saw it happened.
It’s believed the meteor was about the size of a softball when it struck the ground somewhere in Tennessee. They theorize the sound everybody heard was a sonic boom as it entered the earth’s atmosphere and began to burn.