Last night was interesting.
Right about 1 am, I was on the couch reading, and the blinds to the window not facing front were open. (Sam likes to sit in it, and it's not a direct view in from anywhere so I usually leave it for kitty.)
All of a sudden, I saw a bright, firey flash shooting through the sky. It looked at first like a firework or something that had misfired and burned, but the powder never detonated and it just continued downward in a perfect parabolic trajectory. Black ball with a trail of orange flame around it just shot past the window.
I had no idea what it was, of course. It looked like it could have been ball lightning, or a firework or something, but the weirdest part about it was it never made a sound. It looked very close, like 3-4 blocks away, and I wondered if it was falling debris of some kind or maybe frat boys shooting up model rockets and being stupid. But nothing on the ground caught fire and no sirens showed up.
I had also suspected it could be a meteorite, but was ruled that out because 'if it was large enough to not burn up down to here, it must have been large enough it would make a huge noise upon impact'.
I went to bed with no idea what it was, and neither the exponent (student paper) nor the journal and courier (Lafayette's paper) had reports. But upon asking around, I found out that it had been a meteor--that hit Chicago, 3 hours away.
There was no noise here and no impact because it was still that far away and moving towards Chicago, where it impacted. It was just so big and bright (it turned out to be large rocks) it looked much closer.
http://www.nbc5.com/news/2067595/detail.html
http://www.nbc5.com/news/2068758/detail.html
It's nice to know. And fairly interesting. But boy, at the time, was it a suprise, and no small bit creepy.