Is That a Meteor Over Manhattan? New Yorkers Glance Up, Then Shrug.
The New York Times
It had already been a weird few weeks in New York. Then a fireball streaked across the sky.
New Yorkers have lived through their fair share of unusual events recently. There was an earthquake, an eclipse and the criminal trial of a former United States president, all against the backdrop of nail-biting national political crises and the hottest year on record.
On Tuesday, the city added what seemed like a cosmic freak occurrence to the list: a meteor that had traveled millions of miles through deep space entered the atmosphere, passed above the Statue of Liberty, zoomed over the tourist boats of New York Harbor streaked over the Midtown Manhattan skyline, and exploded very, very high over the region.
In a chaotic week, many New Yorkers did not seem to notice. Or, if they did hear a strange noise, they did what New Yorkers often do, especially when in Midtown Manhattan. They minded their own business.
“I heard it, yes I did indeed,” Pat Battle, an anchor on the local NBC News broadcast, told viewers on Tuesday, with wonder in her voice. “But I never thought to look up.”
The arrival and swift demise of a meteor above Midtown, the city’s noisiest and most chaotic precinct, attracted little attention there on Tuesday. But some residents in the other boroughs and New Jersey complained of a loud boom late on Tuesday morning, or said they saw a fireball streak through the sky.
Ashleigh Holmes, a spokeswoman for New York City Emergency Management, referred questions about the meteor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
