Fireball Mystery Over the South Solved: NASA Announced What Object Was

The mysterious fireball that was spotted over parts of Georgia and Alabama may have been explained. NASA has announced that the fireball was actually a piece of space junk burning up in our planet's atmosphere.

On early Monday morning, a slow-moving mystery object lit up parts of the southern sky. NASA's meteor cameras, five of which are located in the southeast part of the United States, were actually able to pick up a video of this object as it streaked across the sky at around 1:30 a.m. ET.

The object only moved at around 14,500 miles per hour, which made it far too slow to be a meteor or a fireball. In addition, the object broke into pieces in a way that suggests that it actually may have been a piece of space debris.

"I honestly thought it was a planet that had caught on fire and was about to crash," said Stacey Alexander, 39, one of the witnesses of the object, in an interview with ABC News. "It looked like it just kept getting closer to the ground and was on its way to crashing when it disappeared."

The fact that the "fireball" may have actually been a piece of space junk isn't surprising. Our planet is accumulating more and more debris in orbit over time, and there are even plans in place to help remove some of it because it's become such an issue.

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