Brilliant Meteor Across Toronto

This week a brilliant meteor lit up the night sky over Toronto. It was captured on many security cameras, and other automatic cameras. The meteorite is believed to have landed in Lake Ontario. 

By the way it is a "meteor" when it is in the sky and a "meteorite" after it has landed. One thing that I have never figured out is why the study and forecasting of weather is called "meteorology". Isn't that what the study of meteors should be called?

Does anyone remember the meteor of August 25, 1995? 

In the early morning hours of August 25, 1995, I was going westward on River Road, in North Tonawanda and Wheatfield, NY. I was having automotive issues and trying to get my car back home. The engine was overheating so I would drive until the temperature gauge reached the danger zone, stop and wait until the engine cooled, and then drive some more.

A brilliant blue light crossed the sky, moving southwestward. At first I wasn't sure how high it was but there were cumulus clouds in the sky and I could see that it was illuminating the clouds from above. It wasn't a completely steady light, like an electric light, it was more like an object was burning.

There was no sound that I could hear, even allowing for the time it would take for sound to reach me.

I thought it was a plane and was horrified that I might have witnessed the death of a planeload of people. Hopefully it was a military or cargo plane so that only a few people would have died. I scanned the radio for any information about a plane in trouble but found nothing. Neither was there anything in the news the next day about a plane.

It turned out to have been a meteor, and hundreds of people saw it. A trailer was destroyed by fire in Windsor, Ontario. Some have speculated that it was due to the impact of the meteorite. Investigators claimed that nothing like meteor debris was found, and there was no sonic boom.

But it might have been a piece of space junk, rather than a meteor, which wouldn't be obvious in the ruins of the trailer. A small object doesn't make a significant sonic boom. Most bullets travel faster than the speed of sound but don't make a sonic boom.