Meteorite appears to hit Cuba
A meteorite appeared to hit western Cuba early Friday afternoon, the National Weather Service in Key West said. In a tweet, the National Weather Service said its radar "may have detected the meteor" at 1:21 p.m. near Viñales, Cuba.
@NWSKeyWest radar may have detected the meteor that affected western Cuba earlier today. At 121 pm, a signature was detected near Viñales, Cuba, at a height of over 26,000 ft above ground level. #flwx #KeyWest #FloridaKeys #meteor pic.twitter.com/R2JIlVwpsS
— NWS Key West (@NWSKeyWest) February 1, 2019
The NOAA's GOES East satellite also detected the apparent meteor flash, NASA Sport said in a blog post.
Amid speculation on social media, Cuban state media denied that any planes had crashed, calling it a "natural, physical phenomenon."
State-run Juventud Rebelde said a team of specialists from Cuba's Geophysics and Astronomy Institute had been sent to Pinar del Rio to study a possible meteor strike.
In January 2018, Michigan's night skies were lit up by a meteor. Numerous videos posted to social media showed the night sky lighting up just after 8 p.m. local time on Jan. 17, 2018.
"Heard a boom and I kind of thought I felt something -- and my dog freaked out," one caller told CBS Detroit at the time.
The biggest meteor hit in modern history -- the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia -- flattened 800 square miles of forest.
And in the much-distant past, 65 million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid impact caused 70 percent of life on Earth to go extinct, including many dinosaurs.