Suspected meteor lights up sky across multiple states Thursday night

On a quiet Thursday evening in early December, the sky briefly became a shared spectacle for hundreds of people stretching from South Carolina to Michigan, as a brilliant fireball meteor cut through the darkness. In that fleeting moment, strangers across half a continent looked upward at the same light — a reminder that the cosmos occasionally interrupts the ordinary without warning. The American Meteor Society, gathering nearly 700 reports by morning, now works to reconstruct the story of what passed overhead from the fragments of video and memory people chose to preserve.