Mysterious fireball baffles Bangkok residents

Residents of downtown Bangkok are still unsure about the fireball that they saw on Monday falling from the sky. Among the things the Thais are speculating what it was include a shooting star, bursting plane or falling meteor.

Mashable reports that the burning object fell at 8:40 a.m. with a bright streak and blazed up into a bigger before it disappeared. As it fell, a trail of smoke followed the fireball, said Porjai Jaturongkahun, one of those who posted the video on YouTube.

He posted it from the Nonthabun area, near the Hatuchak market in Bangkok or 20 kilometres from the Don Mueang Airport, one of the two international gateways in the Thai capital city. There were no reports of aircraft that crashed, according to the deputy governor of Kanchhanaburi.

Various other Bangkok residents also saw it, took videos of the falling fireball from other angles and posted the clip on social media, reports CNN. Others used dashcam videos from cars.

A military analyst, John Krempasky, tweeted that it was likely a meteor/bolde. Steve Herman states that based from dashcams, it looks like a meteorite or satellite debris.

But Saran Poshyachinda, deputy director of the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, thinks otherwise and believes it is an object from outer space. In justifying his theory, he explained that satellites travel on a west-east axis, while the object that Bangkok residents saw was moving in the opposite direction before it burst into flame at a distance of 100 kilometres above the ground.

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