Meteor rattles West Texas with sonic boom

A very bright meteor over West Texas last weekend prompted emergency phone calls over a possible explosion.

The explosion turned out to be a sonic boom, caused by the meteor. The Dallas Morning News reported that three people in the town of Jayton, which is outside Lubbock, recalled witnessing the meteor that made it appear like it was daytime.

“You could see a flash, like if an electrical transformer flashes at night, up to our northwest, but it was cloudy here—kind rainy—so we didn’t actually see any kind of fireball or anything,” Nathan Hines, a deputy fire marshal at the Snyder Volunteer Fire Department, told LubbockOnline.com.

The phone calls reportedly started to come in at 9 p.m. about an unknown explosion. The Lubbock paper reported that calls came in from states including Texas and Kansas.