New York: New Yorkers have lived through their fair share of unusual events recently. There was an earthquake, an eclipse and the criminal trial of a former United States president, all against the backdrop of nail-biting national political crises and the hottest year on record.
On Tuesday, the city added what seemed like a cosmic freak occurrence to the list: a meteor that had traveled millions of miles through deep space entered the atmosphere, passed above the Statue of Liberty, zoomed over the tourist boats of New York Harbor streaked over the midtown Manhattan skyline, and exploded very, very high over the region.
In a chaotic week, many New Yorkers did not seem to notice. Or, if they did hear a strange noise, they did what New Yorkers often do, especially when in midtown Manhattan. They minded their own business.
“I heard it, yes I did indeed,” Pat Battle, an anchor on the local NBC News broadcast, told viewers on Tuesday, with wonder in her voice. “But I never thought to look up.”
The arrival and swift demise of a meteor above midtown, the city’s noisiest and most chaotic precinct, attracted little attention there Tuesday. But some residents in the other boroughs and New Jersey complained of a loud boom late Tuesday morning, or said they saw a fireball streak through the sky.
Ashleigh Holmes, a spokesperson for New York City Emergency Management, referred questions about the meteor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
NASA’s Meteor Watch said that, based on initial information, it believed the meteor was first spotted when it was roughly 49 miles above New York Harbor, east of Greenville Yard, a rail yard in Jersey City. The object then flew over the Statue of Liberty before it disintegrated roughly 29 miles above midtown.
It is not clear how often something like this happens in the New York area, in part because NASA does not track every small meteor that approaches the planet or enters the atmosphere.
Some unflappable New Yorkers shrugged it all off. But others, struck by the city’s series of freak events and the darkening national mood, could not help but see an unnerving portent in New York’s brush with the cosmos. Even if the meteor was only about the size of a toaster.
“You’d think that’s a sign,” said Charlotte Alberts, 26, as she walked her dogs in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood. “Something’s brewing.”
When the city was shaken by a small earthquake in April, Alberts said she at first mistook the jostling for a panic attack. On Tuesday, she cast her eyes across the East River to the sky above the Manhattan skyline.
“That’s actually insane,” she murmured.
But elsewhere in Williamsburg, Bryant Grisham, 21, a visitor from Athens, Alabama, said he thought there was no reason to read into the movements of planets, meteors and metropolises. It was all just a matter of chance.
“It’s very random,” he said. “Especially for New York City.”
And some found the idea of a meteor exploding over midtown to be oddly calming.
Abdul Ndadi, 40, a science fiction writer in the Bronx, said with so much man-made suffering in the world, the meteor’s brief appearance felt like a reassuring act of nature.
“At least a meteor is normal,” said Ndadi.
NASA said the meteor never actually posed a danger to anyone on the ground because it was small. So small, in fact, that it would have been impossible to see it coming in the first place.
In a post on Facebook, the agency said it monitors “asteroids that are capable of posing a danger to us Earth dwellers, but small rocks like the one producing this fireball are only about a foot in diameter, incapable of surviving all the way to the ground.”
“We do not (actually cannot) track things this small at significant distances from the Earth,” the agency said. “So the only time we know about them is when they hit the atmosphere and generate a meteor or a fireball.”
NASA said it was able to make “a very crude determination of the trajectory of the meteor” based on reports from people who claimed to have seen a fireball or heard a boom. It also noted that there had been some military activity in the area at around the same time, which might also explain the noise.
The agency said it believed the space rock was moving at roughly 38,000 mph when it passed over New York. But it cautioned that its understanding of the event remained “very crude and uncertain,” and its pronouncements about the meteor’s path changed throughout the day.
The idea of a meteor traveling across the galaxy to make its way to New York City struck some people as a moment of wonder.
Tina Dang, 43, a private chef, wiped a tear from her eye as she talked about “a little splash of a miracle” in a turbulent time.
“There’s something magical about it,” she said. “You forget about these incredible moments in life, when so much else is going on.”