Meteorite Bounce (or was it a meteor-wrong?)

[Papa Surf]

A good astronomer friend of mine swears this happened to him.... He was driving at night. A streak of light came down at an angle and hit the road in front of his car. What ever it was bounced on the pavement and he watched a glowing red/orange object as it made a long, arching fall back to earth into a field adjacent to the road he was on. He said he was alarmed and intrigued but decided there would be no way he could find whatever it was in the dark.
My friend thinks it could have been a meteorite. What do you all think?

[astromark]

"What do you all think?"

What I think is that I was not there and did not see this thing bounce...,and so on.
Its possible that a small hard meteor could strike a roadway and bound of into the night... I would have realized the value of what I had just witnessed...think about that... then slept in my car and in the morning light found the now cooled object. It would not have gone far... would it. I would not have left the scene...
If it had to much velocity on impact it would have carved a hole in the road or disintegrated with some energy... It might still be findable....or your friend is seeking attention and tells lies... I suspect the latter:)

[BigDon]

Welcome to BAUT Papa.

Or it may have been a number of even more mundane things from a piece of aircraft with fairly bad engine trouble to kids firing a model rocket or a firework of some sort at his vehicle. As a child I've done similar pranks. I still cringe inside at the time I used a self-casting fishing pole (spring loaded with a cup at the end, used for firing sinkers and bait out past the surf line) to lob flaming briquets out to the local freeway. Over two rows of houses. I was ten.

[aurora]

I saw something like this once, and also thought it might have been a rock from space, but then decided that based on what I saw (it was in an urban area) it was much more likely to have been a firework.

[Papa Surf]

Yeah, I'll have to ask him more about it- Where he was. What time of day/year. I was thinking tracer fire when he told me about it. That scares me more than rocks from space!

[mugaliens]

I'd have probably driven out into the field to it's approximate location before sleeping in the car and awaiting daylight to begin a search grid.

[Cougar]

...What ever it was bounced on the pavement...

I go with the bottle rocket explanation, but considering the 'extraterrestrial' alternative.... :)

....I imagine there's a spectrum of possibilities for the surface velocities of various incoming space objects. But I'm inclined to think that objects large enough to reach the surface may do so at very high velocities, in which case they might plow right through the atmosphere and hit the 'pavement' pretty hard... :think: ...testing the pavement's molecular strength and integrity.... I know if the object is large enough - and moving fast enough - it can hit the ocean with such speed as to slam into the ocean floor....

If your friend's experience was actually with some small space rock, it would be a very rare occurrence, I think, to be going slow enough to bounce off the pavement, but it would certainly leave a ~mark~ on the pavement, which your friend doesn't mention, leaving one a bit suspicious.... :think: