Meteor sync

Earlier today I posted about meteorites at The Magician’s Table.

A few hours later, a student happened to ask me how to say “shooting star” in Chinese.

Then, at about half past midnight, I stepped outside for a few minutes and saw an extremely large meteor streak by overhead. It was a good six or seven arcminutes across at the wide end, and the strangest thing was that the path it traced was not a straight line but a squiggle, almost as if it were swimming like a fish rather than falling. I’m pretty sure it’s physically impossible for a meteor to do that, but that’s what I very clearly saw. I remember some years ago reading a description of a comet with its tail “luffing like a sail in the wind” and thinking that was completely ridiculous, but it would be an excellent way of describing what this meteor was doing. No idea what to make of it, and the timing only adds to the weirdness.

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Update: I've found the luffing comet reference. It's from The Secret School by Whitley Strieber, p. 100.

A little boy is taken out of his life and made to confront a strange machine. Maybe he resists, maybe he even screams, but he looks in it, he cannot resist, first once and then many times.

He sees a glowing mass of material, pure white. Above it there is a comet, and the comet is moving. I recall the tail, which was very different from that of an ordinary comet. You could see its movement, you could see it luffing like a winded sail.

I've seen comets -- Halley's in 1986 and Hale-Bopp in 1997 -- and they don't do that. Strieber says as much when he says the luffing tail was "very different from that of an ordinary comet." Meteors don't do it, either. Strieber saw this luffing comet while wearing a VR helmet -- it wasn't real -- but I saw my squiggly meteor with my own eyes in a perfectly normal state of consciousness. It was in every other way an ordinary meteor; nothing even remotely UFO-like about it,

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Update 2: Apparently meteors do sometimes squiggle. This article quotes a planetarium director saying, "I’ve seen some fireballs corkscrew before during some meteor showers." This thread also addresses the question.

I saw a zig zag meteorite in Bukuru, Northern Nigeria, when I was about 13 in 1959. That started from small to increasing swings, then went out near the horizon. For many years I puzzled about this, but rarely mentioned it, because no one would believe it. Years later I attended an astronomy lecture at college in London. I cornered the astronomer with this sighting and he said we know what this is. A flat dish shaped meteorite enters the atmosphere shallowly & flies in a circular motion that gets wider as it approaches the earth then extinguishes. Seeing this from the horizon, it appears to zigzag down. He told me that I was very very lucky to witness this meteor show, and I am glad that others have seen it too.

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Update 3: When I was searching for Strieber's luffing comment reference, I found this just three pages later, describing a childhood phobia: "Many a night, my mother would carry me naked to the bathroom mirror to prove to me that I was not covered with scorpions."

Just after reading that, I checked the Secret Sun blog, and found this in one of Knowles's goofy everything-is-a-star-map posts.

In my Magician's Table post, I had referred to "the vision-inducing meteorite which served as Jacob's pillow."