What Was Flying Over the Skies Last Night in Sioux Falls?

Residents of the Sioux Empire were treated to a bizarre and beautiful spectacle as a cluster of bright, slow moving fireballs drifted across the South Dakota sky early this morning.

In a video shared to the Everything Sioux Falls Facebook Group, the reaction on the ground was pure awe as the quiet light show floated overhead.

"I have never seen anything like that", one person said as the glowing trail lingered over town.

"Must be a comet", another offered during a moment of stunned silence, before someone summed up the mood perfectly: "Bro, that made my day."

While it looked like something straight out of a movie, experts say a slow, glowing cluster like this usually isn't a meteor shower. Instead, it’s typically man-made space junk, like an old satellite or rocket piece, burning up as it falls back to Earth.

Natural meteors travel at speeds up to 160,000 mph and vanish in a quick second or two. Space junk, on the other hand, moves much slower, around 17,500 mph, (which is almost as slow-moving as I am in the morning without my coffee). That lower speed causes the re-entry process to drag out over 30 to 90 seconds. As friction heats up the spacecraft or rocket stage roughly 50 miles up, heavy metal structures like solar panels and fuel tanks fracture into multiple glowing fragments that travel together in a cluster.

The good news? We could be getting an answer to this mystery sooner than you might think. Sightings like this are often confirmed within a few hours via the American Meteor Society tracker.

Story Sources: Everything Sioux Falls Facebook Group