When we saw it, it seemed to be only several miles above us, maybe forty or fifty thousand feet, but the show we saw actually began near the Kármán line, commonly accepted as the point space begins, 62 miles/100 km up. It was written up in Life magazine and Sky & Telescope at the time – pictures from those issues below.
It was a bolide – meaning it broke up as it sped in – estimated to be 5-10 feet across, and since it wasn’t part of any expected meteor shower, it might have been a small asteroid. It was called the “Great Fireball of 1966” and was widely seen on the East Coast of the US and in Canada. Because I remember us shouting – likely pretty tame stuff like “Holy crap!” – and, I think, leaping up and down for quite a while, my recollection was 20 seconds or more, but I doubted that as I wrote the post because even 10 seconds is a long time for any meteor to be visible. I knew it was visible for a long time, and my friend and I saw it from the start, but I was being conservative with my recall.
Second, the fireball lasted almost 30 seconds, not 8. After writing yesterday of my fireball meteor experience as a kid, I did a little digging and found out I was wrong about two things: First, I was actually a few months shy of my seventh birthday when it happened, which, thanks to the fairly amazing web, I discovered was 7:14pm Eastern Time on Sunday, 25 April 1966.