A ball of light that blinked into South Florida’s inky predawn sky Wednesday before bursting into pieces with dazzling long-lived tails was a hunk of cosmic scrap metal, one of 25,000 objects the Air Force tracks in space.

The flaming debris, part of a Chinese CZ3 rocket body, was forecast to reenter the atmosphere Wednesday morning but no one predicted the delight and awe it would spark in those who saw it lazily fall toward Earth just after 2 a.m.

At least two people called the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, one who said there were UFOs over the skies west of Boynton. Others thought maybe it was a meteor — part of the Alpha Capricornids shower — or airplanes flying too close together.

“I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing,” said David Larenas, who was driving on Hypoluxo Road west of Lantana when he noticed the sky light up. “It looked like something out of the movies with this fireball and a long tail that was kind of like a cloud.”

@NWSMiami Good morning! This shot through the sky at about 2:15 this morning...I took this photo & viewers have sent in video as well...Do you guys know what it is?pic.twitter.com/dNq39dTv7R

— Sandra Shaw (@wpbf_sandra)July 3, 2019

Maj. Cody Chiles, spokesman for the Joint Force Space Component Command, confirmed the lights were from the Chinese rocket reentering the atmosphere over the southeastern portion of the country.

The website Satview.org showed it reentering at 2:16 a.m.

“At one point I did think about that movie Deep Impact because it was heading east and I was like, are we going to get a Tsunami,” Larenas said.

Deep Impact is a 1998 film where part of a comet lands in the ocean, creating a giant wave that destroys the Eastern Seaboard.

Mike Hankey, the operations manager for the American Meteor Society, said he was “100 percent sure” the lights were debris breaking up in the atmosphere.

“The reentry time difference from estimate to fireball was just four hours and the distance from estimate to actual was about 300 km, so this is the likely candidate,” Hankey said about the Chinese rocket. “The reentry estimates are really just educated guess, so they are not exact.”

Twenty-three people from St. Augustine to Key West logged their sighting of the space junk on the AMS website.

“This was significant,” wrote a Spring Hill man who included a photo with his report. “It was large, bright and fascinating.”

The Delta Aquarids meteor shower begins next week, but doesn’t peak until July 29. The Alpha Capricornids, which is generally considered a weak shower, is active now. Although it doesn’t produce a prolific number of meteors, the Alpha Capricornids is known for its fireballs.

Hankey said space junk has several characteristics that meteors don’t, including that it moves slower across the sky and there is more fragmentation.

“Basically, every little nut or bolt in a satellite or rocket engine will turn into a fireball in the sky, so this has a very distinctive look,” he said. “A lot of people saw it or got videos of it because it was hanging in the sky for so long.”

That gave them ample time to pull out their cell phones and hit record, which rarely happens with natural fireballs, Hankey said.

Did you see these impressive#fireballs in the sky? Getting numerous reports of bright#meteors over South#Florida at 2:19am this morning. Video is courtesy of Brent Hedeenpic.twitter.com/eeWfnBJLJ4

— Steve Weagle (@SteveWeagleWPTV)July 3, 2019

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