A large fireball observed streaking across the sky over North Idaho Monday night was not a meteor. It was burning debris from a Chinese rocket that launched a satellite in December.

Brandon Stone said he first witnessed what “almost looked like a jetliner with a heavy trail of flame behind it” around 9:55 from his window near the corner of Harrison Avenue and Fourth Street in Coeur d’Alene.  

 “I ran outside to see a cluster … of something streaking steadily though the sky heading north,” Stone wrote in an email. “It was breaking apart, expanding slowly as it flew, kind of like the Shuttle Columbia disaster footage.”

Similar observations were reported throughout the West and Canada.

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