To summarize: Meteors _can_ travel at low velocities and in apparently horizontal paths. 3. _Size and brilliance._ Giant meteors of great luminosity have been recorded throughout history. Some fireballs have been visible to observers throughout an area of thousands of square miles. Typical descriptions are: dazzling, like an airplane falling in flames, bigger than the full moon, of blinding brilliance, so bright it turned night into day, like the headlight of a locomotive, as big as the setting sun but three times as brilliant. The luminosity does not depend on the actual size of the meteoric body. A fragment no larger than a pinhead can create a brilliant flash as it vanishes. A spectacular fireball that lights up the country over hundreds of miles may have a small body that burns up completely miles above the earth. A larger body can survive longer, so that it continues to flare for several seconds or more. The larger, long-lasting fireballs may explode into smaller fragments and cascades of sparks. In exploding, they can produce a luminous cloud of particles that remains visible for fifteen or twenty minutes and then peppers the ground with meteorites that fall like hail or buckshot. A giant fireball can deposit chunks of metal weighing a ton or more like those found in Mexico, or can leave a truly enormous body that penetrates the ground and carves out a great crater like those in Arizona and Texas. To summarize: Huge fireballs of great brilliance are not new. 4. _Sound._ Some meteors produce noise; others do not. Most meteors silently vaporize high above the earth. When one does reach the ground, it may strike with no noise but the faint thud of its impact. Shooting through the air, it sometimes makes weak noises that have been described as rumbling, crackling, rustling, whistling, or hissing. Meteors sometimes explode with one or more crashing detonations that rattle or even break windows. The noise has been described as like a heavy clap of thunder, the explosion of a volcano, or a whir as if a million bumblebees had been disturbed. The noise from the explosion of the Siberian meteor in 1908 was heard over a distance of 600 miles, and the shock registered as an earthquake in England. Many meteors, like the Pennsylvania fireball of January 29, 1952, (AMS 2328) are completely silent. This blue-green object, so large that it showed a definite disk, was reported to the American Meteor Society by more than 400 witnesses from Maine to Virginia and from New York to Ohio; none of the observers heard any noise [V-1, p. 264]. To summarize: Some meteors end with a bang, but most of them don’t even whimper.