A bright fireball from the Perseid meteor shower streaks across the sky above a lakeside grassland at Amuta Scenic Area on Aug. 13, 2026 in Daqing, Heilongjiang Province of China. (Image credit: Chi Shiyong/VCG via Getty Images)

It came from outer space, exploding high above the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina.

That April 1 event — an incoming meteor , also termed a bolide — was observed by both U.S. space-based military and civil sensors.

Hush-hush U.S. government satellite sensors detected the speedy fireball cutting through our atmosphere. The object's brightness peaked at an altitude of nearly 60 miles (90.5 kilometers) over the South Atlantic.

That dazzling spectacle was also caught by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's GOES-E and Europe's Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) Imager-1 satellite.…