WHILE camping one weekend in the mountains of southern Chile, John VanderBrink witnessed an extraordinary event. Late at night he saw a bright, slow-moving meteor low in the northwestern night sky, travelling horizontally from left to right about 10 degrees above the horizon. “The object was brighter than Sirius and had a luminous trail five degrees in length,” recalls VanderBrink. He even saw sparkling fragments break away from the main object. He and his wife Katrina followed the object’s path for almost a minute until it disappeared behind mountains to the north.

VanderBrink is an electronics specialist at the European…