It's a UFO! It's fiery space debris! No, it's a meteor shower
 11/18/97
 The Star-Ledger  Newark, NJ
   Panicky Morris and Essex county residents began calling police about 9
o'clock last night, reporting everything from UFO sightings to fiery debris
falling from the sky.
   "Space garbage" was how a Chester police officer described the phenomenon,
attributing his explanation to a Morristown Airport operator he'd consulted.
   "It looked like a white flame with a red lining on one side, about 2
inches by 6 inches and fast-moving," said Irving Winter, who called the fire
department after spotting the traveling light from his home in Short Hills.
   Amateur stargazers can relax, according to astronomers. What the callers
most likely witnessed was the return of the Leonid meteor shower, which was
expected yield as many as 100 "shooting stars" an hour.
   The Leonid shower, which peaks every 33 years, actually occurs in less
visible conditions every Nov. 17 or 18 as the Earth passes through the dusty
orbital trail of Comet Tempel-Tuttle, said Kevin Conod, staff astronomer at
the Dreyfuss Planetarium in the Newark Museum.
   Comets are made of dust, ice and frozen gases, and they circle the sun in
uneven orbits by traveling from the inner planets to the most distant reaches
of the solar system. As the Earth orbits through the Comet Tempel-Tuttle's
trail, dust particles crash into the upper atmosphere at speeds of more than
40 miles per second, causing the particles to burn and creating the fiery
streaks we've come to know as meteor showers.
   "The Leonids produced the greatest shower ever recorded in 1966, the last
time we had a surge in activity," said Conod, explaining that in some spots,
observers estimated more than 100,000 shooting stars an hour were visible.
   The Leonid meteors, so-named because they appear to generate from the
constellation Leo, are expected to surge again in 1999.
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