According to scientists, flash that appeared in the night sky was not a fireball or meteor; it was in fact a piece of space debris, which they called as something man-made that burned up in the atmosphere. Several people reported that they saw the thing in the sky.

According to a statement released by Martin O'Donnell, a spokesman for the US Strategic Command, the thing was a rocket body that reentered the atmosphere and since then, it has been removed as a decayed object from the US satellite catalog.

The assessment of the incident was issued by the military's Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It tracks over 17,000 objects in space continuously. According to David Dundee, astronomer for the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, the object was moving too slowly i. e. at only 14,500 miles per hour and this much speed is very less when it comes to a meteor or a fireball.

As per Dundee, "Looking at the video, the way it broke into pieces, it could be a piece of space debris. There's a lot of old stuff kicking around up there".

According to Dundee, there were approximately 120 reports of seeing the flash, which was observed around 1:30 am over Georgia in addition to Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama. According to William Cooke, head of NASA' Meteoroid Environment Office, fourteen thousand, five hundred miles per hour is a very high speed, however a meteor has much higher speed compared to this and the view was likely a reentry of space junk.