Fireball over East Islip, NY

The report, as filed

My friend and I were standing in the street in East Islip, NY, at approximately 10:30 PM last night (July 5th)when he pointed over my head towards the Northern sky and said, Look at that! What the heck is that? I turned around to see what he was pointing at and saw what looked like a single, large orange glowing fireball traveling horizontally across the sky. We both are very familiar with the appearance of all types of air traffic at night, as he lives a few miles from McArthur Airport and I live right under the approach path for La Guardia Airport. We agreed that this was no aircraft that we had ever seen before. There were no blinking marker lights or any engine sound whatsoever. It appeared to be a ball of orange colored fire. Although we were unable to determine the object's exact altitude, I would estimate it to be around 2500 feet and, for it to travel the distance that it did in 2-3 minutes, it must have been traveling at a speed equal to or greater than large commercial aircraft that I have observed approaching JFK or La Guardia. The object continued to glow a bright orange and moved rapidly in an Easterly direction, growing smaller, until it disappeared from sight in a period of time of about 2-3 minutes.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #111173). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.