The real query in sky mystery: Who's grilling so late at night?

Great balls of fire, I feel left behind.

Lazy, too.

Seems I might have been the only person in all of Hampton Roads who was enveloped in a cone of unconsciousness during Sunday night's celestial conflagration. Worse, while everyone else was apparently engaged in industrious outdoor activities at the time, I was doing nothing.

Surely you heard.

From Maryland to the Outer Banks, hundreds - maybe thousands - of astonished eyewitnesses claim that at about 9:45 p.m. Sunday their houses rocked, their windows rattled and their dogs trembled. They heard explosions and when they looked heavenward they were nearly blinded by an ungodly flash of light.

Some said they saw a fireball. Others reported that it looked more like a comet with a sparkly tail. One person estimated that the flaming object was the size of a refrigerator while another said it was no bigger than a baseball.

Some frightened folks thought space aliens had crashed to Earth. Others guessed a missile launch. Or a plane crash. Earthquakes, military maneuvers and meteorites were also suspected of causing the spectacular ruckus.

So how did I miss out on all the fun?

At the precise time of the incident, I was at home in Virginia Beach. My son and I were sitting at the kitchen table reviewing college registration paperwork. He was trying to figure out what to put in the "Do you drink?" box on the roommate questionnaire; I was pretending not to notice.

Our house was quiet. The windows were open.

We heard absolutely nothing. Worse, our tiny yapping watchdogs slept through the cataclysmic event.

Yet directly across the street, just a few feet away, neighbors were sitting on their patio when they heard a boom and the ground began to shake. A couple of miles west, one of my pals said the explosion was so loud she thought a jet had crashed at Oceana.

Even weirder than the varied accounts of flaming appliances flying through the sky were the boisterous activities folks were involved in at this hour.

If you assumed that most people are resting up for the week ahead on Sunday nights, you would be wrong.

According to Monday's Pilot, one eyewitness in Chesapeake was apparently outside cooking when the sky became illuminated. Think about it that for a minute. Grilling on a 70-degree Sunday is commonplace. But firing up the Weber at 10 p.m.? That's very, well, European.

The paper also reported that a Great Neck woman and her dog were jogging near the water when they saw a great light in the sky.

In Norfolk, an eyewitness said he was riding his bike over the Hampton Boulevard Bridge when he was startled by the streaking lights.

One posted an online comment claiming that his wife was changing the oil in her truck when the fireball appeared.

And someone identified only as Larry in Norfolk commented online that at the time of the disturbance, he and his friends were working in his yard on a privacy fence.

By late Monday, the mystery of the fireball seemed solved. Looks like Russian space junk may have been to blame.

Yet a bigger mystery remains: Who in the world has the energy to barbecue, repair a fence or ride a bike at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night?

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net