One night maybe 25 years ago, some friends and I were sitting on the beach at Godderich Ontario overlooking Lake Huron. All of a sudden we saw this huge visual display, something like fireworks, but far too high and distant to be that. We all sat there with dropped jaws saying, “WTF was that?!”
The next day we learned from the news that we had witnessed the re-entry of a Soviet satellite.
I was driving through Utah at night and saw that satellite burn through the sky - it took about 4 seconds and my passenger and I had dropped jaws and asked each other "did you see that??".