Residents across San Francisco and the surrounding hills reported seeing what appeared to be a massive meteor tearing across the night sky. And unlike your typical shooting star that flickers out in a blink, this one apparently didn't burn up. It just kept going.

"Absolutely fucking massive," one SF resident described the sighting. "I lost it when it went past the hills."

Reports are still trickling in, and as of now there's no official confirmation from any local observatory or agency about what exactly lit up the sky. That's pretty much par for the course — by the time any government body gets around to issuing a statement, half the internet will have already declared it was either a UFO, a SpaceX mishap, or the opening salvo of the apocalypse.

Here's what we do know: bright fireballs — meteors large enough to be visible even in light-polluted urban skies — are relatively rare but not unheard of. When one is big enough that witnesses say it didn't appear to fully disintegrate, that usually means it was a significant chunk of space rock, potentially large enough that fragments could have survived entry and made it to the ground as meteorites.

Whether anyone finds a space rock in their backyard in Marin or the East Bay hills remains to be seen. If you do, congratulations — you've just found something more valuable per ounce than San Francisco real estate, which is saying something.

For the rest of us, it's a good reminder that the universe is indifferent to your commute, your rent, and your city supervisor's latest spending proposal. Sometimes a giant rock just screams across the sky to remind you how small it all is.

Keep looking up, SF. It beats looking at your phone.