Orange County sheriff's deputies were called about 12:15 a.m. Tuesday to Portola and Alton parkways in Foothill Ranch, where witnesses reported hearing an explosion and seeing white smoke. It was too dark for a responding deputy to see anything, so he surmised to a dispatcher it coulda been a meteor.
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This just in: It was not.
Bomb squad investigators who went to the scene after sunrise discovered the No. 1 clue indicating it WAS NOT a meteor that caused the explosion.
“If there was a meteor there would be a big hole in the ground,” sheriff's Lt. Jeff Hallock, a department spokesman, reportedly explained to City News Service rocket scientists.
But the bomb squaders did find remnants of paper from a two- to three-inch commercial firework, according to Hallock.
Talk about lowering the boom.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.