is more frequent than many people think. We're not out at night as a general population all that much. I've seen three of them, one a spectacular display at about 4 AM, when I was driving on a long one-day round trip and had started early. Nice green fireball that blew up brightly after it had passed over the ridge of a range of hills. I didn't report it. I knew what it was. In the direction it was headed, any fragments would have fallen in the ocean.
The color of the fireball can be a pretty good indication of the makeup of the meteor. Multi-colored ones are usually carbonaceous chondrites. Single color ones are usually metallic in nature. Nickel makes a nice green color and iron makes bright red or yellow sparks.
If you're outdoors a lot at nighttime, you'll see these things. If you're not, you'll sometimes read about them if someone bothers to report it to the newspaper or something.
But...if you see a fireball streaking across the sky, sometimes shedding bits of itself and having a nice long trail, it's a meteor, almost certainly. That's what they do. It's probably not very large, either. If it explodes at some point, it may be up to baseball or softball size. If you hear it as it passes, it's probably even larger than that.
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