First off she said "It appeared to come out of the ocean", not "It came out of the ocean. If the ocean was the horizon, it could have come from beyond that horizon.
It looks startlingly familiar to me. In 1991 I was not quite 17 yet. A couple of friends and I walked to the nearest Blockbuster, and after renting some movies were on our way back to one of their houses. The road we walked was an east-west road, and we were headed East. Cutting across the parking lot of a community center, we were walking uphill when we saw it. A fire in the sky, very similar to the one in the picture. As I watched I saw there were actually two objects, and through the flames we could see silver. Honestly we assumed from the size and speed that it was an airliner that had lost it's tail section (the second ball of fire) and was crashing. If I held a ruler between my hands at arms length, I would say together the parts were at least nine inches across.
It sped across the sky heading due North, and we ran to my friends car and actually tried to follow it, figuring that it would crash into the city not far down the road. We ended up getting lost downtown an hour later and as we returned it sunk in that for that size and speed to not have crashed downtown, it must have been massive, moving faster than we thought and higher up.
The more we thought about it the more we realized how odd it was to not have heard any sound. When we returned to my house (just down the block from my friends house where we were headed originally), I told my mother about it excitedly and she said it was on the news, and would be recapped any moment.
We sat down with heavy anticipation and were sorely disappointed. "And a recap of our top story, sources in the government tell us that a fire seen in the sky all over the midwest tonight was actually a Russian satellite that burned up on re-entry and crashed into Northern Arkansas."
WTF?! I could believe a Russian Satelite, but I'd have to be from Arkansas to believe it actually crashed there. How the hell did it crash in Northern Arkansas when I chased it North from the southern suburbs of Kansas City, hundreds of miles NORTH if Arkansas?!
I've questioned everything ever since. I mean, for that bullshit story to be true, it would have had to either circumnavigate the globe after I saw it, or made a 180 degree turn.
Never take the easy explanation for a fire in the sky. It's usually bull.
-Mike
nice picture of one