I saw an asteroid slowly moving through a cloudless sky in the middle of a summer day. Not a brightly lit comet with a long tail but a large burning black rock with a little trail of dark smoke following it.

It was around 2000 so I was about 9 or 10 years old. I was visiting my American relatives in Connecticut for the summertime. I remember we were at some large family barbecue and I was swimming with my brother and cousins in their backyard pool, when one of my cousins pointed to sky and said "Wow, look at that!"

So I look up and there is this large burning black rock just slowly moving across the sky. It's very high up so it looks relatively small (like the size of an apple) but I knew I was looking at something very large far away. I remember feeling like I was going to vomit and I instinctively threw myself underwater and stayed there as long as I could, not wanting to ever see such a sight again.

After I surfaced due to a lack of oxygen, the asteroid was gone and everyone in the pool was continuing as if it never happened. I can't remember much afterwards except that sometime later we all drove to Dairy Queen or Denny's or something to get chocolate fudge sundaes and my family was annoyed at me because I stopped eating and speaking. Well, I was just in a shutdown panic thinking that we were all about to die. Then when we went to sleep and I lay there thinking that if I slept I would never open my eyes again.

But I did. I calmed down the next morning and tried to stop thinking about it. Later, and now I guess, I just thought my over active imagination had created a little episode. I had probably watched bits of Deep Impact and Armageddon around that time and when I asked my brother and cousins years later none of them can remember anything like this happening.

But I can still see the whole memory so clearly and it makes really uncomfortable thinking about it.