Matney believes that hypervelocity collisions may produce some non-equilibrium phenomena that produced the extra light. So the meteoroids causing the observed lunar impacts may be ten to a hundred times smaller than Melosh indicates, making them more compatible with the expected Leonid stream distribution. Although certainly not visible from the Earth, the new craters might be found by comparing new images that will be obtained by the Japanese Selene spacecraft, scheduled for launch in 2003, with Apollo or Lunar Orbiter photoes taken about thirty years ago. Sunglints, caused by sunlight briefly shining off of artificial satelites or space debris, have been proposed as a possible explanation of the flash observations. This is very unlikely since the observations were made late at night local time when most orbiting space objects were deep in the Earth's shadow.
Geosynchronous satellites are high enough to be outside of the Earth's shadow.
Also, with six flashes simultaneously recorded at two or more separated locations, the chances are much greater that the flashes are lunar phenomena than something closer. In the cases where lunar location information is available in the separate video records, there is also good agreement.