Fireball at high altitude, at night

I do not remember the exact date of what I saw, but remember the event very well.  Reading one of your past reports from July 31, 2000 at 9:24 am jogged my memory and I thought I'd add this to your database.
Back when I was in high school, my father and I were out in the yard one evening around 9:30, using a telescope I had recently gotten.  My dad was looking down at the the telescope, trying to adjust it, but I was looking nearly due west and about 75 degrees up from horizontal, over the top of our house.  Suddenly a very large, spherical fireball, about twice the size of a full moon, seemed to drop into the sky and roll to the west across an invisible shperical dome, then vanish as if had burned out.  That was the most amazing sight.  There was no sound, no enormous amount of light (just a soft orange color), no blast.  It seemed to all take place at extremely high altitude.  The event lasted about 1 second, but was burned into my mind.  My father never saw anything.  In my own mental analysis, it seemed to me that something had entered the atmosphere and exploded at extremely high altitude.  I figured the invisible dome I mentioned, to be the curve of the atmosphere and that the fireball just rolled off of it.  One detail I clearly recall is that the fireball had a "firey" texture to it, much the same as the texture seen on close-up photos of the sun.  There was no residual contrail, etc. left behind by the event.
Date is approximate.  PD