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Or was it June 18? Or June 25? Well, it was June. That's close enough. :)

There's a longer version of the quote on the Wikipedia page for the crater in question. And here's a lesson regarding Wikipedia articles on technical topics with a small number of interested editors. Read the summary of the hypothesis on the page for Gervase of Canterbury here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gervase_of_Canterbury
Then read the summary on the wikipedia page for the crater itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_(crater).
The first says that the observed impact theory is reasonable. The second provides good reasons for dismissing the impact model. For example, we can now see details in the interior of the crater, and it is mostly likely millions of years old, not hundreds. Neither of these articles comes clean on the simple fact that these are conjectures, interesting ideas, improbable speculations founded on very limited information.

I don't see any merit to the straight-on meteor model either. Nor do I count it as "noteworthy". Some guy in a bar could have come up with that theory. Its scientific value is close to zero. It's quite possible that those monks back in 1178 saw some unusual refraction phenomenon having nothing to do with the Moon itself or any aspect of non-terrestrial astronomy. We will get no further understanding what they saw until I complete my time travel experiments. But I promise that June 1178 will be one of my first stops in my first week of operations as I bend history to my will. Please note that I have stockpiled a hundred Casio fx-260 solar calculators, and I'm giving one to everyone in history that I visit. That should shake things up a bit, but otherwise I'll be careful.

Frank Reed
Time Lord (part-time)

PS: Follow the "Time Lord" link, not to see a silly comment, but to be inspired by "text fragment" URLs (these work in Chrome, MS Edge, Opera, and standard Android mobile browsers; not currently in Firefox, Safari or standard iPhone/iPad browsers)