GRANITE CITY, Ill. — Several Metro East residents reported hearing a loud boom early Tuesday morning and then were surprised to find that their security cameras captured a fireball streaking through the sky.
At first, they believed they may have witnessed a plane crash or some type of explosion.
“When I first seen it I thought it was an orb,” Donna Johnson said. “It was moving and I don’t know if they move. Then it went 'boom' and I went, oh, maybe it’s not an orb.”
“Sometimes these aren’t visitors from outer space,” John Martin said.
After taking a look at multiple videos from around the Metro East, Martin, an astrophysicist with the University of Illinois-Springfield, was able to ID the object.
“That’s a meteor,” Martin said. “It’s a classic meteor. The type that would be known as a bolide or a fireball.”
“Most of these are only the size of a softball to maybe a beachball and they usually burn up before they ever make the ground,” Robert Lunsford with the American Meteor Society said.
“This is larger than usual,” SIU-Edwardsville physics and astronomy researcher Tom Foster said. “The earth is always bombarded by stuff in space.”
According to Robert Lunsford with the American Meteor Society, the meteor was sighted across Missouri, Illinois, and Michigan before being found in a field outside Coatesville, Indiana.
“It’s very rare” to recover a meteorite, Lunsford said. “I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now and we’ve had less than 10 meteorite recoveries.”
“They can trace the trajectory backwards and figure out where it came from in the solar system,” Martin said.
“There are bits of the moon and Mars that have been discovered as meteorites,” Lunsford said.
With that in mind, the experts said this was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many who saw the fireball.
“You’ve got to be in the right place at the right time under clear skies and looking in the right direction,” Lunsford said.
Meteorite witnesses can file a report with the American Meteor Society for research purposes by clicking here.