This event came as a surprise, as I've never heard it recounted by any of my elderly relatives, and most of them died before I read about it in this book. A number of other such impacts, including some which hit or nearly hit people, ships, animals etc, are described in this book, which I recommend.Rain of Iron and IceOn November 27,1919, a meteorite fell into Lake Michigan near the Michigan shore. "Residents of Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, South Bend, Grand Haven, and other Western Michigan cities fled from their homes in panic, fearing an earthquake. Houses were shaken, the country was illuminated as by a bright sun's rays, so all-enveloping it was impossible to tell from which direction the flare came, the earth trembled for half a moment and then came a deep prolonged rumbling as of a terrific explosion." (p 159)
by John S. Lewis
There was a similar event in roughly the same area about fifteen years ago (+/- a few years, I don’t recall the exact year it happened).
I was sitting up watching the news in the wee hours (some things never change :) and all of a sudden I heard a LOUD, long, rumble outside. Like a very loud thunderclap that just kept on going for several seconds.
I ran outside to see what had blown up. (I was thinking that maybe a truck hit the gas station a few blocks away, or maybe the Coke bottling plant exploded — I was grasping at possible explanations.)
I stood outside my house in total silence. The occasional car driving by, and a faint beep-beep-beep in the distance, which I’d heard off and on over the years and never could figure out. (It was a weird “SF-ish” type sound, borderline creepy in the wee hours.)
I saw no flames anywhere. From the intensity of the explosion sound, I figured it had to be fairly close, so I waited a few minutes, thinking that it wouldn’t be long before the firetrucks and police sirens would show up and give me an idea of where it had happened, and thus, I’d have some idea or perhaps what had happened. But, there were never any sirens, firetrucks, etc. Just normal quiet night.
The next day, a friend who owned a student rental rooming house told me that some of his tenants were sitting out on the back porch and saw it — it was a HUGE fireball, lit up the whole sky. Then, there was an item in the news that said that an airline pilot saw it, it came in and landed in Lake Michigan. If it had hit land, it would have been a really big event, I’d think. There was also an item in the local paper — a tiny piece of it had broken off — maybe five pounds or so — and crashed through the roof of a house in Coleman MI, which was probably 175 miles NE of where the main thing splashed into Lake Michigan.
Oh, the airline pilot said when it hit the lake, there was a bright blue flame. That’s about all I remember of it, other than that sound, which had to be heard to comprehend.
I now live closer to the lake. A few years ago, I was standing outside my house seeing off a friend who’d come out to visit. We were standing near his car, and all of a sudden, there was a *bright* tube of light that lit up in the sky to the east of us, I think it was headed “down” to the east. No sound, but the tube of light hung there in the sky, gradually fading out. It took probably 15 or 20 seconds, maybe a bit longer.
I have my garden in my barnyard, and I regularly find very strange rocks. One of them looks like a very rare type of meteorite (from my too-extensive web searching). I plan on sending it in to a university that will evaluate such things and validate them if real (in return for a 20% slice of the rock if it’s a winner). Other rocks are really strange fractured pieces of “I don’t know what.” I’m not a geologist, obviously. It looks like a lot of these rocks were subjected to some intense force, and in many cases, intense heat. From what I understand, the normal explanation for the appearance (of some of these rocks) is volcanism, but there is *no* history of any volcano in this region.
I would not be surprised if something really big crashed into the earth thousands of years ago in this region.