Minnesota residents across a 50-mile radius reported seeing a bright flash and a thunderous ‘sonic boom’ in the sky over Beltrami County Monday night — and now a NASA astronomer and a local astrophysics professor are on the case.
The American Space Agency analyzed footage from an airport that captured a ‘horizontal’ object streak across the sky when the boom rattled windows and shook homes.
And a meteorites specialist believes the object was the size of a refrigerator and hit the atmosphere at a speed between 30,000 to 130,000 miles per hour.
DailyMail.com spoke with Beltrami County Emergency Management, which revealed that the sonic boom was too close to the ground to be a meteor – ‘at least not ones that don’t cause regional devastation.’
NASA analyzed footage from an airport that captured a ‘horizontal’ object streak across the sky when the boom rattled windows and shook homes
The second video, which came from the Bemidji Regional Airport four miles to the northwest of Nymore, shows what appears to be a blindingly fast white streak zoom past the airport.
‘This video was provided to an astronomer and a scientist from NASA,’ according to Muller.
The one key video, which came from the Bemidji Regional Airport four miles to the northwest of Nymore, shows what appears to be a blindingly fast white streak zoom past the airport
‘They analyzed the video frame by frame and determined the object is too horizontal to indicate it was a meteor,’ he said. ‘It is undetermined if the two videos are related.’
‘But one obvious thing is that bugs were flying around,’ he said.
‘And there were other bugs before that one. And it just so coincided that the timestamp on that was the exact same time as the other reports.’
Chris Muller, director of Beltrami County Emergency Management, has reviewed additional footage from the airport’s camera, from Monday night and at times during the day, and is now suspects the object could be prosaically explained. ‘There were bugs flying around,’ he said.
But while emergency management continues to pursue a terrestrial explanation, Craig Zlimen, the owner of science collectibles company Minnesota Meteorites, believes that the meteorite theory can’t yet be ruled out. Zlimen said such a meteor could sell for ‘thousands’ per gram
