Meteor Lands In Lake Michigan

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That green thing that shot across the Midwestern sky early Monday morning was a rock that crash landed into Lake Michigan from outer space. At least, that’s according to preliminary findings from the American Meteor Society. Mike Hankey is the society’s operations manager, and says the physical makeup of the flying rock is what makes it light up in different colors as it plunges through the Earth’s atmosphere.

“It’s that underlying material that’s essentially getting vaporized is what gives it its color, and meteors like this often are green,” Hankey said.

Estimates suggest the fireball traveled from the southwest to the northeast, and ended its interstellar trip at the very bottom of Lake Michigan, off the coast of Wisconsin north of Cheboygan. Almost 200 reports of the fireball came into the meteor society’s phone banks overnight.