‘It was a little surreal’: Meteor lights up the sky over Vancouver Island

A celestial object lit up the sky last night, and doorbell cameras up and down Vancouver Island captured the moment.

Possibilities flashed through Mike Hall’s head as quickly as the light flashed outside his bedroom window.

It reminded him of the searchlights he used to use in the coast guard auxiliary. It called to mind images of a major police operation in his backyard. He even briefly wondered if it was “the second coming of the big guy.”

Once he saw the video from his wildlife camera, he thought it might be a plane crash.

“It was a little surreal,” the Comox resident told CTV News, describing the moment just after midnight Wednesday when a meteor lit up the night sky overhead.

Videos shared with CTV News show the streak from a variety of angles, captured on dashcams and home security systems around the region.

Hall was in bed, facing the bedroom window, which he described as having “very dark, thick wood blinds that were shuttered closed.”

“It doesn’t let a lot of light in,” he said. “All of a sudden, a bright light flashed and it startled me because it kind of lit the room and it was very brief.”

Some additional flashes followed, conjuring the searchlight memories and sending him rushing to check his camera.

“I’ll be honest, it was unsettling,” Hall said. “I thought there was some major activity, whether it was police or—like, I couldn’t describe it. I thought somebody was trying to light up our home in the back.”

He went to share his video with local Facebook groups and soon found that others had seen the same thing, describing it as a “bolide”—a particularly bright meteor.

Randy Enkin is a research scientist at Natural Resources Canada and a past president of the Victoria centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

He told CTV News most meteors are comparable to grains of sand: very small pieces of rock from elsewhere in the universe that get caught in Earth’s gravity and burn up in the atmosphere.

“This one was probably quite a bit bigger,” Enkin said. “It was very bright. It was seen all the way to the (B.C.) Interior, all the way down through Washington state.”

Enkin said Wednesday’s meteor entered the atmosphere about 100 kilometres above Port Alberni and fell southwest across Vancouver Island, likely landing in the Pacific Ocean about 50 kilometres west of Bamfield.

He said the meteor broke up as it got closer to the planetary surface, but portions of it—meteorites—would likely be recoverable if they had crashed into land rather than into the ocean.

The interest the incident has generated—from Hall and others—is exciting to Enkin.

“I always like it when people look up in the sky,” he said. “First of all, it’s awesome. The pictures are just beautiful, and there are so many people who are enthusiastically sending in their photos and their security cameras’ (videos).”

Looking at the night sky is also a way of connecting with the history of the human species, Enkin said. It’s something people have always done and likely always will do.

“It’s a great unifier,” he said. “It’s something that binds all people together.”

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