'Where did it land?': Doorbell camera captures meteor over Rocky Mountain House

EDMONTON -

A doorbell camera in Rocky Mountain House captured a meteor flying through the sky Tuesday night.

People in Leduc, New Sarepta and south Edmonton also reported seeing a flash in the sky and hearing a loud boom. At first, due to the freezing rain warning in effect for many parts of Alberta, people thought the flash of light and loud noise could potentially be thunder and lightning.

Heard a large bang in Calmar. Didn’t sound like thunder. Seeing reports it was heard/felt from Spruce Grove to east Edmonton and Leduc area too.

— Paisley Langston (@paislangston) December 8, 2021

Did anyone else's house shake? In Beaumont just outside #Edmonton and had people I know in #Leduc and #Devon too. #alberta

— Racquel Creces (@doublekell) December 8, 2021

Some even reported that their houses shook from the booming sound.

A little while ago there was a big bang & the house shook. I ran out back because I was sure the neighbour had blown up! Nothing. Went out front. Nothing. I wasn't the only one but no one knows what happened. I hope everyone is okay.#MysteryBoom #Leduc

— Kerry Atkinson (@KerryAtkinson2) December 8, 2021

CTV News Edmonton meteorologist Josh Classen said no lightning was detected in the area.

Mystery seems to have been solved. Meteor....not lightning&thunder. #yegwxhttps://t.co/tCRbsG3MwT

— Josh Classen (@joshclassenCTV) December 8, 2021

"Based on what we know, it looks like it's a fire ball from the entry of a space rock, which we sometimes call a meteoroid coming through the atmosphere," said University of Alberta Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Chris Herd.

Kaitlyn Kostyniuk's doorbell camera on her home in Rocky Mountain House captured the meteor flying by.

"I heard a rumbling, it sounded like a semi-truck slowing down and I was like that's pretty weird because we're pretty far away from any traffic noise," she said.

Kostyniuk said she didn't think much of it until her phone lit up saying there was motion detected on the front porch camera.

"Sure enough I open up the app and I see a big ball of light flashing across the sky."

The loud bang that accompanied the flash of light was a sonic boom from the meteor, according to Herd.

"The loud boom is not typical, it doesn't happen all that often. In this case, it suggests the rock was of some particular size, we don't even have an estimate at that yet," he said.

"It is a sonic boom basically, it's the result of the rock slowing down really quickly in the atmosphere. That's also what causes the light."

Herd says seeing a meteor is uncommon, but hearing the sonic boom from it passing through the atmosphere is even more rare.

"It suggests that it was larger than the size of a pebble sort of thing, something bigger than that, that had more energy," said Herd.

He pointed out videos of the meteor can be uploaded to the American Meteor Society so they can further triangulate where potential meteorites may have ended up.

"There could be meteorites on the ground," said Herd. "We don't really know the area so we can't really narrow that down."

Herd asks anyone who finds a meteorite to contact the University of Alberta because anything that recently arrived from space has significant scientific value.

"We tend to encourage people not to touch them with their hands. Not that there's anything dangerous about them, but the more sort of pristine, the more sort of uncontaminated, even from finger grease things like that, the better that we can understand what the intrinsic properties of the rock are," he said.

Kostyniuk said she shared her video online in the hopes of finding out what happened to the meteor.

"I want to know, did it land? Where did it land? Like, I'm so excited," said Kostyniuk.