Meteorite Crashes Into House: Softball Size Rock Breaks Through Roof, Ceiling
A homeowner in Connecticut initially believed that it was a broken rafter that caused a loud bang in his home on Friday night, but on Saturday he discovered something that appeared to be a rock that had travelled straight through his roof.
"It sounded like a gunshot but it was a louder bang," Larry Beck, a resident in Wolcott, Connecticut told the local news channel. "We looked up and saw the ceiling coming down and it broke away the sheet rock in the dining room."
After hearing the loud noise, Beck assumed that a rafter or joint had broken. It wasn't until Saturday morning that he went to inspect what might have caused the noise. What he found was a hole in his roof.
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The object that caused the hole has been described as being the size of a softball, and appears to be a rock. But given the amount of damage, Beck thought this couldn't be just any rock. Beck alerted the local authorities.
"For this to crash through asphalt shingles, the roof, smash copper pipe, crack a ceiling, it was moving very quickly," said Wolcott police Chief Edward Stephens.
Officials have now confirmed that instead of being a rock, the large softball sized object was actually a meteorite.
"Stefan Nicolescu, the collections manager for the Mineralogy Division at the Yale Peabody Museum, confirmed that the dense and blackened rock was indeed from outer space," according to the Daily News.
Several other residents in Becks area had also placed calls to 911 on Friday evening, before the meteorite hit Beck's home. They claimed to have hear a loud boom.
"The sound might have been the space rock exploding into smaller bits when passing through the Earth's atmosphere" the Daily News reported.
Luckily, no one was home when the meteorite hit Beck's home.
"My wife says it can only happen to us," Beck told NBC.
