Sunday night meteor explodes over Vermont
March 13, 2021 | BY EMMETT GARTNER
Illustration by Juli Badics.
Just after 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nicole Roscioli and her two daughters were exiting their car at a friend’s house in Duxbury when she and her youngest, Avalene, spotted a mysterious object coasting over the evening Vermont sky.
According to Avalene, it made a whistling noise as it descended.
“I commented that maybe someone set off a rocket. It looked like a rocket to me with a fire burning at the end,” Roscioli said.
The trio had more important business to tend to, however – the adoption of a pet rabbit. Talk of the projectile sighting was quickly forgotten until they joined the rest of their family at home in Waterbury later.
“We were so distracted and excited about meeting the bunny that we didn't think twice about it,” Roscioli explained.
Other Vermonters reported a similar sighting that night: a streaking object with a white tail.
Many more reported hearing the thunderous boom that accompanied the phenomenon rather than a rocket-like whistle. Snow falling off a roof was one common theory along with training at the Ethan Allen Firing Range, or even a frost quake (another mysterious, noisy winter phenomena). Social media lit up with people weighing in from Essex to Wolcott, Duxbury to Williamstown.
“It sounded as though someone dropped an elephant on the roof,” Sarah Page commented from Duxbury.
“We were outside and heard it, but did not see anything. Thought it might have been a military plane,” suggested Kamala Kelton in Waterbury Center.
In no time, reports began popping up on a site run by the American Meteor Society ranging from Hinesburg to Quebec all around 5:38 p.m. Within three hours of these sightings NASA had received enough eyewitness reports and footage to confidently identify the fireball as an asteroid fragment that traveled above Vermont’s Mount Mansfield State Forest, its path covering a wide swath of the state where people below took notice.
The WCAX-Channel 3 late news shared a short video clip captured by the station’s stationary camera at the Burlington International Airport showing a brilliant streak crossing the sky in an easterly direction.
In the object’s descent through Earth’s atmosphere, NASA’s Meteor Watch Facebook page reported, pressure built up in its front and created a vacuum directly behind it. The difference between the two forces led to an explosive reaction within the meteor’s structure.“The space rock fragmented violently, producing a pressure wave that rattled buildings and generated the sound heard by those near the trajectory,” NASA’s post said.
Instruments on the ground helped the agency calculate that the explosion was the equivalent of 440 pounds of TNT. And at its peak velocity, the meteor was traveling at 42,000 miles per hour and got as close as 30 miles to the Earth’s surface before it reached its fiery demise. Its size was no greater than a watermelon when it released its shockwave.
Before you hop in your car and ready your snowshoes to try and find evidence of the space object though, heed the words of Johnathan Kemp from Middlebury College’s Mittelman Observatory.
“Sunday's event was large enough to create a great show in the sky, but unlikely to be sufficiently large so as to result in a potential specimen for recovery on the ground,” Kemp said. “Estimates by scientists of the meteor's size before atmospheric entry imply that it is quite unlikely that a part survived the trip through the atmosphere.”
The display reminded one veteran Vermont reporter, Stefan Hard, of his brush with a similar celestial object in 1994. On June 15 of that year, Hard was at his house in Fairfield when the dim evening sky was illuminated by an unnatural color.
“I’m just standing there doing my dishes and all of the sudden, around 8 p.m., this thing lit up the whole sky in this weird, eerie green hue,” Hard recalled. “At that point, [the object] started to break up, and it kept going until it disappeared behind Jay Peak. I was just flabbergasted, my jaw was on the floor. I had never seen anything like that.”
The following day Hard was tasked by his editor at the Country Courier with tracking down the object and recording eyewitness accounts. He began by calling every police station and dispatch center to the northeast of Fairfield and combing through reports — the hunt was on.
After a day of phone calls, Hard said, he headed out in his car and kept driving north, asking if anybody saw anything.
Sure enough, they did. His journey took him all the way to the Quebec border, by Great Averill Pond in Essex County. “There were some camps that were facing the right way and I found one or two people up there that had seen it,” Hard said. “They were pretty impressed by it as well, and I think a few days later I started hearing reports from Quebec that pieces had come down in Quebec.”
The border, however, was the end of Hard’s journey. “I was like, ‘Damn.’ It was logistically a little too difficult to keep pursuing it,” he professed.
Unlike Sunday’s fragment, the object Hard pursued not only reached the ground, but broke into 20 sizable fragments that weighed roughly 56 lbs altogether. A detailed report published in the Meteoritics & Planetary Science Journal determined that the explosion of the 1994 object was the equivalent of a half of a kiloton of TNT, more than twice the energy of the Sunday spectacular.
Both events will stay in their audience’s memories for quite some time.
“A nice little firework, courtesy of Mother Nature,” NASA’s description concluded.
An Associated Press report on the meteor included dashcam footage from police cruisers in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Portland, Maine. This report was carried on WABC-7 New York.