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Hundreds of people witnessed a meteor lighting up the evening sky over Edmonton, Alberta, last week, and the spectacular fireball was even caught on tape by unsuspecting videographers. Around 5:30 P.M. MST Thursday, a brilliant streak of light shot across the western Canadian sky, setting meteorite hunters on a chase to find any surviving fragments of the object.
"We're trying to take all the reports and put them together in a meaningful conclusion as to where it might have fallen," Frank Florian, of the TELUS World of Science in Edmonton, told the Edmonton Sun.
Added Alan Hildebrand, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Calgary and leader of the Prairie Meteorite Search project: "It may have been the largest [meteor], or one of the largest that would have occurred over Canada this year." Hildebrand told the Edmonton Journalthat the object probably broke into pieces and landed east of Edmonton, near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.
According to the Sun, the video below was taken by a dashboard camera in a police car in Devon, Alberta, a small community southwest of Edmonton. "What started out looking like a shooting star suddenly erupted into a ball of flame and shot across the sky," the police officer told the newspaper.
