Scientists speculate rock could have impacted in Dugway Proving Ground

A meteor made a surprise appearance over the dark skies of Tooele County just after midnight Wednesday, sending a bright light cascading into bedroom windows and awakening many — if they weren’t awake already.

The meteor entered earth’s atmosphere at 12:07 a.m. over Utah, according to NASA ambassador and Stansbury Park resident Patrick Wiggins. Its appearance, which had not been predicted by astronomers, produced a flash of light and a sonic boom that was heard across the state and even parts of the Intermountain West.

“It was bigger than your typical meteor,” Wiggins said. “Usually people see a shooting star about as big as a grain of sand, but this was larger.”

Wiggins, who is nocturnal by nature, was sitting at his desk working when he saw a flash of light and hurried outdoors to investigate.

“I only saw the tail end of it, but it got very bright,” Wiggins said. “It literally turned darkness into daylight. It was very impressive.”

The speed the meteor was traveling, which usually averages around 44 miles per second, is what caused the flash of light, Wiggins said.

“When a meteor comes into the atmosphere it comes pretty fast,” Wiggins said. “When it hits going that fast you get friction. The end result is the exterior of this body gets very hot briefly. It also makes it slow down and then it cools down, so by the time the typical meteor hits the ground it is generally cool.”

Erla Woods and her husband Jay were also wide awake at their Tooele home, sitting near a window, when the speeding meteor flooded their home with light.

“We thought maybe it was a shooting star,” Erla said. “But it was way too big. It lit up our house like it was daytime. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

About five minutes after seeing the light, the Woods heard what sounded like an explosion.

“It shook our house,” Erla said. “We thought it may have been an earthquake.”

Upon realizing that none of her neighbor’s houses appeared to be disturbed, Erla then blamed the sound — which she described as an uncommonly loud boom — on a possible explosion at the nearby Tooele Army Depot. When she later heard the phenomenon was natural, she considered herself lucky to have been up at such an early hour.

“You know us older folks, we never get to bed before 1 a.m.,” she said. “We were looking out the window and it went right past. It was really fantastic.”

The Tooele County Dispatch Center was bombarded with over 100 calls within an hour of the meteor passing over, according to Tooele County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Regina Campbell. The reports ranged from explosion sounds to shaking to a suspicious light. One caller even assumed that a plane had crashed near Grantsville Reservoir.

Because of the several minute delay between when the light was seen overhead and when the sonic boom rang out, Wiggins estimated that pieces of the meteor touched down near Granite Peak on the western boundary of Dugway Proving Ground.

“It took five minutes for the sound to get here and sound will travel about 343 meters per second in one direction, so I took a compass and measured on a map where [the impact site] would be,” Wiggins said, adding that the crumbling meteor is likely to look like average rocks. “But certainly no one will find all the parts. If you are walking down the road there might be a meteor nearby but you might never know it.”

According to NASA.gov, there are three kinds of meteorites: stony, iron and stony-iron. Stony meteorites consist of minerals rich in silicon and oxygen, with smaller amounts of iron, magnesium, and other elements. Iron meteorites consist mostly of iron and nickel. Stony-iron meteorites have nearly equal amounts of silicon-based stone and iron-nickel metal.

Following hearing of the meteor and the possibility that it may have landed on the base, Dugway Proving Ground public affairs specialist Al Vogel began making phone calls.

“I called the Air Force, our base security, law enforcement, the airfield,” Vogel said. “Nobody picked up anything. Nobody has seen anything. There’s been no report of anything being found at Dugway.”

Despite rumors that astrology enthusiasts are organizing an expedition to hunt for the fallen rocks, Vogel said his office hasn’t received any requests to gain access to the secure military base.

Four seismograph stations operated by the University of Utah recorded energy signals in the vicinity of the state’s west desert, which seismologists believe may be connected to the meteor sighting.

“There are some signals which coincide with the time the meteor was reported,” said Relu Burlacu, a seismologist at the university. “We think that those are a result of acoustic energy traveling through the air and coming in contact with the ground.”

Burlacu said the signals weren’t recorded automatically by the seismograph stations — at Dugway, Fish Springs, southwest of the Great Salt Lake and near Promontory Point — because the energy didn’t emit from the ground. Researchers later determined that the energy was a result of some type of percussive force slamming into the ground, but can’t pinpoint the exact location.

“When you have an event and you know it propagated through the ground, then you can run a program to locate the event,” Burlacu said. “This event was different. We weren’t able to find the arrival point.”

Wiggins said despite the sensation caused by this meteor’s arrival, in general meteors cruising across the sky are not a rare happening.

“It was a fun event, but not a rare event,” Wiggins said. “These things happen pretty frequently. They just usually don’t happen where you are. Typically someone else gets to see them. Or, since most of the earth is uninhabited, if there is no one there to see it then no one reports it.”

Wiggins himself has seen two such occurrences in his lifetime.

“The last one I saw was in 2001,” he said. “It was a lot closer to the ground. I was driving up I-15 near St. George and saw this green light.”

Wiggins said it’s highly probable that residents may get the opportunity to see such a vivid display of light again — if they keep their eyes open.

“If you didn’t see this one, you might see another one,” Wiggins said. “Keep watching the sky.”

Jamie Belnap: jamieb@tooeletranscript.com