Video recently emerged and is making the rounds on the internet that was filmed by a man in Georgia which purportedly showed a smoldering meteorite-type rock that had just crashed down into his yard.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, the man was identified as Jay Sullivent of Appling, Georgia, who heard a loud crash outside his home on July 21 and thought there had been a car accident.
However, when he rushed outside, cell phone camera in hand and recording, he found nothing but a smoking crater in his yard with a small pink-hued rock that was so hot flames could be seen dancing around it.
Advertisement - story continues below
“It’s a damn meteorite,” Sullivent decided as he attempted to get the hot rock out of the crater using only his pocketknife.
“It was so loud that I thought there had been a car accident on the road in front of my house,” he told the Daily Mail.
“When I got over to the crater it was around 15 inches deep and about the same across. The rock in the middle was glowing red.”
Advertisement - story continues below
You can watch his video right here: (CAUTION: STRONG LANGUAGE)
While Sullivent seemed convinced that the rock he found in the crater was a meteorite, others disagreed. Critics said the video was nothing more than an elaborate, though not particularly believable, hoax. In short, fake news.
Indeed, Yahoo’s Grind TV reported that the video is fake, citing no less of an authority on the matter than the American Meteor Society.
“Totally 100 percent fake. Meteorites are NOT hot when they hit the ground contrary to popular belief, which is based mostly on Hollywood movies,” read an email from the AMS. “Meteorites are cold when they hit the ground and do not burn, cause fires and are not hot to the touch. A meteorite that size would also not leave an impact crater.”
Advertisement - story continues below
The email further cited a 2015 story from The Washington Post about a small wildfire supposedly started by a burning meteorite, which explained that meteors actually explode at such a high altitude that any pieces of it that made it through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface would be cold by the time it hit the ground.
Furthermore, it was explained that meteors and meteorites aren’t even actually “on fire” as they appear to be while streaking through the sky, and that the appearance of fire is actually just the superheated air around the rock that is glowing because of the incredibly fast speed at which they are flying.
Whether this was really a meteorite that struck the man’s yard or just a clever hoax will continue to spur debate though. What do you think of the man’s video?
Please share this on Facebook and Twitter so everyone can see this video that supposedly documents a meteorite that landed in a man’s yard in Georgia.
What do you think of what this man recorded? Scroll down to comment below!
