Minnesota residents across a 50-mile radius reported seeing a bright flash and a thunderous ‘sonic boom’ in the sky over Beltrami County Monday night — and now a NASA astronomer and a local astrophysics professor are on the case.
NASA analyzed footage from an airport that captured a ‘horizontal’ object streak across the sky when the boom rattled windows and shook homes
Aside from the local witnesses to the bright flash and the thunderous boom, three videos were obtained by Chris Muller, director of Beltrami County Emergency Management.
The first was a security video from a private residence in Nymore, south of Lake Bemidji.
The one key video, which came from the Bemidji Regional Airport four miles to the northwest of Nymore, shows what appears to be a blindingly fast white streak zoom past the airport
‘They analyzed the video frame by frame and determined the object is too horizontal to indicate it was a meteor,’ he said. ‘It is undetermined if the two videos are related.’
Running the video at one-quarter and one-tenth playback speed, Muller assessed that the airport streak could very likely be an insect made visible by a bright spotlight closer to the camera.
Chris Muller, director of Beltrami County Emergency Management, has reviewed additional footage from the airport’s camera, from Monday night and at times during the day, and is now suspects the object could be prosaically explained. ‘There were bugs flying around,’ he said.
But while emergency management continues to pursue a terrestrial explanation, Craig Zlimen, the owner of science collectibles company Minnesota Meteorites, believes that the meteorite theory can’t yet be ruled out. Zlimen said such a meteor could sell for ‘thousands’ per gram