{"id":757223,"date":"2026-06-24T03:13:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T03:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/757223\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T03:13:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T03:13:26","slug":"bright-fireball-seen-in-sault-ste-marie-skies-shocked-and-amazed-onlookers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/757223\/","title":{"rendered":"Bright fireball seen in Sault Ste. Marie skies \u2018shocked and amazed\u2019 onlookers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Text<\/p>\n

Listen to this article<\/p>\n

Estimated 4 minutes<\/p>\n

The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.<\/p>\n

Gerri-Annette Grenier was taking videos of vintage vehicles at the Queen Street Cruise car show in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., last week when something unexpected entered her shot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A meteor travelling at high speeds broke through the atmosphere and created a brief but bright fireball in the sky just before 8:15 p.m. ET on Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was about a minute into [my recording], and I started to notice something coming from the sky,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI just panned over in time to see that it was coming out of the top right corner of my screen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grenier was among many residents in the region and across several U.S. states like Michigan and Ohio who reported witnessing the event.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But she was one of only a few who actually caught it on camera, garnering thousands of views for the unintentional capture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just started freaking out. I was so shocked and amazed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other videos of the meteor made its way to social media over the weekend, including from Nathan Polaski.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The security camera at his family\u2019s cottage in Posen, Michigan., roughly two hours south of the Sault, caught a clear shot of the event.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents were there, I was [away] but I read the news and checked the camera recordings and found it,\u201d he said. \u201cMy parents heard and saw nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looks like it captured the meteor breaking up into two big parts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Meteorites landed in the northeast region<\/p>\n

Phil McCausland, a planetary scientist and member of Western University\u2019s Media Physics Group, says fragments from the object \u2014 known as meteorites \u2014 landed on Cockburn Island.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The island is a mostly uninhabited land mass in Lake Huron\u2019s north channel between Manitoulin Island and Drummond Island.<\/p>\n

But some people camp on the island in the summers, which McCausland said increases the chances of the fragments being located.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMeteorites in Canada found on private land belong to the landowner,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they find something, we\u2019ll negotiate with them about loaning the meteorites to do scientific studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PhotoMeteorites that landed on Cockburn Island are believed to look similar to the Grimsby, Ont., meteorites that fell in 2009 and are pictured here. (Western University)<\/p>\n

McCausland estimates the meteor was travelling as fast as 28 kilometres per second when it entered the atmosphere last Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He said the object could have weighed hundreds of kilograms before breaking apart into several dozen, tinier fragments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While events like this happen many times each year around the world, McCausland said last week\u2019s occurrence has some unique qualities.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s more remarkable because it was a bigger fireball,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s unusual to see them this bright, and bright enough that it would be seen in broad daylight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor anyone who saw this event, you can count yourself as extremely lucky.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cockburn Island is a heavily wooded land mass in Lake Huron. (Supplied\/natureconservancy.ca)<\/p>\n

McCausland said his team will not be making the trip to search for the meteorites as there are likely too few fragments in an already heavily wooded area.<\/p>\n

But he does have tips for residents with ties to the island who may want to do a search of their own.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re freshly fallen, so they\u2019ll look out of place,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ll be sitting on top of vegetation and won\u2019t look like they\u2019re part of the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving just come through the atmosphere, they’ll have a black outer fusion crust on them, which is melted rock, but only about a millimetre thick. On the inside, very likely it\u2019s a stony type of meteorite \u2014 gray, maybe slightly brownish with a stony-looking interior.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he anticipates most of the meteorites won\u2019t be found, McCausland encourages searchers to get in contact with Western University if they believe they\u2019ve found a fragment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 4 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":757224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-757223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/757224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}