Lights, Booms and Rumbles Over West Michigan But Was it a Meteor?

Late last week several people in West Michigan saw lights, heard loud booms, and long rumbles but was it the Perseid meteor shower or was it something else?

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Perseid Meteor Shower

If you like seeing things in the sky, the Perseid meteor shower is one you can rely on because it happens every year from mid-July to late August. It's one of the best times to see what many call a shooting star which is a meteor. On a good clear night, you may get lucky and see several meteors or sometimes many at once.

I saw on Saturday night it was clear and knew the peak of the Perseid was going to happen around 4 am on Sunday so I set my alarm only to wake up to clouds and couldn't see a star let alone a meteor. A few days before that, there were several in West Michigan that saw something but what is crazy was they heard something too.

It Wasn't the Perseid But Something Was Up There and It Made a Loud Boom

There were hundreds of people who reported hearing a loud boom and rumble that lasted well over a minute Thursday around 10:30 pm. Residents from Holland to northern Kent County claimed to have heard the sounds. It was a clear night so that rules out thunder from a storm and it wasn't a meteor from the Perseid since those vaporize before getting into a lower atmosphere there you cannot hear them.

There was a video of something moving through the sky and one home's Ring camera even caught audio with the rumbles people were reporting.

According to FOX 17, Robert Lunsford who is with the American Meteor Society said, You can hear meteors if they're made out of stone, and come from asteroids, and they can actually produce a sonic boom."

For those hoping what was seen and heard late last week over West Michigan was a spacecraft, better luck next time. If you would like to see a video that was captured of the object and hear the rumbling sounds caught by a Ring camera of a home, click here.