Lexington man’s doorbell camera picks up blazing meteor flying over neighborhood
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it ... an alien?
Nope, it was a meteor. And luckily, Lexington resident Jamie Dalton caught it all on video.
On Sunday, Oct. 10, Dalton stepped out his front door to grab an iPad from his truck but froze in amazement just as a blazing meteor flew by the Crescent Ridge subdivision near the Peachtree Rock preserve in Lexington.
His motion triggered his doorbell camera to start recording, and it captured the fireball passing by. His experience was first reported by local CBS affiliate WLTX.
“I wasn’t sure exactly what it was at first because of how big it was,” said Dalton, 33. “I thought it was maybe an airplane or something coming out of the sky. It was weird. It just kind of exploded, then trickled off.”
The infrared camera was unable to pick up the bright colors of the glowing rock, but Dalton said “it had a lot of different colors to it” and was mainly green.
Dalton quickly ran back inside to tell his wife, Megan, what he had just seen, then grabbed his phone to see if his doorbell camera picked up the footage.
Seeing shooting stars in the neighborhood is actually quite common, Dalton said, but never has he witnessed anything that large in the sky before.
“It illuminated the houses pretty good,” he said. “It was coming down, and it was big. It wasn’t just streaking across the sky.”
After the sighting, he went online to see if anyone else had witnessed the once-in-a-lifetime experience, even searching for news articles and visiting the American Meteor Society’s website to view other people’s footage of the fireball.
“Nobody really had anything that was as clear as mine, except for maybe one other person,” he said.
The meteor was also spotted and landed in Georgia, according to NASA Meteor Watch.
Dalton said he has the video stored on his cellphone and plans show it to his baby boy when he gets older.