PROPHESY DEBUNKED
Meteors are pretty common, explains astronomer
“I had a dream that a meteor was coming to the Great Lakes. And it was gonna hit Michigan. But it wasn’t nothing to cause destruction. It was a symbol. A star, if you will, of an anointing, of a power, that is so strong, that it would hit the Great Lakes, and it would cause Ohio and Canada to feel the impact of it.”
So said Rick Satterfield, pastor of I Am Church in South Rockwood, Mich., in a sermon recorded on video on Dec. 31.
A little more than two weeks later, on the night of Jan. 16, a meteor would indeed cause a stir across the Great Lakes region, with a fireball in the sky visible across six U.S. states plus Windsor-Essex, and a sonic boom that registered as a lowmagnitude seismic event. No one was hurt. Did the pastor accurately predict a celestial event? Was the meteor — as he told Detroit television and newspaper reporters — the fulfilment of a prophecy?
Well, University of Windsor learning specialist and astronomy instructor Mark Lubrick would just like to point out that meteors aren’t actually rare events.
According to Cornell University’s astronomy department, every million square kilometres of the Earth’s surface receives 36 to 166 meteors bigger than 10 grams, every year.
When you consider the planet’s total surface area of about 510 million square kilometres, that works out to thousands of meteors hitting the Earth’s atmosphere annually.
“The thing is, they are fairly common occurrences,” Lubrick said. “Not all of them are going to be as dramatic as this one (on Jan. 16). Obviously, this one was more substantial .... But they do occur pretty regularly.”
“In a way, it’s a fairly safe bet to say that a meteor will occur,” Lubrick added. “They’re basically dust and rocks coming into the atmosphere. We know they’re going to occur.”
Meanwhile, at I Am Church — described as a non-denominational Christian church — Satterfield stood by his belief that “the spirit of the Lord” told him of the meteor, which was a sign of a “new release” and “great revival” of God across the Midwest and around the world.
“I had a prophetic utterance. It came upon me. The spirit of the Lord spoke to my heart,” the pastor, 59, said Friday.
Satterfield said he has had other visions from God in the past, such as the election of Donald Trump.
“The spirit of the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Donald Trump will be the next president. And he will restore the White House, he will restore the school house, and he will restore my house,’” Satterfield said. “God is using him and has anointed him to do whatever it is that he has been called to do.”
There have been other mutterings of what the meteor means. A Facebook post by a Michigan woman named Antwaneshe Randle ranted: “They blocking ppl from posting this but Taylor Michigan near Detroit just got hit with a missile.”
“They tryna cover up and keep us calm by telling us it was just a metoroid. Stay woke ppl.”
The post included images of a building on fire and a streak of light from the sky.
At press time, the post had been shared more than 114,000 times.
Taylor fire department officials said a garage fire did take place on the night of Jan. 16, but the incident had no connection with the meteor. A pickup truck being repaired caught fire due to its engine leaking fuel and oil.
According to NASA, the meteor was about six feet in diameter when it exploded about 20 miles above the Earth. Any meteor matter that reached the ground was in fragments.
Pebble-sized meteorite pieces were recovered from Howell, Mich., and displayed at a press conference at the Longway Planetarium in Flint on Friday.
Back at the University of Windsor, Lubrick said he hopes the meteor event inspires a greater appreciation of the science of astronomy.
“Hopefully people weren’t too scared by it. It just shows how amazing a piece of rock coming into our atmosphere can truly be. That’s really all it was — a desk-sized rock. Yet it made a spectacular event for all of us.”
The spirit of the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Donald Trump will be the next president.