GREAT BALLS O’ FIRE!
Meteor trashes house and kills farmer’s dog
UNLUCKY Dustin Procita beat astronomical odds — losing his dog and his rural California farmhouse — in a four trillionto-one accident when a flaming meteor from outer space blew the property to smithereens!
Dustin says he and wife Jeanette were in their Nevada County home at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 4 when they were rocked by a thunderous sound.
“I heard a big bang,” he says. “I started to smell smoke. I went onto my porch and it was completely engulfed in flames.
“I did not see what it was, but from everybody I talked to, it was a flaming ball falling
from the sky.” A neighbor’s doorbell camera caught the fiery ball flash in the sky and then shoot toward Earth. Others captured the flaming object’s fall on cameras including a driver on a Northern California highway. Procita says one video shows “a flaming basketball coming out of the sky. Definitely feel very lucky that it was 30 feet away from me and not five.”
Sadly, his pooch, Tug, was trapped inside the house and died.
Fire Capt. Josh Miller says his department was swamped by reports about the fireball.
“I had one individual tell me about it and at first I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll put that in the back of my mind,’ ” he says. “But then more people — two, three or four more — started coming in and talking about it.”
Fire Capt. Clayton Thomas says the incident — which is
more unlikely than winning the 292.2 million-to-one Powerball — is being investigated. NASA and the Air Force will be contacted.
“I’ve been an investigator for 12 years and in the fire service for 25. I’ve never been to a fire that was caused by a meteor,” Thomas says.
“But at this point, because our investigation isn’t done, I can’t rule that out as a possibility.”