A meteor fireball explosion lit up the night sky—and the videos are so cool

Winter in Michigan isn’t what you’d call “welcoming.” It’s cold, snowy and you pretty much don’t want to leave your house most days. And that means it can also get a little boring, leaving Michiganders craving a little excitement.

Well, that wish was granted when a rumbling boom and a flash of light lit up the night sky at around 8:10 p.m. on Jan. 16. Thousands of tweets about and videos of the event began flooding social media, with people offering up possible explanations for the spectacle—including everything from thunder and lightning (which was also my guess when it lit up my own living room) to a missile from North Korea and even, of course, aliens.

via GIPHY

In reality, the light show was not a UFO. But it was still pretty exciting: The National Weather Service has since confirmed it was actually a meteor. No “War of the World” stuff or government conspiracy, just your standard, you know, fireball falling from the sky!

Check out some pretty cool footage of the meteor here:

Lighting up the skies in the southeast portion of the state, the meteor also caused a magnitude 2.0 earthquake about 40 miles from Detroit.

Or this video from Ypsilanti:

The meteor was even captured on a dash cam video and shared by AccuWeather Astronomy:

Lastly, check out this video, which shows just how fast and bright the explosion was:

After thousands of Tweets and posts, the Department of Homeland Security took to Twitter to tell residents there was no need to call 911, saying it was a “natural meteor fireball”.

“It was definitely a meteor,” Bill Cooke, lead for NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, told The Washington Post.

Cooke said the fireball was caused by a small asteroid, moving at 28,000 mph. When it entered the atmosphere, it heated up and began to melt away, leading to the bright light.