Local woman sees light in sky, too

An unexplained light in the sky seen by some residents in the Thunder Bay area back on Saturday, March 8, as reported in the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, also was seen by local resident Judy Carmody.
“It was just a few minutes before 6 [p.m.],” she noted Friday. “I was at the corner by Canadian Tire and I saw it out of the right side of the windshield, at eye level.
“I kept on driving and was able to see it until it went [north] over the roof of the Red Dog Inn,” she added.
Carmody, who admitted she’s still amazed by the sight, said the object was the size of a “large dinner plate, with about a three-foot tail.”
“It was a bright, bright yellow, not orange like some other people have described it,” she remarked.
But as to what the object might have been, Carmody is at a loss. “It was moving extremely fast,” she said, ruling out the theory it may have been an airplane.
“It was beautiful. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen,” Carmody added. “Up the lake, you see falling stars and things like that. But in the daylight. . . .”
As reported in the Tuesday, March 11 edition of the Chronicle-Journal, Stephen Kissin—a geology professor at Lakehead University and member of the meteorites and impacts advisory committee to the Canadian Space Agency—speculated the object may have been a meteor.
He said reports of a ball of flame with a long, smoky trail are consistent with the many meteors that fall to Earth each year.
Meteors usually travel between 20-80 km per second.
The sighting indicates the meteor was a small one, Kissin added, since a very large one weighing many tonnes wouldn’t have been slowed by the atmosphere and would have crashed to Earth in a matter of a few seconds.
And the “tail” would be a trail of dust, which could remain visible for about an hour, he said.
In related news, a Crozier man said he saw a different object in the sky around 8 p.m. this past Sunday evening.
“It was a streak of red, quite thick,” Lloyd Perry said yesterday afternoon, recounting his sighting while travelling south on Highway 611 North.
“It was coming from the west, going east over Minnesota. It was going downwards,” he added. “It had a real deep colour, a flame that was deep. It showed up real good.
“I was trying to keep track of it, then a pulp truck went by and I lost track.”
Like Carmody, Perry couldn’t speculate on what the object was. More than anything, he contacted the Times to see if anyone else had seen it.
“I couldn’t see any piece of machinery in front of it. I don’t know,” he remarked.
The Times has not received any similar reports from local residents regarding either sighting.