California Man Claims Meteorite Burned Down His House

A man whose rural home in northern California was burned down has said that the fire was caused by a meteorite hitting the house.

Dustin Procita, who owns the property in Penn Valley, evacuated his home at around 7 p.m. local time on November 4 when he noticed the fire, but one of his dogs and three of his wife's pet rabbits were lost in the blaze.

"I heard a big bang," he told KCRA. "I started to smell smoke. I went onto my porch, and it was completely engulfed in flames."

Procita says that the fire was started by the meteorite that fell to Earth around the same time. The fireball was witnessed by many locals and captured on a variety of security and dashboard cameras all the way from Gustine, California, to Grants Pass, Oregon, according to SFGATE.

Meteorite experts are skeptical about this explanation for the fire, as meteorites that hit the ground are not as blazing hot as we might assume.

Jonti Horner, an astrophysics professor at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, told Newsweek: "Meteorites that make it to the ground at subsonic speeds aren't actually hot when they reach the ground. That's one of the big myths people hold dear about astronomy that just aren't true.

"A meteorite like that coming through the atmosphere is a little bit like what you get when you order some deep-fried ice-cream. You have a lump of rock or metal that is moving through space and has been in space for billions of years. So it will be chilled through to its very center—nice and cold," Horner said.

"As it comes into Earth's atmosphere at high speed (above 12 kilometers [7.5 miles] per second), it pushes the air in front of it, causing that air to become superheated (kind of like a shockwave), which in turn causes the surface of the rock to 'ablate'. Basically, the very surface layer gets super-heated, and vaporised," he added.

"As the thing continues to push through the atmosphere, it gets whittled away from the outside in by this ablation process—until friction with the atmosphere slows it to subsonic speeds," said Horner.

"At that point, you essentially have a rock with a very thin super-heated layer (like the skin of an apple), which then takes tens of seconds or a few minutes to fall the rest of the way to Earth. The interior will still be bitterly cold—but that fall will be plenty of time for the surface to cool off."

When the rock hits the ground, Horner said, it is traveling at terminal velocity, and would be cold to the touch, and rather than glowing hot. It would have water condensed on it, like a box of ice cream, or even frost.

"I'm absolutely certain that this man's house wasn't set on fire by the meteorite—at least, not by the impact of a space rock itself," Horner said. "The only way that I could see it working is if the meteorite came through a window and knocked over a stove with an exposed flame—in the same way that some houses have caught fire in earthquakes in the past, as a result of stoves getting knocked over."

Clayton Thomas, a captain of the Penn Valley Fire Protection District, told SFGATE that he had seen a video recorded by an individual who filmed the meteorite falling as they drove. "When they tried to figure out where it landed, they pulled up to the building that was on fire," he said.

"I see... that people 'saw where the meteor landed and ran to it.' Sadly not possible," Jim Rowe, co-founder of both Fireballs Aotearoa and the UK Fireball Alliance, told Newsweek.

"Meteorites stop glowing 15 to 30 kilometers [9.5 to 18.5 miles] up. But seeing them 'hit the ground' is a really common illusion. The brain is hardwired to think that a fast object must be nearby."

Rowe added: "For decades, people have reported that a meteor fell behind the next hedge, where what they actually saw was 300 kilometers [186 miles] away, so a meteor disappearing behind the horizon but still 20 kilometers [12.5 miles] above the ground, rather than a meteor landing 300 meters [985 feet] away behind a hedge."

Fire captain Thomas said that, while there were no objects "consistent with a meteorite at the scene," the cause of the fire is still under investigation, with other factors such as electric problems or issues with gas service needing to be ruled out.

"Overall? Impossible nonsense," Rowe said. "Even if people did see a fireball, it's impossible to chase one down and go to where it seems to have fallen.

"And if one did fall? Its temperature may have been sub-zero, and it certainly wouldn't have set anything alight. And if it did set anything alight, it would still be there in the ashes for everyone to see because it's a rock, and rocks always survive house fires. But there's no rock."

If a much-larger rock had collided with Earth, there may indeed have been a fire, but it would have created a much-larger blaze than the one that occurred at the house.

Annemarie E. Pickersgill, a meteorite-impact scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, told Newsweek: "When the original asteroid is very big, more than 50 to 100 meters [164 to 328 feet], it is likely to keep most of its speed and survive passage through the atmosphere.

"If the fireball discussed in this article was that energetic, and did indeed hit that house, the house and surroundings would be completely destroyed, not just burnt down, and anyone in the house would not survive."

Alexander Nemchin, a space rock scientist at Curtin University, Australia, agreed. "They can probably cause fires if they are large enough not to be slowed down by the atmosphere. But such pieces would also leave a hole in the ground where you would not be able to find the house or what is left of it," he told Newsweek.

Regardless of the cause of the fire, Dustin Procita and his wife, Jeanette, lost their home and their belongings and pets, and they did not have home insurance. A GoFundMe has been set up to help them find a new home.