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Last night (this morning?) around 3:30am, I was woken up by this insane thunder-like noise. Only it didn’t sound like thunder at all… it sounded like an explosion. It lasted long enough to have me frozen to my bed, looking around. I had vague dreamy memories of a bright flash and the sense that the noise had been happening for a while…

My roommates and I all got up because we all were really freaked out. Marci said she looked out the window and had seen that it was weird and foggy, which is odd for a lightning storm, and she said that when she openned the window, the sustained sound of the “thunder” was unbearable and hurt her ears. She had to cover them. She also said that the wind suddenly picked up intense speed.

Immediately after the noise, the rain came down in absolute buckets! I’ve never seen a downpour that intense before, and I used to live in Hawaii where sometimes you had to pull off the side of the road because you couldn’t see anything in front of the windshield. This was insane heavy rain.

I was totally scared, and still half asleep. My other roomie Cody made some joke about aliens and I actually screamed out loud. It was pretty stupid.

Anyway, when I’d recovered some of my sanity, and after Cody said that he’d seen two bright flashes a few minutes apart just before the explosion noise, I started thinking about what it could be.

I checked online at Lj_Oregonstate to see if anyone else saw it in other parts of corvallis, and yes! People saw it and heard it all over town. I’m on the south end of campus, and people saw and heard the same intense flashes and explosion sounds as far away as Shari’s about a 5 minute drive away and as far north as Witham Hill! This wasn’t fucking lightning. The guy at Shari’s said that it seemed like a flash-bulb went off, and shari’s is a well-lighted family restaurant, which would mean it was more intensely bright than a regular lightning strike… especially since it woke people up all over town.

Anyway, so I came up with this theory: What if it was a mid-air meteor burst? I started googling.

Stories like this one from Komo News describes similar events that were suspected meteor explosions in 2003 in the Seattle area. Then there’s this one from Alaska in 2000 and this one in New Zealand from ‘99 .

none of these describe the intense rain that we saw though… the rain really was just what made me think that this might be a meteor explosion because of the “red rain” phenomenon that some people think is triggered by exploding meteors (like this one in India where they found the red rain was a large concentration of fungal spores in 2001) and because the X-Files used to have episodes where colored rain was explained by meteor activity rather than alien activity (and Mulder was never completely convinced of course). It shows that my leap to a “meteor explosion” is based on pop-culture myths about unknown phenomenon (our first reaction was ALIENS!! afterall), but still… could end up being the truth, right?

Anyway, I have no idea how completely crazy any of this is. I just think it would be exciting to discover that it really was a mid-air meteor explosion or something cool like that. It totally wasn’t lightning. no fucking way. I hope something gets revealed about this.