New Jersey's 'meteor mystery'

(Image credit: YouTube)

last updated 8 January 2015

The video: A New Jersey family told police recently that a mysterious crater had appeared in their lawn — several feet across and about 18 inches deep, roughly the size of a round coffee table. (Watch a news report below.) The homeowner, identified as "Sue," assumed something had blown out of the ground (dirt and rocks were scattered across a 100-foot area), but her son had a different take: "Something clearly came out of the sky," he said. While a state police bomb squad found no evidence of an explosion, Jerry Vinski, director of a nearby planetarium said the hole appears to have been made by something slamming into the ground. Conspicuously absent: Any evidence of a sizeable space rock to support the meteor theory. Vinski's expert opinion: "It's just really, really weird."

The reaction: The most awe-inspiring thing about this mystery was not the "spontaneous divot" in the lawn, says Cyriaque Lamar at i09. It was the local newscasters, jaws agape, "spinning dark, eldritch dreams of meteorites and UFOs." Indeed, says Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever. "Apparently, the hole was most likely caused by one of the following: 1. A meteor; 2. An alien; 3. An alien riding a meteor re-enacting Dr. Strangelove; 4. The X-Files." Don't ignore the obvious, says Chris Arrant at Comic Book Resources. "What if it was a spaceship — say, from Krypton?" Yes, folks. There might be a real-life Superman in our midst. Watch a TV news crew's report on New Jersey's "meteor mystery":