Watch out! Meteor strikes Ohio man's car

By SANDY COLLINS

and RICHARD WILSON

Dayton Daily News

DAYTON

A Kettering man believes a meteorite hit his car early Sunday morning.

Joe Massa said he was driving home in the center lane on northbound Interstate 75 when his Buick was struck by something around 2 a.m.

Out of the corner of his eye, he said, “I could see something. It was a light, shadow, a beam of light, small. Within a split second, something hit me, the front of the car was pushed over into the far left lane.”

Massa said there was a big flash when it hit.

“It was like a silent pop,” Massa said, “then there was pressure in the car. I could feel pressure in my ears, like the air had changed in the car, in a split second.”

Massa, who manages restaurants in the Cincinnati area, said he pulled over immediately to see if he hit a deer, a dog, or something else. He found nothing, except the damages to the right-front bumper.

Massa said he got off at the Tylersville Road exit in Butler County and drove to a gas station where he met with a West Chester police officer and a trooper with the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

The Dayton Daily News continues to work to verify Massa’s story with those agencies.

Massa said the dent in his car’s bumper showed a downward motion, as if something fell from the sky and struck it.

“What are the chances of this happening?” he said. “The West Chester police officer told me it’s 1 in 275 million!”

Massa said he was unaware of the meteor shower that was expected over the weekend as the tail of a comet, discovered in 2004, entered the earth’s atmosphere.

The showers are called the Camelopardalids and are caused by dust ejected from the comet 209P/LINEAR more than a century ago. No one has seen them before.

According to NASA, comet 209P/LINEAR was discovered in 2004. The space agency describes it as a “relatively dim comet that dips inside the orbit of Earth once every five years as it loops around the sun.”

NASA says people outside during peak viewing hours of 2 to 4 a.m. Saturday might see more than 200 meteors per hour. Experts say the display could rival the well-known Perseids of August.

News Center 7’s Rich Wirdzek said incidents like this happen occasionally. He said it’s possible for a meteorite to make it through the atmosphere and crash onto the earth, or in this case a Buick.