Outdoor Camera Captures Meteor Over Chicagoland Area

Attention star-gazers of anyone else who grooves on taking a gander at an undeniable heavenly body—and we’re not talking about the usual stars and moon and other atmospheric phenomenon that earn slots on everyone’s galactic hit parade several nights a week. No, we’re talking about a bona fide cosmic phenomenon—and it’s the centerpiece of a video that you want to watch right now!Show more

Taken from a security camera over the Chicagoland area at 11:44 PM central standard time on Friday May 10, 2019, one can clearly see that it is a glorious shot of a brightly glowing green meteor streaking across the nighttime sky. Proud and fierce, and so well-defined and clear that there’s no mistaking what it could possibly be, the appearance of the meteor immediately calls to mind the opening pages of H.G. Welles’s famed science fiction novel War of the Worlds (not to mention its subsequent film, TV and radio adaptations), which offers a rich description of “meteors” descending into the Earth’s atmosphere and then shooting across the sky, ultimately landing on Terra Firma in a prelude to a wantonly destructive alien invasion.

But while the War of the Worlds began with a glowing video touching down in the farmlands of Southern New Jersey, this video captures the otherworldly “traveler” making its way across the suburbs of metropolitan area of Chicago. While pictured in the not-so-distant horizon, the meteor offers a distinct juxtaposition to the green lawns, humble homes, leaf-topped trees, plated windows and halogen-lit driveways of the Chicago suburbs. It’s a quietly and hypnotically powerful image, to be sure, in that it surely and provocatively humbles anyone who sees it.

The scope, scale and speed of the meteor has the power to reduce its audiences to the simplest of observers of the greater glories of the universe. For even as the inhabitants of Earth have “conquered” the cosmos with some six decades of satellite launches, moon explorations of long-distance probes, it is the arrival of an intergalactic visitor that reveals our race’s own limitation as we slowly take our first steps—indeed, baby steps—out into the cosmic void.

Let us all be humbled by the arrival of this extraterrestrials made of stone! And let us never forget that we are only tenants on this world that has been receiving visitors from the skies for countless centuries before we even pondered signing our planetary lease!