Eyewitnesses across West Michigan see fireball in the sky

WEST MICHIGAN (NEWSCHANNEL 3) - Dozens of people say they saw the meteor fly through the sky Sunday.

Experts are estimating it was somewhere between the size of a softball or a basketball. To put that in perspective a shooting star is usually as small as a grain of sand.

Whatever the size, it caused a lot of commotion. Even 911 dispatchers were busy taking calls.

At the Kalamazoo Valley Museum's planetarium it can be night no matter what time of day. But Sunday you had to be in the right place at the right time to see what everyone's talking about.

For Robb Perrin, he was chopping wood in his back yard. "It was so intense you could actually see the blue light inside of it," said Perrin. "I'm on my way out to pick it up and maybe out 40 feet before it hits the ground it just turns into white dust. It just exploded and i was just immensely disappointed, I thought I was going to have a meteor."

So did many others around West Michigan.

Perrin may have just seen a particle of the meteor because Eric Scheurer thinks it probably traveled a little more before it burned up. "It was probably moving so fast it would have been across the borderline. More likely over Ohio than Indiana," said Scheurer.

It's not likely that we'll find pieces of this meteor in West Michigan. But that's not going to stop some from heading out.