By Tim Binnall
A mysterious fire destroyed a house in California over the weekend and the homeowner as well as several area residents believe that the blaze was caused by a rather unusual suspect: a meteorite. According to a local media report, the peculiar incident occurred on Friday evening as farmer Dustin Procita settled in for the night after feeding his cows. The moment of peace was pierced when something suddenly struck his house. "I heard a big bang," he recalled to an area TV station, "I started to smell smoke. I went onto my porch and it was completely engulfed in flames."
The seemingly spontaneous inferno spread quickly throughout the house and Procita was only able to escape the fiery scene with one of his beloved dogs, losing the other to the blaze. While multiple area fire departments descended upon the scene to put down the sizeable fire, it took them several hours to extinguish the flames and the man's home was ultimately destroyed by the unfortunate event. Curiously, as the inferno was raging, multiple people from the community showed up at the fire and wondered if it could have been caused by a meteor that they had just seen.
"I had one individual tell me about it first and I put it in the back of my mind," said Penn Valley Fire Department Captain Josh Miller, "but then more people — 2, 3, 4 — started coming in and talking about it." Indeed, a fiery object descending from the sky was captured on film by multiple home security systems in the area. As such, its entirely possible that the anomaly, which some described as akin to a flaming basketball, could have been behind the boom that Procita heard as well as the fire that erupted shortly thereafter. For his part, the homeowner had something of a positive outlook on his extraordinary bad luck, musing that "they said it's a one in four trillion chance so I guess I might be buying a lottery ticket today."