After discovering a meteorite in the backyard of his home near Hartford Road in June of 2017, a Mount Laurel resident is now sharing his experience with The Sun.
Kenneth Cunningham Jr., a township resident for more than 30 years, believes the meteorite struck a tree on his property at night seven years ago.
“I was home when it hit,” he recalled. “I thought it was a storm, like lightning or something. I was sleeping and woke up because everything lit up in a flash outside my bedroom window. I thought it was just lightning.
“Then I heard a crackling sound coming from over my house, which I thought was thunder,” Cunningham added. “Then there was a big bang at the end, the loudest sound I’ve heard in my life. I swore my whole house shook (from it).”
Cunningham immediately went to his window expecting to see damage outside, but ultimately everything appeared normal, so he went back to sleep assuming it was noise from a storm. The next day, Cunningham got a text saying a friend had witnessed what they perceived as a meteor flying over Cunningham’s home before disappearing into a wooded area.
“I didn’t think nothing of (the text),” Cunningham acknowledged. “I was still going with the storm story.”
Cunningham attributed a large crater on a tree in his yard to a lightning strike. He later took notice of what looked like a small rock poking through the grass on his property, almost 18 feet away from the damaged tree.
“It was a little piece of a rock that kept showing more and more over time,” Cunningham noted. “As time went on, one day I just decided to dig the rock up. I tried pulling it at first thinking it was … small. I then felt that the rock was bigger than I thought. I remember thinking ‘Wow this rock’s heavy.'”
Cunningham then laid the rock on an old pool ladder near the tree. He discovered that a lightning strike causes a tree to splint and leave black burn marks on the its bark, none of which was true of his tree.
“I thought, ‘Oh lightning didn’t hit that (tree),'” Cunningham recalled. “I started looking at the crater on the tree and I realized the way the rock was facing (on the pool ladder) was the shape that was on the tree. Then everything clicked for me.”
Cunningham then found reports online of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in Mount Laurel on the same date in 2017 he believed the meteorite struck.
“The report said a meteorite came down,” he remembered, “and it was bright. It said there was no tail and they lost sight of it when it went over the trees.”
Cunningham has since spoken with a NASA representative and is going through the process of getting confirmation of the meteorite. It is about 15 inches long, 11 inches wide and 5 inches tall and weighs 27 pounds.
