By Tim Binnall
A Canadian homeowner found himself with something of a strange mystery on his hands when a rock plummeted from the sky and landed in his pool. The weird incident reportedly occurred on Monday morning at Justin Broad's residence in the community of Delta, British Columbia. While standing in his backyard, the man saw what he likened to a "black lightning bolt" strike his pool and cause an enormous splash. Understandably surprised by what had just happened, he was all the more bewildered when he looked into the water and saw a strange rock that had begun to disintegrate.
Suspecting that the object could be a "little meteor sample," Broad and his wife had the water drained from the pool so that they could get their hands on the peculiar object. By the time they retrieved the oddity, however, it had largely turned to mud. While Broad mused that the curious material might be "a one-in-a-million find," upon seeing photos of what was recovered from the pool, the University of Calgary's Alan Hildebrand seemingly threw cold water on his meteor hypothesis.
The planetary scientist explained that such an object from space would have almost certainly remained solid despite sitting in the pool water and, if it did disintegrate, "it’d be a different color," specifically black or dark grey. Given that the material was brown, Hildebrand concluded that it was simply "mud from this planet." The scientist's assessment now leaves Broad to wonder how the odd rock wound up crashing into his pool in the first place as well as "how it turned from a solid into a sediment" in seconds.