Doug Olson was folding laundry in his Mill Woods home last fall when he heard a loud thud on the roof. He didn’t think much of it at the time, but while cleaning out his rain gutters in the spring, he found a small black rock.
He took it to meteorite expert Chris Herd in the U of A’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who confirmed the rock was indeed from outer space — the first witnessed fall of a meteorite in Alberta since 1977 and one of only 18 ever found in the province.
The “Menisa” now forms part of the University of Alberta Meteorite Collection, the largest of any Canadian university, with more than 2,000 specimens.