Cape York may have been the latest location of a meteor air burst, a phenomenon that lit up the sky and caused an airborne aftershock that rattled buildings across the Peninsula.

Residents in Weipa, on Cape York cattle stations and on the east coast at Portland Roads have all reported seeing the sky light up in a turquoise-like colour at 5.50am on Friday.

CCTV footage from a Weipa yard at 5.50am on Friday when the sky is dark and The same spot a second later as the sky lights up in a turquoise colour. Photos courtesy Cape York Weekly.

Some of the same people then reported hearing a big boom a few minutes later.

The incident put the region’s rumour mill into overdrive and a number of theories were raised, including the prospects of an air force exercise at RAAF Base Scherger, or perhaps an extraterrestrial invasion.

Graham Woods at Piccaninny Plains was feeding the dogs when the boom came.

“It was like a massive explosion,” he said on Friday.

“We get plenty of thunder up here and it was nothing like I’ve ever heard.

“The building was shaking and the windows were vibrating.

“It just went on, maybe for a good 30 seconds it echoed.”

His partner Sally Gray saw a flash in the sky a few minutes prior but they didn’t put two and two together at the time.

“At the time I thought it had to be a big thunder clap because it felt like it came from the air, not the ground,” Graham said.

“But there were no clouds around and I got on the Bureau of Meteorology site and there was no weather around us.

“It felt like it was right beside you, so I just don’t think it was thunder. Maybe the aliens are coming!”

The most likely explanation, at least according to experts, was that Cape York experienced a meteor air burst.

In simple terms, it is an air burst resulting from a meteor exploding mid-flight as it encounters the thicker part of the atmosphere. These types of meteors are also known as fireballs or bolides.

Dr Hadrien Devillepoix from Curtin University has been studying meteorites in outback Australia and viewed some of the CCTV footage supplied by Cape York Weekly.

He said it was impossible to be certain, but believed it was likely that the flash of light was from a large bolide and the noise that followed minutes later was the sonic boom from the explosion in the atmosphere.

“If people don’t believe it was thunder (I bet they are very used to what thunder sounds like up there), then it’s quite possible it was a large bolide that hit in the area,” he said.

“It’s hard to say without more details, or people directly witnessing the fireball.

“Sometimes the sonic boom from a bolide only reaches the ground several minutes after the light.”

Meteor air bursts are not rare, but aren’t common in Australia.

Around 30 to 40 are reported globally each year.

Jonti Horner is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland and said it reminded him of an incident in Russia in 2013.

“Basically a big rock from space hit the earth’s atmosphere, detonated 20km to 30km up and that was a big enough explosion to injure 1500 people and damage 7000 buildings,” he told ABC Queensland.

“There are a lot of similarities; there was this spectacular flash in the night sky and then a few minutes later there was a boom that kept going on.

“What happened in Cape York was on a smaller scale.

“All the signs point to me that it may have been an air burst event.”

This article appeared in Cape York Weekly, 8 February 2022.