Treasure hunters swarm Macomb County for Michigan Meteorite

MACOMB COUNTY, Mich. (WJBK) - The Michigan Meteor lit up our phone lines and emails Tuesday night and hasn't stopped on social media. 

The roughly two-yard wide meteor was traveling around 28,000 MPH when it hit the atmosphere over Detroit and likely broke into smaller pieces, causing the multiple booms everyone reported for miles.

Now, almost 24 hours later, some are hoping the flying object can become a jackpot, including Victor Espinoza who admits to not being a treasure hunter.

"Not normally, but today I am," he said. "I'm a space enthusiast, I love everything about it. Just the idea of it, within in my lifetime something lands pretty much in my backyard, I pretty much had to go for it."

The curious are canvassing fields at 26 Mile and Card Road in Macomb after scientists at Cranbrook speculated that's where debris could be.

"One way to estimate where it fell is by looking at the earthquake epicenter, which is at 26 Mile and Card," said John Zawiskie, geologist Cranbrook Institute of Science.

MORE COVERAGE:
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How much a piece of Michigan meteorite could be worth and how to identify it against a rock
Fire in the sky: Meteor soars over Michigan causing massive tremor
Suspected meteor flashes across southeast Michigan

Cue the hunters.

"They gave kind of the general area of an impact zone so I was like, let's go look," Bethany Williams said.

She and her sister Anna are rock collectors and say this would be their greatest find yet.

"We just thought hey this is a really cool rock - kind of like a once in a lifetime thing to find and add to our collection," Anna said.

Whether it's valuable or not, the sisters say if they found part of it, they'd keep it.

But not everyone wants a souvenir. Meteorites can be worth thousands of dollars and Charles Gray is looking for his jackpot.

"I would sell it," he said. "I would sell it on Amazon for like $1,500. We've been looking out toward north and 26 Mile too so nothing yet. I'm going to keep looking."

But they'll have to look somewhere else. The property owner near the area was asking people to leave.

"I don't know what they're looking for but this is private property - please get off," he said.

Macomb County Sheriff Lt. Steve Briney says this is when treasure hunting becomes trespassing.

"The property owner would like to have the people stay off of the property - he hasn't seen anything back there and I haven't heard anything of that," Briney said.

Treasure hunters could be looking in the wrong spot! NASA says you may have better luck in Hamburg Township where Doppler radar detected material falling from the sky.

Either way, happy hunting.