Officer Jim Dexter of the Lisle Police Department was making his routine patrols early Monday morning when he suddenly saw a green light streaking across the sky at 1:25 a.m.  

“I was unsure of what exactly had just happened,” said Dexter in a statement Monday.

Atmospheric activity isn’t what the night shift officer usually sees. According to Lisle Deputy Chief of Police Ron Wilke, Dexter wasn’t sure if it was fire, or what else the object could be, but reacted quickly when he saw it.

“[He] stopped to see some parked cars and saw the bolt of light and looked up in the sky and activated his dash cam,” said Wilke.

The green light in the sky Dexter caught on his dash camera turned out to be a meteor. After sending the video to the National Weather Service, they confirmed that it was a meteor, and was actually in flight somewhere over Wisconsin. According to Popular Science, the meteor landed in Lake Michigan close to shore and was of significant size.

“[It] was unusually large and bright—if it hadn’t landed in Lake Michigan, it probably would have been one of the few each year that produces a fallout large enough to scatter individual meteorite pieces for hunters to find,” the  Popular Science article stated.

According to NASA, a station in Manitoba, Canada, 600 miles away, recorded the force of the two-foot-wide meteor impact to be equivalent to at least 10 tons of TNT.

The police department was contacted by news organizations across the world from Berlin, Germany to places closer to home like Washington, D.C., and Florida, searching for the best video and the rare firsthand witness account of this meteor. Popular Science states that a meteor is usually seen by more people, but this shower happened in the middle of the night.

“In this profession, we see so many things that the public doesn’t get to see. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad. I’m just glad that in this instance I was able to capture this for everyone to see,” Dexter wrote.

In a previous version of this article, it was implied that the meteor was two meters wide when it was, in fact, two feet wide.