Trevor Mead-Robins is convinced the bright green fireball he and a fellow paraglider saw last Friday afternoon hit the ground right behind Grey Mountain.

Mead-Robins explained in an interview this week three of them had just finished their second flight off Haeckel Hill, as twilight was setting in.

He and Jake Olson of Yellowknife were at the top of the hill retrieving their truck when the meteor streaked through the sky.

Both of them had a front row seat, looking straight at it, though the other paraglider, Russell Bamford, was already down the hill.

“We started screaming like crazy,” said Mead-Robins, the owner of a local computer business. “It was like we were two little kids at Christmas.”

Mead-Robins said the meteor was glowing bright green. While he didn’t notice a tail behind it, Olson did.

Mead-Robins said it was still light enough to see Grey Mountain clearly, as well as the mountain behind it.

In the brief 21⁄2 seconds they watched the fireball, it appeared to be travelling more or less in a vertical dive toward the ground as opposed to a horizontal streak across the sky.

It appeared, he insisted, to come down between Grey Mountain and the mountain behind it.

So convinced were they, they searched the area the next day by airplane.

Mead-Robins said after he and Olson told Bamford what they’d seen, Bamford suggested getting a hold of Gerd Mannsperger from Alpine Aviation to see if he wanted to go meteor-hunting the next morning.

And off they all went.

For about an hour, Mead-Robins said, they flew a grid search behind Grey Mountain.

The aircraft had tundra tires, in case they needed to land, and they brought along rubber gloves to handle material they may have come across. Four sets of eyes scoured the area but did not see anything that stood out, he said.

It would be difficult to spot any evidence from the air, Mead-Robins said, given the topography, all the rock outcrops and dark spots on the landscape.

After seeing how rugged it is back there, he’s put away any notion of a ground search.

Mead-Robins said he also saw what’s come to be known internationally as the Tagish Lake meteor when it zoomed horizontally across the sky above Whitehorse early one morning in January 2000 before exploding over the frozen lake.

The bright green ball was not like the Tagish Lake fireball, he said.

“I didn’t know meteors could even be that colour,” he said. “I think it was a Martian coming down to visit.”

Mead-Robins said he posted their experience on social media.

As of Wednesday, he was aware of one other Whitehorse resident who witnessed it.

A woman he knows saw it through her office window, which faces Grey Mountain, he said.

Thursday and Friday of last week were to be the peak for the annual Geminid meteor shower.

The shower is said to originate with the near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon which passes Earth on a regular basis.

Planetary scientist Alan Hildebrand of the University of Calgary told the Star it’s difficult to determine whether the object Mead-Robins witnessed was associated with the Geminid shower without knowing more about the event, such as the direction in which it was travelling.

There’s a chance some security cameras captured it, he pointed out in an interview.

Hildebrand said when he was involved with the investigation into the Tagish Lake meteor, security cameras were not as plentiful as they are today.

Fireballs, he said, can be deceptive. The professor said he’s talked to many eyewitnesses who were convinced the meteor came down very close to where they were when in fact it hit the ground a couple of hundred kilometres away.

There were numerous eyewitness accounts of the Tagish Lake fireball. Many recounted how it lit up the sky as it passed overhead, with a large tail trailing.

It was of such significance that it quickly drew international attention, including NASA’s attention.

NASA dispatched an aircraft to see if it could collect dust along the fireball’s route after it broke into the atmosphere.

A local collected some of the meteorite material that fell on Taku Arm.

It was transported to different research facilities, and is currently held in the collections at the University of Alberta, the University of Western Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum.