A century ago, on the eve before Thanksgiving, people across Michigan saw something that would mark Nov.

The Chelyabinsk meteor seems to be on par with what happened 100 years ago.

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A century ago, on the eve before Thanksgiving, people across Michigan saw something that would mark Nov. 26 in their memories for years to come. Fog and rain rolled across the Great Lakes region, when just before 8 p.m. something unusual cut through the dark.

"The road, trees, houses and even ourselves were bathed in a blinding phosphorescent-like glow which had its center in a bright streak in the sky above us," highway construction superintendent Leroy Milhan of Centerville, Michigan, would recall in a paper published the following year. "It passed over us toward the west. Immediately came a muffled report or jar that shook houses and the very earth like an earthquake."

The following day, the Washington Times reported that "telegraph and telephone communications and electric lighting plants in several cities in southern Michigan and northern Indiana are out of commission" as a result of "a remarkable phenomenon believed by several scientists to have been a gigantic meteor."

The newspaper describes a brilliant illumination resembling "an extraordinarily prolonged flash of heat lightning" in some cases accompanied by heavy thunder.