Imagine you’re driving on a desert highway in the middle of nowhere in Australia. Suddenly, you hear a crash, see a blinding flash, and find your car filled with smoke. What’s your first reaction? You probably wouldn’t think, Was I just struck by a meteor?

Veterinarian Stephen Melville-Smith certainly didn’t think so. He later said, “I thought we’d crashed…I thought someone had fired a shotgun at us.”

Speaking of “shotgun,” his wife in the passenger seat had her own theory. “My wife said, ‘The car’s blown up.’”

Luckily for both of them, they were driving a Tesla Model Y with Autopilot engaged. Once the smoke cleared, they found their car still cruising along the same road—with one major difference. “I was in shock; I remember wiping glass particles from my face and being completely disoriented.”

There wasn’t just a crack in Melville-Smith’s windshield. There was a crater. The glass was warped as if it had melted. It had solidified again, but was still warm to the touch.

Melville-Smith turned around and drove back to the scene of the “accident.” He examined the roadside for a dead animal or debris, but he found nothing.

When he later took his Tesla in for repairs, one technician mentioned that automotive glass doesn’t melt until around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s when Melville-Smith reached out to mineralogist Kieran Meaney of the South Australian Museum.

A one-in-a-million meteor strike

A meteor is a small body from outer space that falls into Earth’s atmosphere, often burning up from friction with the air. There is no recorded instance of a meteor striking a moving automobile—until now.

“The really unusual thing is that the glass of his windscreen has actually melted a little bit; there was a lot of heat in whatever hit the windscreen.” –Kieran Meaney of the South Australian Museum.

Meaney admits that few phenomena could have melted the windshield. “It may be the case once we investigate further, we find out it’s something different, but at the moment [a meteorite is] the theory we are working with.”

Melville-Smith gave the museum the damaged windshield. Experts will examine it for particles embedded in the glass. From the composition of those particles, they hope to determine whether the object was terrestrial or from space.

“If we do find out that it is a meteorite, we will probably end up going out to where this happened and trying to find the bit of rock,” Meaney said. You can hear the driver tell his story in the video embedded below: