Huge ice ball crashes into home, nearly hits Wisconsin man. Its origin is a mystery

The photos are astonishing.

A hole blasted through the roof, insulation and sheetrock with debris scattered across the floor of a home.

Elk Mound, Wisconsin, resident Ken Millermon told WQOW a 12.6-pound ice ball fell from the sky Tuesday and nearly hit him inside his house.

“If it had been a couple inches closer, it would have hit me in the head and I probably wouldn’t be here,” Millermon told the Leader-Telegram, a newspaper in Eau Claire. “That’s the scary part of the whole thing. It was so out of the blue, but I could have died and my children and wife could have been without me around. It gets you thinking about all that stuff.”

Millermon said he was about to log on to his computer when the ice ball crashed through the home, Bring Me The News reported.

“Yes I was in shock. I was covered in insulation. Sounded like a bomb going off in my room and looked like it too,” he told the Minnesota news outlet.

Though storms rolled through the region Tuesday, experts told several news outlets that severe weather couldn’t have caused hail this size.

The largest hailstone ever recorded in the U.S. weighed 1.9 pounds and fell in Vivian, South Dakota, in 2010, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Nothing close to a dozen pounds.

“It’s not related to weather,” National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Taggart told the Leader-Telegram.

Taggart speculated the ice chunk possibly fell from an airplane passing overhead, the newspaper reported.

With its origins still a mystery, Millermon was left to speculate about what might have happened.

“All I know is God had to have been watching out for me because I could’ve died, I could’ve,” Millermon told WQOW.

This story was originally published May 27, 2021 at 8:02 PM with the headline "Huge ice ball crashes into home, nearly hits Wisconsin man. Its origin is a mystery."