[meteorite-list] Fireball Observed Over Minnesota

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:23:48 2004
Message-ID: <200303141624.IAA08846_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.grandmarais-mn.com/placed/index.php?sect_rank=5&story_id=135246

Becoming an involuntary member of the UFO Club
Column: Magnetic North
Vicki Biggs-Anderson
Cook County News-Herald (Minnesota)
March 13, 2003

Last Saturday I became an involuntary member of the UFO
club. The object I saw was not, however, so much flying as
it was falling to earth. And the spot it came down is, either
in fact or in my overactive imagination, less than a mile from
my home.

Lest anyone think I was under the influence of anything
more than winter, it was just 6 p.m., still daylight and I'd
done nothing more than put in a few hours at the office, gas
up my car and do the week's grocery run. No
mood-altering chemicals in this kid, unless one regards a
mini-Snickers bar as a serious hallucinogenic. I do not.

The drive home was totally uneventful until I got to the turn
at County Rd. 14 and Caspers Hill Rd. I was half listening
to Garrison Keillor blather on the radio and half writing this
week's editorial in my mind. As I turned the steering wheel
to the right, brightness in the trees to the left caught my
eye.

It was a big white ball of light, angling down through the
trees. "Oh, oh, oh, ohhhhhh," was all I could stammer over
and over as what looked to be a falling star, shining tail and
all, disappeared in the area of my neighbor's gravel pit.
There is a plowed road into the woods leading to the pit and
I did go a couple hundred yards down it, but decided dusk
was a dumb time to go meteor-looking.

Besides, I couldn't wait to get home and tell Paul what I'd
seen.

Now most guys would hear something like this and respond
with a completely non-supportive, "Are you nuts?" But not
my sweetheart. He was pretty darned impressed - so
much so that he suggested I call the "cop shop" and report
the thing.

"Are you nuts?" I said, imagining my co-workers shrieking
in laughter as reports of the Caspers Hill woman who saw
a fireball got dutifully entered into the March 8 Sheriff's
Report. "My sanity is questioned quite enough thanks to all
the critters I've chosen to keep in chow and scratch," I
said.

Eventually, I called. No one else had reported the sighting,
but then the area is pretty sparsely populated. I told the
dispatcher and Sheriff that Paul and I were going to go out
and look for the meteorite the next day, Sunday. But I
awoke feeling like my stomach was filled with space debris.


Delicacy prevents me from going into detail. But hiking was
the last thing I was going to be doing that day. So I "hiked"
the Internet instead, hoping to find out what might be out
there.

Apparently meteorites - meteors that impact the earth
instead of burning up in the atmosphere - are common
enough to warrant a magazine devoted just to them.
Meteorite, the International Quarterly of Meteorites and
Meteorite Science, has a fascinating Web site. There is
also a market in meteorites. One Web catalog lists the
year, location of the find and the type of matter, and then
prices the meteorite by weight, often selling slices of the
material to collectors.

My Internet search for Minnesota meteorites was not
fruitful, except that I found a retired University of
Minnesota professor, Paul W. Weiblen, online writing
about northeastern Minnesota geology and his interest in
meteorites. He said most 'meteorites' brought to him over
the years were nothing but earth rocks. But in 1996, he got
his hands on the real thing. A baseball-size meteorite had
fallen on a parked car in Turtle Lake, Wis. on the night of
Oct. 21. The 82-gram chunk of chondrite had struck the
windshield of an unoccupied Geo Metro.

The meteorite is now in the University collection. The fate
of the Geo Metro is not mentioned.

My favorite Website is the Smithsonian's, metorites.org. It
features a slide show tour of their collection of meteorites.
They are all shapes, sizes and ages. Some are from Mars.
One is a mammoth hoop-shaped chunk big enough for a
moose herd to run through.

A plain sandwich-shaped meteorite on display at the
Smithsonian fell to earth on Nov. 16, 1492 in Alsace,
France and another meteorite there is the first recorded
touch-down in America, from Connecticut in 1807. If I could
have any I wanted, though, it would be the 2002 pound
Goose Lake, Calif. meteorite. That behemoth looks like a
polished petrified brain. How cool would that be in a
backyard pond?

Probably nothing like any of the above is in the woods less
than a mile from my back door. On the other hand, this is
Cook County. I think we'll take a look come spring.
Received on Fri 14 Mar 2003 11:24:32 AM PST