[meteorite-list] Nebraska Man Says He Was Nearly Hit By Meteorite

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Jul 1 18:36:08 2005
Message-ID: <42C5C52F.975EE13F_at_bhil.com>

Doug,

    I feel like Mike Myers in one of his old movies, who does mock prostration's while
chanting "we're not worthy; we're not worthy."

    Of course, I calculated the area by squaring the diameter of the circle instead of the
radius. "I'm not worthy; I'm not worthy."

    It was late; I'd just taken "do not operate heavy machinery" medication; the Nakhala dog
ate my homework...

    But... I never include "glowing rock" falls as a matter of principle, so I was saying
"let's leave this out of the count for now."

    Correcting for the dumb error in area, 2 to 15 times a year becomes .5 to 4 times a
year.

    Now we tackle "clustering." I mentioned it. Spread out, people!

    Humanity is not evenly distributed on the planet Earth taken as a whole. It's actually
fairly extreme. The people critters appear to be repelled by continentality and altitude, as
one real expert termed it.

    That is, the majority of humans live below a certain low altitude and within a certain
close distance to the shore of a sea or ocean. I'm not going to go find the original
reference, but as I recall, if you use figures like below 500 meters and within 100
kilometers, you get about 70% of the human race!

    Yet Denver is not deserted and the middle of the Midwest is not empty, despite what
folks in New York think...

    My personal opinion is that when one is dealing with the intersection of two unrelated
sets of random data, the best course is to just go random all around. People are moving
targets, you know.

    I tried to calculate the annual meteorite fall rate by working up from the number of
meteorite hits on cars (and trucks) over time, despite the same problems, like the uneven
distribution of people. Cars are distributed similarly to their owners, and though they
range more widely afield, they spend most of their time in the garage with their owner
nearby.

    I started with the MORP figure of 25,000 falls a year for the entire Earth (true rate,
observed or not) and concluded that the true rate had to be 2.5 or even 3 times greater at a
minimum to account for the ability of meteorites to ruin your Chevy Nova and turn it into
Peekskil legend! That's 60,000 to 75,000 per year with an option on 100,000.

    The method was that of collisional cross sections, familiar in physics, but never
applied to meteorite falls that I knew of. It was a "sweet" and simple methodology.

    At the time I knew of no one else chewing on the problem, but as soon as I posted the
study on the List... It seems that Phil Bland of the (formerly named) British Museum had
just concluded an exquisite study by a much more elaborate and delicate (and exhaustive)
method and had determined a minimum fall rate of the range 40,000 to 60,000.

    And our own Rob Matson, it seemed, had been working on the problem, based on finds on
those vast and treacherous playas he works so well, and arrived at 80,000, again by a
radically different method.

    That's a remarkable concordance.

    There are two huge problems with us all.

    1. How do you count the multiple stones that constitute a fall? If you measure at the
top of the atmosphere, it's usually only one rock. But it ain't a meteorite until it touches
the Earth, so does every stone in a fall count as one? Clustering again. Besides which, no
one knows the fragmentation coefficient -- it's a complete unknown. That doesn't help. Even
pairing data doesn't help much.

    2. By definition our data only include meteorites "detected" by humans and made known to
the rest of mankind generally. How many do we miss?

    I believe we miss a lot. A "find" is a meteorite we missed seeing fall. A "fall" is a
meteorite we saw fall then went and picked up. The ratio of finds to "falls" is about 20 to
one. Even for the durable iron, which waits much longer to be found, it's almost 10 to one.

    Jeff Grossman opined that a country like Japan, with a high population density more
uniformly distributed and a very well-organized society would have a higher percentage of
falls. He was right.

    Calculating from Japan alone produces a very low annual fall rate for the Earth, he
said. He was right. The figure was LOWER than the MORP estimate.

    Where we differed became apparent when you looked at each individual case for the 20th
century. Excluding questionable accounts where no stone was actually examined and the case
of an ancient inherited "stone from heaven" which was actually just a rock but is still
listed in the catalog (because it's always been there, an historical pseudo-meteorite).

    Almost every 20th century meteorite in Japan is a fall! The 20:1 find/fall ratio is
almost reversed to a 15:1 fall/find ratio! A huge percentage of 20th century Japanese
meteorites hit something: a building, a lamp, some new paving, a ship in the harbor, and so
forth. They produced damage that must be accounted for and explained: "Who has done this?!"
The most important thing is that it must proven that it wasn't somebody's fault. Especially
not MY fault. A high obligation slash responsibility society is Japan, you know.

    From that, I concluded that the Japanese of those days would miss, ignore, not
recognize, be uninterested in, or dismiss "finds" entirely!

    The significance of the data depends entirely on one's judgment of human behavior!

    I think the 20:1 ratio of finds to falls applies to 65 foot encounters just fine. Worse,
my opinion of human beings' ability as observers is so low that I would ALMOST apply the
400:1 ratio of missed meteorites to falls to the situation of a meteorite falling within 65
feet of a person!

    How many humans claim to have seen UFO's? Many tens of millions by the 1960's, so
hundreds of millions by now? Those monkey-boys are great observers... They are sharp little
critters.

    The NOBLESVILLE (Indiana) stone is the classic close approach fall case, perfect in
every detail: "The stone passed two witnesses, Brodie Spaulding and Brian Kinzie, who
observed it land 3.56m in front of them on the lawn in front of a house. No light or sound
except for the whirring sound as it passed and the thud in the ground was noticed. It is an
oriented specimen with well-developed flight markings, weight 483.7g."

    Just after dusk on a perfect midwestern summer night, two boys are standing talking in
the front yard in the new hush of evening, when... WHIRRR!

    If you like REALLY BIZARRE coincidences, notice that the man in Nebraska is named "Brad
Kinzie" while the boy in Indiana decades ago is named "Brian Kinzie"! Charles Fort would
have LOVED that.

    Do you suppose they are related? Is there a genetic ability to attract small meteorites
to one's self? Is this the work of Magonian tricksters?

    Quick! Somebody play the theme music to The Twilight Zone!


Sterling K. Webb
-----------------------------------------------------------




MexicoDoug_at_aol.com wrote:

> Sterlng W. wrote:
>
> >This (unnamed) expert needs a basic course in statistics. Assuming
> >one defines this approach (65 feet) as a criteria for "close", then the
> >number of cases of a fall being within 65 feet of a human being are
> >substantial....Integrating for the varying size of the human population
> >over this time period, I get odds of about 4,000,000,000 to one per year.
> >Lifetime odds are less than 100,000,000 to one!... 65 feet is far enough
> >away that the fall of a small fragment... A 130 foot circle has over 53,000
> >square feet, a big target. Assuming that those humans don't bunch up
> >too much (they do, but they all count as one person only in this survey)...
>
> Hola Sterling, List,
>
> This reminds me of two things:
>
> 1. That the amount of falls has less bearing on the probability of a human
> hit. The factor that determines that is simply the average size of the strewn
> field and the number of meteorites that have big strewn fields.
>
> 2. My favorite book, "Le Petit Prince" once again...when the wise author
> discusses how much space people perceive they occupy vs, what they really do.
> The updated figure is that if you put everyone in their private 1 meter X 1
> meter box in a grid, the whole human population today would easily fit in a big
> field 80 km X 80 km (50 miles X 50 miles) - just a bit bigger than
> Metropolitan Paris...(the same comparison I think I recall the book gave over 50 years
> ago).
>
> Let me volunteer my comments:
>
> I would give the 'unnamed' expert a break and say that he has solved an
> easier problem than you. Remember, Sterling, you are writing-off the claimant as
> a "wacko," so anything the claimant says doesn't count.
>
> An easier problem is: The targetted wacko is in the grandstands (called
> planet earth) and a homerun is hit (single meteorite stone falls into the
> grandstands). What is probability the wacko will be the lucky one to catch THAT
> PARTICULAR BALL (his mit has a reach of 65 feet)?
>
> Statistics has always been so misused precisely because people want numbers
> but are not interested in doing the work and understanding how they are
> derived and what their constraints are. We can't be guilty of that!
>
> The answer to that question of odds can be at least as great as 400 billion
> to one (event probability, not time-probability). Four times even greater
> than the quoted 'expert'...
>
> Of course, you are thinking several homeruns could be hit in that game
> (strewn field), and there are many games going on (many meteorites), but a fan
> might say "It will never happen to me again in a 100 billion years...", viewing
> it like playing a lottery. OK, you can't run and you can't hide from
> meteorites...but I don't think we are dealing with a fan using that sort of
> scientific logic. Thus, your back of the envelope and the 'experts's' calculation is
> a factor of 6, 60, or even 1000 different...but we need the 'expert' to
> clarify which one, and if it is only 6, that's not bad.
>
> On your chosen and defined problem, I went this route: There is a recovered
> witnessed fall in the USA-48 very nearly annually of 1, what's the area of
> the region, about 7.5 million square km? That gives odds in one year of 6
> billion to one, and over what's left of his lifetime you assigned 40 years that
> leaves 150 million to one...and you and I are in basic agreement!! No big
> surprise...
>
> I would go on to sensibly fudge: a factor of say, 10-100 due to forgetting
> about witnessed falls and concentrating on witnessed falls with sizeable
> strewn fields, leaving, say 15 million to one (on the conservative end). And then
> there is the factor of say, 2 for the falls that are never registered,
> leaving true odds in 40 years at 1.5 million to one, according to my
> interpretation - which now deviates from yours (in which we agree). If you don't agree
> with my fudge factor of 10, I'll dispute your area of the circle of
> diameter=130 (you were 4 times too large):
>
> Your odds actually would state odds of 16 billion to one in a given year
> according to your methodology, if you need to correct for the proper circular
> area.
>
> You then get a weighted average for a lifetime, but if you read the article
> carefully, there was no time period stated by the "expert": "The chances of
> this close of an encounter are one in 100 billion, expert said..." I'd
> definitely agree with you to that point that we can have some fun with the sloopy
> journalism, but if you read the article, is the alleged targeted man-not the
> 'expert'= who says "Only once in a 100 billion years, and it will probably
> never happen to me again," but this is not the 'expert' talking. And it sounds
> like the problem defined by the baseball game to me, not the meteoriticist...
>
> So we are all in the same ballpark, as far as I can tell, even the 'expert',
> until proven to be a quack in his own right...or that's how it looks to
> me... save any stupid errors I could have committed:)
>
> Saludos, Doug
>
> USA (BM Catalog)
>
> 1990s 7
> 1980s 5
> 1970s 6
> 1960s 5
> 1950s 7
> 1940s 8
> 1930s 19
> 1920s 13
> 1910s 12
> 1900s 9
Received on Fri 01 Jul 2005 06:35:27 PM PDT