[meteorite-list] German Cottage Destroyed By Meteor? - Translation of German article

From: bernd.pauli_at_paulinet.de <bernd.pauli_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Oct 20 18:34:17 2006
Message-ID: <DIIE.000000E100000F79_at_paulinet.de>

http://www.rhein-sieg-anzeiger.ksta.de/html/artikel/1161148347911.shtml

Here's the translation:

Something must have come from above:

The 77-year-old man has probably never heard of the Giacobinids or the Draconids but
he surely won't forget them for the rest of his life as they literally deprived him of
his garden cottage. Achim Buchholz, an incendiary expert of the Siegburg police, is firmly
convinced this is what happened. He is investigating the fire of a cottage in a Troisdorf
garden facility where the 77-year-old man lived. On October 8, at about 22:30 hrs,
the hut was destroyed by the flames of a fire.

Buchholz' conviction is based on several facts. That night the Earth crossed the orbit
of the Giacobinids. The particle stream is part of 21P / Giacobini-Zinner, almost an
Earth-grazing comet.

Manfred Gaida of the German Society of Aero- and Space Technology (DLR) in
Bonn-Oberkassel confirms a maximum of particles was to be expected at that time.
They usually burn up in the atmosphere. But it cannot be excluded that such a piece
did reach the ground, says the scientist.

Reliable eyewitness account

The second fact is a reliable eyewitness account. Leonhard Schiller lives in Troisdorf
and has an unobstructed overview of the Siegaue and the garden facility. He and his
wife were sitting by the window when he saw an extremely bright light phenomenon whiz
past his house. He said it was about the size of a football. "Right in the path of flight
I saw jetblack clouds of smoke shortly after and then a fire developed from the ground",
the businessman remembers. He drove to the fire and told the fire brigade and the police
where to go. Suddenly an elderly man came running from the cottage that was already
on fire. "The man stared at me and said something must have come from above", Schiller
says. Schiller's tax adviser who lives in Siegburg-Kaldauen says he too observed a bright
light at the same time. He believed it was a plane crash.

Incendiary expert Buchholz started investigations after hearing this witness' report and
he was able to exclude several possible causes one after the other - gas bottles were not
the culprits, he couldn't find any fire accelerator, and a technical failure was also out
of the question.

In the end the police chief was left with the space theory as the only possible scenario.
He talked to the scientists who told him about the Giacobinids or the Draconids. But he
didn't find any traces of the potential impactor from space. After the fire had been
extinguished, the soil was soaking wet and plowed up. So the local authorities can
only make best guesses.

Gaida's DLR-colleague Christian Gritzner will surely attempt to refute Gaida's theory.
He says that such particles from space don't glow any more during the final 10 km of
their free fall to the ground.

He says he can imagine that a piece from the cometary cloud did fall to the ground but
it was highly unlikely it was still hot enough to cause a fire. He said there was another
possible and plausible scenario: a ball lightning may have gone astray in the Siegaue
area. Well, only problem: ... it was a moonlit night, not a trace of a thunder cloud in
the sky. Emil F. couldn't care less with no roof over his head and the burns he has
suffered.


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Received on Fri 20 Oct 2006 06:31:51 PM PDT