[meteorite-list] www.venusmeteorite.com - Let the experts decide

From: Randall Gregory <randall_gregory_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:06:48 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <436098.18178.qm_at_web52108.mail.yahoo.com>

Ken,
   
  You said not to rely on your own conclusions but let the experts decide. I am inclosing a e-mail I send 10 months ago to another forum. Please look at the bold text. It was my intention from the very start to have experts evaluate my claim.
   
   
  http://www.nuggetshooter.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6757&st=0&gopid=70581&#entry70581
   
  Dated April 7, 2006
   
  I have been searching for the impact site for about a year. I searched in remote and inhospitable areas. I've searched and camped out in the desert with a professor from the geology department from the National University here in Arequipa, Peru. And a short time ago, I found the impact site and a very large strewn field. I used satellite photos, eyewitness accounts, seismic data, and what really helped was the time difference between when the people saw the fireball and heard the impact. Knowing that the speed of sound in dry air travels at about 330 meters per second gave me a relative distance. I have collected quite a few samples and have had some testing at the National University here in Arequipa, Peru and some of my own testing.

I'm sorry if I implied that I witnessed the fall. I only wish I had seen this incredible event, but soon, my wife and I will interview people that did witness the huge fireball that fell at 12:00 in the afternoon. My wife and I will be filming all the interviews and translating them into English. I hope to come close to experiencing this event through their descriptions. I hope this fall, the impact zone, and the meteorites collected will contribute a little more to science and our understanding of our universe.

For my own curiosity, I did some crude testing on the meteorites when I first found them. The meteorites I found are composed of a very very hard black basalt type of rock with small crystalline structures. The fusion crust looks like melted shiny black plastic but is incredibly hard. A tested sample contains Nickel, Iron, and Manganese. I?ll go into more composition when further detailed scientific testing is completed, but I can say that their relative hardness exceeds 8.0. I can cut large quartz rocks all day long, but I wore out a industrial diamond coated stone cutting saw blade spining at 12,000 r.pm. trying to cut through a large fragment. A fragment will fracture when hit with a small sledge hammer.

I also tried to duplicate the fusion crust by taking a chip and heating it with a oxy-acetylene torch until melting point but found that it produced a more glassy and thicker crust. I tried putting it in a blacksmith's furnace for various lengths of time without success. I seriously doubt that anyone could reproduce this type of fusion crust using any kind of heating methods. I have videos of my temperature and hardness testing.

Some people I sent pictures to said my samples didn't look like known meteorites. I completely agree. I have looked at hundreds of photos of rights and wrongs. I really don't want to speculate but they are not like the meteorites I've seen on other web sites with the exception of one that I ran across recently. There is a fellow that claims to have found a meteorite from Venus.(www.venusmeteorite.com) His web site has a lot of information and I was almost convinced that this was another "Spaceslag" type of story. That was until I seen the first picture of the claimed basaltic meteorite. It is virtually identical to the meteorites that I am finding within the impact elipse. He found his in North America and I found mine in South America. As for the other pictures on his site I don't know if they are meteorites or not.

I have seen alot of junk claims concerning meteorites. "Spaceslag", "Emerald Meteorite", "it looks like a meteorite so it must be", etc. I am very cautious about releasing any detailed information and samples. I want my proof to be irrefutable and don't want to release any meteorites until they have been verified and cataloged. I suspect that this road may be longer and more difficult than actually finding the impact site.

I'm sure that many people believe the possibility that one day, someone will find a meteorite that falls out of normal classification. I suspect many years ago that nobody believed we would find meteorites from the Moon or Mars. Concerning my meteorites, it is not for me to guess where they came from but up to professional planetary geologists to determine their origin once they have been verified.

I can send you pictures of some samples I collected. What I can truthfully and positively say is that they are basaltic type (igneous) of rocks with a unreproduceable melted surface layer collected on a massive sedimentary plain with no traces of any other igneous rocks in a computed fall zone from an area where more than 300 people witnessed a massive fireball, saw a huge dust cloud form thousands of feet into the air, felt the ground shake, and heard a deafening explosion. At that instant, 2 separate sets of seismic sensors recorded a 3.8 quake in the vicinity. Approximately four hours later, the city of Arequipa experienced an extremely rare event that most residents have never seen in this very dry location. FOG. Satellite weather photos show a dramatic increase in cloudiness shortly after the event. At the time the people seen the fireball, the sky was clear. This I can prove, but I can't irrefutably prove the samples I collected are meteorites. Hopefully, someone else
 with the proper resources and training will do that.

More evidence will be gathered next week when we plan on spending 3 days in the desert filming impact areas, and gathering more samples. Additionally, my wife and I will be interviewing and filming people that actually witnessed the event. We will be gathering as much information as possible on every possible detail they can recall about the fireball, tremblor, dust cloud, and explosion. Everything. Color, shape, size, direction, sounds, vibrations, location, what they were doing at the time, what did they think it was, whatever. We have a list of about 60 questions. This was a once-in-a-lifetime event and I hope I can capture part of the awe and the intensity of this incredible fall from the recollections of the witnesses. We will also collect police reports, data and statements from the seismology and geology departments at the University here.

An estimate as to the amount of kinetic energy released in this fall is about 120 tons of TNT to produce a relatively light 3.8 shock wave. Do you have any idea what the total mass would be? A friend of mine estimated about 1,000 tons but I suspect this might be a bit high.

   
  Randall

 
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Received on Thu 15 Feb 2007 08:06:48 PM PST