Meteors

Anyone watching the sky on a clear night is likely to see two or three meteors. As flaming bits of matter they usually disintegrate and disappear scores of miles up. Far less frequent are meteors big enough to make a daytime display and send fragments visibly hurtling to earth as meteorites. Yet within 24 hours last week two such phenomena caused excitement on opposite sides of the U. S.

One afternoon a metallic mass swooped in a long arc over Maine and Massachusetts. Groundlings saw its orange-red path, heard a mighty rumbling and hissing. Somewhere above the Massachusetts coastline the meteor exploded. At Salisbury Beach a crowd of Emergency Relief workers saw a fireball drop into the sea, cringed as another fragment thudded into the ground a scant 100 ft. away. One worker hastened to the spot, found the meteorite too hot to handle. A man near Newburyport saw a fireball with a 15 ft. trail splash into the ocean a half-mile from shore. Over Cape Cod a cloud of smoke which obscured the sun was reported. Elsewhere at least six other meteorites were declared to have fallen in the water or on land. Only meteorite recovered was the Salisbury Beach fragment. When cool enough to pick up it was found to be a pitted, fused, 1-lb. mass. Astronomers at Harvard Observatory eagerly accepted it for analysis.

Next morning at dawn a United Airliner with eight dozing passengers was flying west over Solano County, Calif., at 7,000 ft. Co-pilot Archie Anderson had the wheel; the pilot was in the passengers' cabin. Suddenly Anderson saw a great dazzling ball in his path which he afterward said was as "big as a house." Instinctively he whipped his plane into a bank. The passengers snapped awake and the pilot rushed forward in time to see the meteor shatter like a mammoth bomb. Glowing fragments streamed past, plunged earthward. The plane was unharmed. But on the ground a truck driver who saw the meteor telephoned police that a burning airplane was falling. California astronomers thought it likely that the phenomenon was, in reality, miles away from the airliner.

If the meteor had wrecked the plane and killed the occupants, it would have been the first incontrovertible instance of such hail from outer space causing loss of human life. No one knows whether the mountainous mass that shook North Central Siberia in 1908, or the prehistoric fall that dug Meteor Crater 4,000 ft. wide in Arizona, killed anyone or not. But several close shaves are well known to connoisseurs of meteoritics. In 1827 a man was injured by a fall at Mhow, India. In 1836 cattle were reported killed by a meteoric shower in Brazil. In 1847 two iron meteorites totaling 85 Ib. plunged through the roof of a room in Braunau, Bohemia where three children were sleeping. In 1917 a 150-lb. stone fell within the town limits of Colby, Wis. In 1924 a 14- Ib. stone hit a Colorado highway a few feet behind a funeral procession. Last year in France a burning farmhouse in which three persons perished was thought by neighbors--but not proved--to have been fired by a meteorite. Colorado's Harvey Harlow Nininger, meteor expert and author of Our Stone-Pelted Planet, believes it only a question of time before a catastrophe unquestionably involving human life will be caused by a meteoric fall.

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