Farmer wrote.
We are not talking a very far off course. The smaller stones seem to be less than a quarter to half mile to the east, that is nothing when something is falling from space. Steger is just on the other side of the road from Park Forest, not really like out west here where one town is 30 or 40 miles to the next. To me this strewnfield looks absolutely perfect, if not just a tad scewed like (I think) by the wind.
Hello Mike and List,
Sorry for joining this conversation late as I was out the last few days.
At this point I am still reluctant to share too much information as I still have Park Forest specimens to sell and I am convinced many more little ones are out there waiting to be picked and compete with mine in the market place.
However, I will say, after picking up 113 specimens and probably spending 30% of my time (of the 44 days I hunted) looking outside of the strewnfield area on my map, these things are very uniformly distributed (with one little exception - all the oriented specimens landed with significantly smaller sized stones) from sub gram pieces roughly in the Southeast and the big 5kg one roughly to the Northwest. And this field goes MUCH further southeast than most people realize. Much more than the 1/4 to 1/2 mile that Mike mentioned above. Also the further Southeast I got the more dramatic the reports were of the noise, light and shaking when the rocks came in.
I do not think any meteorites fell in Beecher. Reports from one person said multiple pieces hit their window and or roof top. I think not. Maybe the sonic boom(s) shook the windows and roof, but if "many" pieces could land on just one roof, or hit just one window, we should have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousand of small specimen in and around Beecher. I did not find any near Beecher. I don't think anyone else did either. Slag yes, meteorites no.
Within my strewnfield map area, I would find pieces in a fairly constant spacing from each other with a few anomalies of two pieces being found just feet from each other. Once I would venture out too far in any direction, (one never knows how far is too far until he tries) I would not find anything in 10 times the area I would find a specimen back inside the zone, possibly only a few hundred or thousand feet away.
Of course there could be more outside of my mapped area, but statically we are looking at about 200 specimens total now and NONE of them are significantly out of place. I mean if just one specimen was found anywhere to the Southwest or the Northeast of all 200 others, that might make me think it was transported, but it would offer a hint of a possibility of a SW to NE fall. But there is not one such find. There were many cars and buildings hit with rocks laying in the street. If there were any significantly to the SW wouldn't one have been found? And if there was such a low break up, then the wind would have to be blowing like 500 miles an hour to scoot those specimens miles to the East with rocks indeed going in under roof eves and hitting windows.
As I mentioned before in another post, this is a very normal elliptical strewnfield. The only thing that would make it perfect would be a 50kg stone found a mile or two further Northwest of where the other big ones have been found.
Even with the possibility of a reverse strewnfield, that would need to place the fireball coming in from the NW going SE. Match that up with the eye witness accounts that Steve Witt mentioned, and I would have to say that there is an error in the report. I know, it is totally impossible for some people to think that anyone who works for the government could ever be wrong about anything. Humm... maybe this is a conspiracy by the Federal Government to throw us all of the track of the real main mass waiting to be located...
Oh, on another subject, Noe Garza's 911 call came into the Park Forest Police Department at 11:56pm of the 26th. Maybe the dispatcher's clock might have been off by a few seconds or possibly a minute, but even with a little variation, I am now convinced that the fall distinctively was on the 26th. It would be interesting to know if Garza could account for how long it took for the rock to hit his house and then for him to actually make the call. It is still looking like a 3 minute plus free fall after burn out before impact.
Steve Arnold
