-Caveat Lector- http://www.concordmonitor.com/stories/front0400/salisbury_fireball.shtml Mystery of the fireball from the sky deepens If Monday's fire wasn't caused by a meteorite, what was it? Thursday, December 7, 2000 By STEPHANIE HANES Monitor staff Salisbury SALISBURY - Ron Baalke of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab saw the story about the meteorite in a small New Hampshire town online. It seemed a spectacular occurrence - meteorites are rare to begin with, but it's unheard of to see one land on Earth still burning. So, on his California computer, he forwarded the news to a London-based electronic network that disseminates information on catastrophic asteroids and cosmic disasters. The "CCNet" published Baalke's post about the supposed Granite State meteorite, and sky-minded scientists across the world read the news. Salisbury, New Hampshire, was famous. Since Paul Kornexl and Donna Ayoub saw a fireball plummet from the sky into the woods behind their houses Monday evening, Salisbury and its potential meteorite have gained worldwide attention. While Kornexl, Ayoub and her husband, Dave, continued to scour the muddy ground yesterday for extraterrestrial signs, scientists from New Mexico to Moscow - aided by the more-familiar science of the Internet - were conjecturing on just what happened behind quiet Hensmith Road. The first report that had come out of Salisbury said a meteorite had landed in the woods behind 129 and 137 (which are next to each other) Hensmith Road. The blazing softball-sized object had started two small fires in the dried leaves Monday evening, and neighbors had rushed to douse the flames. "It's a little weird for my book," said the fire dispatcher Monday. "I've never had anything drop out of the sky on my watch." By the time firefighters arrived on scene the blaze was extinguished. But the curiosity wasn't. Kornexl had been standing next to his shed when he saw the fireball land. "I was dumbfounded," he said. The next day, when a scientist from the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium examined the scene, and other experts pieced together the reported details, the explanation of a meteorite seemed less and less plausible. A meteorite would not have been burning when it hit the ground, scientists said. It would have left a crater when it landed and it would not have come in on an arc like residents described. But the woods were deserted. Kornexl, who spent six years in the Army, said the scene didn't fit with any weapon he knew of. And air control and military officials said there was nothing overhead at the time. So the question lingered. What sort of unearthly visitor had shown up in Salisbury? The conjectures started coming in yesterday morning. Robin Griffith, who lives outside Houston, Texas, said the New Hampshire fireball was similar to a flash of light she saw from her deck back in July. "If it had streaked I would have thought it was a shooting star," she said. But she added that her siting was exactly the same - she didn't see her ball of light fall to the horizon. "I don't believe mine was what y'all had," she said. She gave the name of a scientist in Russia who had studied her incident. Andrei Ol'khovatov had read the posting on CCNet and had asked her to get more information about the New Hampshire incident. Ol'khovatov had his own opinion. "It was probably not a meteorite," he wrote in an e-mail, "but a geophysical meteor (high-speed ball lightning). I investigate these events for some years." Ol'khovatov's Web page has scores of information about incidents of geographic meteors, what he describes as a rare type of electric atmospheric discharge like ball lightning. He suggests TWA Flight 800 and other airline disasters may have been caused by this natural phenomena. Salisbury's fire could be just the latest incident. Richard Spalding, a senior engineer at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, a U.S. Department of Energy national security lab, had his own theory. Apart from the lab, Spalding has studied flashes in the atmosphere - of which meteors are one sort and lightning another. "This particular article is reminiscent of quite a number of events I've looked into in which people claim they've seen a fireball come all the way to the ground," he said. "I think they are an electrical manifestation - akin to lightning but with nothing to do with thunderstorms." Spalding said evidence of this sort of event could be gained by analyzing some leftover material at the site. "It's quite possible there are some radioactive trace elements that are formed by the ions," he said. The Ayoubs, he said, agreed to send him some ground samples. "If found, there's no mistaking something very strange had occurred. There's only one way those elements could be created. It requires high energy radiation." Scientists conjecturing on the Salisbury mystery got more information from residents yesterday as more people came forward with reports of seeing the fireball. Phil Plait, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and who developed the badastronomy.com Web site to clear up misconceptions about his science, said he spoke to more Hensmith Road residents who saw the flame. "I really, strongly feel it's not a meteorite," he said after hearing the residents' descriptions. "I, unfortunately, don't have a good alternative explanation. Unless it was something thrown from a distance. Sometimes these things are mysteries forever." But if the bright light New Durham resident Ron Nordquist saw Monday night was the same fireball, it couldn't have been an object simply thrown over the trees. Nordquist said he saw the glowing ball as he walked his dog around 5 p.m. "It was like the brightest star you've ever seen," he said. "It was going down instead of going across the sky. It seemed like it was going in slow motion, even though it happened in seconds. I looked at the dog and I said 'did you see that?' " Nordquist mentioned the site to his brother on the phone that night. It wasn't until he read the paper that he made a connection. "I got my map book and looked for Salisbury. And right away, when I saw M6 or whatever the page was, right away I started getting goose bumps. I looked up New Durham, I looked at Salisbury. And I said to myself, 'my goodness, I'd seen that.' " The scientific search is still on. Sandt Michener, a scientist at the planetarium, said while he still doesn't believe the object was a meteorite, he thinks the incident is worth investigating further. "There are a lot of ideas, but it's just so many possibilities," he said. "If it is a meteorite, or if it's something else, it's unusual enough to merit an investigation." © Concord Monitor and New Hampshire Patriot P.O. Box 1177, Concord NH 03302 603-224-5301 =========================== http://farshores.topcities.com/farshores/nmetfire.htm Debate Grows Over New Hampshire Mystery Fireball [Original headline: Object that lit Salisbury fires also sparks debate, confusion] The strange fireball that touched down in Salisbury Monday evening might have been just about anything, according to experts, but it probably wasn’t a meteorite. "It’s pretty much a mystery," said Sandt Michener, an astronomer at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium who has examined the woods behind Hensmith Road where residents doused two small blazes started by the softball-sized fireball. "It’s theoretically possible it could be lots of things, including a meteorite, but probably not." Donna and Dave Ayoub, on whose property the fireball fell, sent soil samples to U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia Lab in New Mexico Friday. An engineer there, Richard Spalding, heard about the fireball on the Internet and has taken an interest. He will check to see if the soil’s chemical and isotopic composition matches that of meteorites. "I believe it was something that fell out of the sky," said Dave Ayoub. "I definitely believe that — I put out the fires." Ayoub said he is waiting for the test results before digging further, but is afraid the ground may be frozen by then. "I just hope I hear something before it gets too cold," he said. "I don’t know if I should dig or not. I don’t want to contaminate the site for someone else." Phil Plait, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland has also taken an interest in Salisbury’s unexplained phenomenon. He posted an article Friday about the "Fire from the Sky" on his Web site, badastromomy.com. The site is devoted to airing out myths and misconceptions in astronomy and related topics. "A lot of the story supports the idea that it was a meteorite that did the damage," said Plait’s paper. "However, after looking into the case, I have concluded that it was a much more mundane — and Earthly — object." The first tip-off is the fire, said Plait. "I was suspicious immediately, because small meteorites should not start fires," he said. "This is a very common misconception." Meteors are hot for only a short time. The friction that heats them up when they first enter the atmosphere also slows them down, explained Plait, giving them plenty of time to cool during the several minutes it takes to fall the rest of the way to the ground. "As a matter of fact, the inside of the meteorite is still as cold as the ambient temperature of space, so many of them are covered with frost when found!" said Plait. "So they won’t cause fires, but they might give you frostbite." The object’s trajectory, which witnesses said appeared curved, like a thrown basketball, also points to something other than a meteor. "A meteor coming in would be falling straight down, or even at an angle, but not on an arc," said Plait. "Also there was no evidence of the object on the ground after the fire was extinguished, as if it had burned itself out." The fireball also made no sound or crater on impact, according to witnesses, leading Plait to believe it may have been something more of this world. "It sounds to me like this was some sort of fireworks, like a Molotov cocktail or Roman candle, launched from the nearby woods," he said. But Ayoub, for one, does not buy that theory. He said the deep, dark woods behind his house harbor no miscreants. "There’s nothing behind my house. There is no kids around here to speak of," he said. "You couldn’t walk outside now, it’s virtually impossible. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face it’s so dark out there." James Ryan, a professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Department, also has his suspicions. "It’s hard to imagine a meteor starting a fire without some of the other signs of the impact," he said. "It’s not that it’s impossible, but you have to explore other alternatives." One alternative besides fireworks-wielding teenagers, is ball lightning, a poorly understood phenomenon also known as Saint Elmo’s fire. "It wasn’t but 30 years ago that ball lighting was pretty much pooh-poohed as anything real," said Ryan. "But there’s mounting evidence that it exists. It’s pretty rare to be sure, but any lightning is more common than a meteorite." Ball lightning has been recorded in many places since antiquity. It is generally a luminous, grapefruit-sized sphere, according to Peter H. Handel, a physicist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. In Scientific American’s "Ask the Experts," Handel said ball lighting usually appears during a thunderstorm, but can appear after, or even before it. The duration of ball lightning varies widely, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes, averaging about 25 seconds. Its duration tends to increase with size and decrease with brightness. Balls that appear distinctly orange and blue seem to last longer. While most physicists now agree ball lighting exists, theories about its cause abound. There have been hundreds of papers, and at least three books, discussing it, according to John Lowke, a plasma physicist at the Institute of Industrial Technologies, CSIRO, in Australia. He said most theories raise more questions than they claim to solve. Russian Nobel Prize winner Pyotr Kapitsa claimed ball lightning is caused by a standing wave of electromagnetic radiation. Other theories, said Lowke, assert a variety of sources of energy for ball lightning, including atomic energy, antimatter, burning material or the electrical field from a cloud. Lowke’s own theory was published in the "Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics." "I propose that ball lightning is powered by the electrical field associated with dispersing charges in the earth after a lightning strike," said Lowke. "The movement of the ball is controlled by the velocity of the electrical charge as it disperses in the ground after the initial period of electrical ‘breakdown’ that occurs at the moment of the strike." Another Russian scientist, Andrei Ol’khovatov, has his own theory about the Salisbury fireball. He believes it could have been a "geophysical meteor," a meteor-like luminous event of terrestrial origin. Ol’Khovatov, a scientific worker in Moscow’s Radio Instrument Industry Research Institute, postulates these phenomena, which he also calls geometeors, are the result of a "strong coupling" between atmospheric and underground processes. The drop in atmospheric pressure and increase in cloudiness in Salisbury following the mysterious fireball, and the region’s documented minor earthquake activity are consistent with other suspected geometeors, he said. "Nowadays geometeors are on the modern science frontier, or maybe even a little beyond it," Ol’Khovatov said on his Web site www.geocities.com/olkhov. "As soon as we explain ball lightning, probably we will have a large progress in understanding geometeors." But Ol’Khovatov’s theory doesn’t hold much water with one local scientist. "That’s pretty far out," said UNH’s Ryan. "None of this stuff builds up any of the voltage that just clouds do .... It’s bordering on pseudoscience. I’ve never put much stock in this tectonic business." Whatever it was, Michener, of the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium, plans to revisit the site of Monday’s strange occurrence. "I think I might be interested in taking another look just in case there’s something that was overlooked," he said. • Originally published by • Foster's online, Dover / NH | By Robert Emro - December 10 2000 New Hampshire Meteorite Probably Ball Lightning [Original headline: Scientists weighing in on mysterious fireball] Salisbury, N.H. (AP) — Scientists from around the world are weighing in on the mysterious fireball that landed in a Salisbury backyard this week. Several neighbors say a softball sized, glowing object landed in the woods behind their homes Monday night, starting a small fire. The only sign that anything happened was two small patches of burned leaves. Since then, the story has spread over the Internet around the globe. But so far, the far-flung scientists agree with the local experts — it probably wasn’t a meteorite. Russian scientist Andrei Ol’khovatov said it may have been what he describes as high-speed ball lightning, a rare electric atmospheric discharge. An engineer at a U.S.Department of Energy lab in New Mexico said he’s heard of similar cases caused by electrical flashes. "This particular article is reminiscent of quite a number of events I’ve looked into in which people claim they’ve seen a fireball come all the way to the ground," said Richard Spaulding. "I think they are an electrical manifestation — akin to lightning but with nothing to do with thunderstorms." • Originally published by • Foster's online, Dover / NH - December 7 2000 Meteorite Said To Start Backyard Fire Salisbury, N.H. (AP) Hensmith Road residents swear a meteorite started a backyard fire in the neighborhood. ''There was a white flash that lit up the area,'' Paul Kornexl said Tuesday. ''It sounded like someone dropping a large rock on the frozen ground.'' He said the object made two holes in his yard, one about three feet in diameter and the other about eight feet in diameter. They landed about 50 yards from his house, he said. He said it burned some leaves, a log and some underbrush. He said his wife, Pat, came home just as firefighters were leaving, and ''she thought I was kidding.'' But he said she believes a bit more now since the media has flocked to the area. The scene was quiet by the time Salisbury firefighters arrived after 5 p.m. Monday. Neighbors had doused the fire that had prompted the call, and the meteorite said to have started it had stopped blazing. The extraterrestrial visitor slammed into the back yard of 129 Hensmith Road, according to witnesses, burying itself in the ground and starting a small fire. ''When we got there they told me they saw this meteorite come in,'' said Fire Chief Edwin Bowne ''I've been doing this for 30 years. I've never seen anything like it before,'' he said. The flame burned about an 18-inch area, he said, and that the ground was muddy from residents pouring buckets of water on the small fire. ''It's there. Buried in the mud,'' Bowne said. ''It's a little weird for my book,'' said the fire dispatcher who dealt with the call. ''I've never had anything drop out of the sky on my watch.'' He said the National Weather Service, which he called for advice, didn't know what to do about the meteoritic visitor either. ''They said, 'We just predict the weather, we don't predict stuff falling out of the sky.''' The New England Meteoritical Services said meteorites are some of the scarcest material on Earth, much sought after by researchers and collectors. It said meteorites essentially are shooting stars that make it to the ground. The majority, it reports on its Web site, originate from asteroids. A smaller number comes from the moon, comets or Mars. On The Web: http://www.touchanotherworld.com • Originally published by • Boston Globe / MA - December 5 2000 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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