February 18, 1948, had been a pleasant day in northwestern Kansas and as
the supper hour approached, the sky remained blue and cloudless. Shortly
before 5:00 p.m., a few people were still out of doors. An eleven-year
old girl was hanging up the last of the family wash on a high
clothesline. In the late afternoon sunshine, a woman and her son were
enjoying a walk around the back yard of their home on a large Kansas
ranch. Outside his house, a ten-year old boy was playing basketball with
friends. A veteran of World War II was loading fodder in a silo. In the
feedlot of his ranch, a farmer was stacking hay. A filling station
attendant was working outside at the pumps, grateful for a spell of
milder winter weather.
Without warning, a large and very bright fireball streaked across the
clear sky from southwest to northeast. Ominous-looking white
smoke-clouds mushroomed up from points in the fireball’s path. Shortly
after the fireball disappeared, loud explosions and rumbling sounds
drove thousands of people out into the open. The whole astonishing
luminous display was over in a few seconds, but the strange clouds and
the frightening sounds that followed the fireball’s passage continued
much longer.
Although startled by the brilliant fireball and the strange thundering
noises, the young girl, whose face had been turned skyward as she hung
up the clothes, noted very carefully where she had seen the fireball
disappear behind the tallest building in her home town. (Her sighting
was later of great value to field parties from the Institute of
Meteoritics of the University of New Mexico.)
The woman and her son were amazed to see an angry, boiling white cloud
tinged with red developing overhead in the blue sky and to hear strange
whizzing noises in the air around them.
The boy playing basketball heard a peculiar whistling or hissing noise
just as he was ready to shoot a basket and, on looking up, saw the ball
of fire slanting earthward. (This boy’s report was of particular
interest, since it related to an unusual type of “sound” that travels at
the speed of light rather than at the velocity of ordinary soundwaves.)
As a cannonading louder than any the veteran had heard on the
battlefields of Europe echoed over the rolling countryside, he went
temporarily into a state of shock.
The farmer stacking hay heard several explosions, felt a violent air
blast, and finally heard a solid object strike the ground “with a
smack,” as he put it, “like a clod hitting the earth.” (Later, field
searchers found that this man lived only about two and a half miles
south of the point where the largest fragment of the meteorite fell.)
Shortly after the passage of the fireball, the filling station attendant
felt the legs of his trousers flap as if he were standing in a high
wind, although he was more than 11 miles distant from the actual path
along which the fireball moved on its way to the earth.
As in the case of the Ussuri fall, which had occurred about a year
earlier, farm animals, chickens, and dogs were terrified by the strange
and noisy event. Cattle tried to run through a fence to escape the
deafening racket. A fine pair of horses panicked and ran headlong into a
narrow gully, the walls of which collapsed on them during their
struggles. Chickens dashed for the henhouse, screeching and cackling all
the way. A dog that feared lightning jumped behind a haystack and
finally ran to his master in alarm.
Although the majority of the people did not see the fireball itself,
they were driven out-of-doors by the violent concussions that followed
its passage, and thus got out under the open sky in ample time to see
several large, turbulent white clouds mushrooming far overhead. From
these clouds, a thick powder or dust filtered down through the air and
collected on the surfaces of stock ponds and water tanks.
Some people thought the peculiar clouds were similar to those produced
by atom bomb explosions. Many suspected that a V-2 rocket had “run away”
from the proving ground at White Sands, New Mexico. One man disagreed
with the opinion of his friends that the military had been experimenting
and declared that it was “the Lord who was experimenting!”
The February 18 meteorite fall caused great excitement throughout Kansas
and Nebraska, and it was the chief topic of conversation for days among
the residents of the many small farming communities along the western
half of the Kansas-Nebraska state line.
The Ussuri fall was studied by Russian scientists exclusively, and we
have of necessity given, in Chapter 1, a secondhand account of the fall
and surveys the Russians made; but field parties from the Institute of
Meteoritics conducted on-the-spot investigations of the Norton, Kansas
fall. As we were members of several of these field parties, the story to
follow is a firsthand report.
A little before 6:00 p.m. on February 18, word of the mysterious
explosion centering near Norton, Kansas reached the Institute of
Meteoritics, in Albuquerque, N. M., through the kind offices of Civil
Air Patrol personnel. Since a number of early reports had described the
incident as an airplane falling in flames, it was only natural that the
Civil Air Patrol and similar groups would take an interest in the
occurrence. At once, the staff of the Institute began to interview
eyewitnesses of the event through Civil Air Patrol channels and by long
distance telephone, telegram, and letter. Soon we had collected enough
information to show clearly that a large meteorite fall had been
responsible for the unusual light and sound effects that had startled
the inhabitants of Kansas, Nebraska, and adjoining states.
By March 3, the Institute staff had made a first determination of the
probable area of fall. The center of this oval-shaped, 8 by 4 mile area
lay about 15 miles north-northwest of Norton, Kansas and nearly on the
Kansas-Nebraska state line. The meteorite had fallen in a region of
wheat fields, pasture lands, and widely scattered farm houses. The
countryside there is open and gently rolling. The small creeks winding
through shallow valleys are marked in spring and summer by narrow bands
of low green trees and bushes. Many of the hillsides are covered with
unplowed buffalo sod.
[Illustration: A fragment of the Norton fall is removed still
imbedded in the tough buffalo grass sod into which it penetrated.]
On March 24, a field party left the University of New Mexico to make a
survey of this area. Unfortunately, Kansas blizzards can be as severe as
any in Siberia, and although the scientists gathered many helpful
reports from eyewitnesses of the fall, heavy snow and high winds
seriously hampered the work. The information they collected, however,
confirmed the accuracy of the Institute staff’s first determination of
the probable area of fall.
Late in the spring, a farmer in this area found a “strange stone” on his
land and held it for identification by the second Institute party. This
strange stone—which smelled like sulfur and had metallic specks in
it—was the first piece of the fallen meteorite to be recovered.
Scientists and farmers soon found many other fragments during systematic
searches of the rolling farm and pasture lands. The fourteen-year-old
boy who had been walking with his mother at the time of the fall
discovered a 130-pound fragment of the meteorite in a pasture that had
already been carefully searched by grown-up meteorite hunters! This find
was one of the two largest fragments recovered from the entire fall. The
landing place of this large piece was marked only by a small hole in the
sod, but, on prodding into this hole, the boy struck something rather
solid. He ran at once to tell the lady who owned the pastureland, and
together they dug out the fine meteorite.
[Illustration: The Furnas County, Nebraska, stony meteorite in place
at the bottom of its 10-foot “penetration funnel.”]
This discovery brought interest in finding meteorites to a fever pitch,
and it was soon possible to look in almost any direction and see
farmers, or their wives and children, walking slowly across the fields
and looking for meteorites.
Finally, in August, two farmers cutting wheat in a field just a short
distance north of the Kansas-Nebraska state line found a deep hole when
their tractor almost fell into it. They investigated and discovered that
a very large fragment of the meteorite had buried itself deep in the
ground.
Scientists from the University of Nebraska and the Institute of
Meteoritics carefully excavated this huge meteorite. They found that the
mass had plunged more than 10 feet into the earth. Quite by chance, its
lower surface had come to rest in the ashes of a long-buried primitive
cooking site.
The excavated meteorite looked and felt like a huge stone. Actually, it
was stony in nature, but of a texture so fragile that it had to be
wrapped in tissue paper, then in burlap, and finally covered with a
thick coating of plaster of Paris before it could be lifted out of the
ground. Those in charge of the removal of the meteorite borrowed this
procedure from the paleontologists, who use it in the removal of fossil
tusks and bones that otherwise would crumble away.
After the great meteorite had been raised out of the excavation, it was
taken by truck to the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque. There it
was put on display beside the smaller 130-pound fragment found in May.
By careful measurements, scientists determined the weight of the main
mass to be approximately 2,360 pounds—a record weight for stony
meteorites.[1] This remarkable meteorite, known as the Furnas County,
Nebraska, stone, is now a prized item in the collection of the Institute
of Meteoritics.
[Illustration: Field party proudly surrounds the Furnas stone in its
protective “armor.”]
As more and more finds were made in the area of fall, we accurately
recorded their weights and mapped their locations. In this way, we could
tell how the pieces of the meteorite had distributed themselves
according to size and weight over the oval-shaped area. The smaller and
lighter fragments were slowed down by air resistance and fell first,
while the 2,360-pound mass carried on beyond them and came to earth at
the farthest point along the direction of flight.
The staff of the Institute took many photographs of the meteorites that
were found, of the impact funnel made by the largest mass, and of the
excavation and removal of that giant stone. Some of these pictures were
published in scientific journals, others in magazine and newspaper
articles. A few of our best photographs are included in this chapter.
Although the light and sound effects that accompanied the Ussuri and
Norton falls were similar, the meteorites recovered from them were not
at all alike. The Ussuri specimens were masses of nickel-iron so
malleable that on high-speed impact with hard rock they had held
together and taken twisted and ragged shapes. But the Norton meteorites
were very fragile stony masses, many of which went to pieces either in
the air or when they struck the ground. Almost all of the recoveries
made of this very rare type of stony meteorite were fragments, not whole
specimens. They somewhat resembled pieces of a strange whitish mixture
of chalk and crystalline limestone containing tiny specks and lumps of
nickel-iron. Many specimens were covered wholly or in part by a shiny
varnish-like fusion crust, varying in color from jet black through
yellow to almost pure white.
[Illustration: The Furnas stone, protected by its “armor,” hangs
suspended from the truck crane that raised it out of its deep
“penetration funnel” in the earth.]
The largest meteorite recovered from the Norton fall was the 2,360-pound
mass that formed the deep impact funnel. The smallest Norton specimens,
like their Ussuri counterparts, weighed no more than the thousandth part
of a gram. Altogether, nearly a ton and a half of meteoritic material
from the Norton fall was collected by the Institute. Other small
fragments may remain undiscovered in the Kansas and Nebraska wheatlands,
but, unfortunately, because of the soft and fragile nature of the
material they are composed of, it is likely that they have now weathered
away so completely that they are no longer recognizable as meteorites.
Our stories of the Ussuri and Norton meteorite falls show how hard
scientists work themselves (and others!) to find meteorites. Therefore
meteorites must be important. The two accounts given also make clear
that investigators of meteorite falls are almost entirely dependent upon
observations made by nonscientists.
Scientists investigating meteorite falls greatly appreciate the help
given them by children and adults alike. Field parties are powerless
without it, and we should like to encourage people of all ages to
continue this type of valuable cooperation. In Chapter 7, we shall tell
more about how the individual observer of a meteorite fall can make his
report really count.
[Illustration: A close-up of the Furnas County stone, the largest
stony meteorite ever recovered.]