[meteorite-list] Wales Meteor Images

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:28:22 2004
Message-ID: <3F7FC58E.D3E5EEC_at_bhil.com>

Hi,

    I just want to address one aspect of the current controversy over
the Wales photo. Namely, the notion that a spectacular and brilliant
fireball MUST be observed by a large number of people, that this is a
necessary part of an observation for it to be accepted as a meteor.
Multiple reports may be not be a valid criterion.
    I base this strictly on my own experience. On June 30, 1969, I
observed a daylight fireball that was roughly half the brightness of the
Sun (I haven't calculated that as a magnitude but that's really bright,
okay?).
    I was working in my garden between 4:00 and 4:30 in the afternoon;
it was bright cloudless day. What made me look up was that everything
vertical had suddenly acquired two shadows: its "normal" one and a
secondary shadow, about half as dark as the normal shadow, turned to the
north by about 30 degrees, and that the secondary shadow was rapidly
rotating further to the north!
    It took me about a second or two to realize what was going on and
fall over on my back so I could look straight up and see a daylight
fireball whose "head" was literally too bright to look at directly,
traveling from WSW to ENE, leaving a bright trail about 120 degrees
long! (Much later, based on the date and the track of the meteor, which
passed through Taurus, I decided it was probably a beta Taurid.) I did
not see a terminal burst and there was no sound, so it must have been
high and fast. It passed beyond the eastern horizon.
    The next day, tremendously excited by what I had seen, I asked my
co-workers if they had seen it (I worked at a university at the time).
No one had. I asked friends, acquaintances, near-strangers. No one had.
I called the local newspaper to see if anyone had reported anything. No
one had.
    Eventually, I began to call newspapers west and east of my location,
town by town, inquiring about reports. There were none. I called other
universities, amateur astronomy groups, the U.S. Air Force, anyone that
might have received a report of an aerial phenomenon. I spent four
months, off and on, trying to find even one other report across a
four-state area, filling three spiral notebooks with logs of my
contacts, lists of calls to make, and so forth, without ever turning up
a single report.
    Although I doubt very much that I was the only observer, from the
standpoint of an official or unofficial record, there is none. If you
note the date (6/30/1969), it was at the time of the Apollo 11 mission
and so it occurred when the public mind was "primed" to be aware of
things astronomical as they possibly could be.
    I concluded the human species is a) not very observant, or b) not
very curious about what they do observe, and c) of a mind not easily
stimulated by remarkable events and thoroughly mired in the trivia of
the everyday.
    While I don't know if the Wales photos are a meteor or not, I don't
think the "nobody else saw it" argument is a particularly strong one.
    From my experience, it might not be remarkable that a daylight
fireball was not observed or reported by "thousands" of people, even if
it was bright, spectacular, easily visible, screamed for attention, made
loud noises, had a trail that twisted and skywrote the word "METEOR" in
letters of fire across the heavens... Well, you get the idea.


Sterling K. Webb
Received on Sun 05 Oct 2003 03:17:34 AM PDT