[meteorite-list] looks like a big NO to me

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Apr 29 00:24:13 2005
Message-ID: <emd371h0rog8aom5g3cf22jgit6vdj3e6d_at_4ax.com>

The picture is too small to be really sure, but it sure looks like a piece-o-crap to me.

http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=54008

Rock discovered in city may be meteorite
By RILEY YATES and CAROL ROBIDOUX
Union Leader Staff
 
 

MANCHESTER - What?s grayish black, about the size of a baseball and falls from the sky when nobody's
watching?

Denise Lavoie isn't sure, either, but she's looking for someone who can confirm her theory that the
craggy rock that landed next to her mother-in-law's rose bush the other day was a remnant from the
recent Lyrid meteor shower that has had star-gazers from across the country and around the world
calling 911.

"As soon as I saw it there I knew what it was," Lavoie said yesterday of the rock she's been keeping
close tabs on since it landed about five feet from her in-laws house at 586 Cilley Road.

Her mother-in-law, Donna Boucher, said the rock, discovered Wednesday, wasn't there over the weekend
because that's when she planted the rosebush.

At first Boucher thought the one-pound UFO might be a lump of coal or maybe something that was
thrown there by a neighbor. She said it reminds her of rocks she would see in Reno, where she lived
for 27 years.

"I'm just looking for validation of what it is," said Boucher.

Eberhard Moebius, a professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire, said there are two
kinds of meteors: ones that are stony and ones that are made of iron, nickel and other metals.

That a meteorite would bear some resemblance to lava is not surprising, he said. "If a meteorite
really falls down and lands, it has gone through the Earth's atmosphere. And it burns during that."

Moebius said Boucher and Lavoie would do best to show their specimen to scientists at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. They would be able to say whether it
was a meteorite.

"Certainly that is possible and that has happened," Moebius said. "But to say that positively, one
would have to see it."

So far, everyone who's seen the rock believes it to be otherworldly, Lavoie said.

"I took it to work and everyone was saying we could probably get money for it," Lavoie said. "My
brother-in-law is going to make a nice box for it and we're going to put the date on it, and where
it was found. Until then, I'm keeping it close to me."
Received on Fri 29 Apr 2005 12:28:03 AM PDT