[meteorite-list] Meteorite Deaths? Interesting old article-read

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:26:54 -0600
Message-ID: <A75DF7F8834B43FB92C51E07058F9A5D_at_ATARIENGINE2>

Hi, Larry, List,

> The events quoted by you from John Lewis'
> book are open to interpretation.

This you quickly spin to UFO's and I. Velikovsky
in the very next sentence and following paragraph.
Ridiculous. There is nothing like that in Lewis'
book.

Such a lame response puzzles me. I realize that
Lewis' views are not popular with the community.
Never really undestood why. To me he seems
emminently reasonable. Perhaps it is merely
an inevitable consequence of conflict between
those who like (and want to assert) a cozy and
orderly universe with none but minor upsets
and those who point out it just ain't so, bub.

"Open to interpretation"? I don't see it. Are you
telling me that the "monk, several birds, and a
sheep... killed by meteorites" was really a nun, some
squirrels and a goat killed by stones thrown by
hooligans? Or that it never happened? Got a
contemporary reference for that?


> Lewis did not make any effort to try to validate
> the events...

Lewis was very clear that his was a records search
(of the sort which almost all of historical research is)
of what historians call "primary sources." He does
sometimes finds multiple references to an event,
but that is rare in the Dark and Middle Ages. See the
opening of Chap. 13 of "Rain of Iron and Ice." Not
field work. Paul's response suggests that field work
could be profitable if the site could be located. That
took me by surprise; I assumed too much time had
passed. It's an exciting thought.

Most of the bulk of my post involved the old Chinese
recorded incidents. Lewis took those from the Yau,
Weissman and Yeomans' paper:
    Yau, K., P. Weissman, and D. Yeomans.
"Meteorite Falls in China and Some Related Human
Casualty Events." Meteoritics 29, 864-871.

The full text is available here:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1994Metic..29..864Y

If there is any controversy about the Yau paper (in the
sense of articles that dispute the data or conclusions),
I can't find any despite my Googlestorm for "Yau et al.
1994 meteorite.".

Quoted below are a summary and some comments from:
http://farshores.org/ameteo.htm
    "The... study by Yau et al is based upon an in-depth review
of the catalogues and ancient texts that document the fall
of meteorites in China. Their research has found that 337
meteorites were observed... in China between 700 BC and
AD 1920. Given that the area of China is 9.6 million square
kilometres, Yau et al (1994) find that the average number of
meteorite falls, in China, is 0.1 per year per million square
kilometres. [Please note that this is 80 times smaller than
the MORP estimate and that's too small by 3-4 fold, so the
Yau estimate is modest, to say the least. -- SKW]
    One of the most interesting results of the new study was
revealed when a plot of the number of meteorite falls per
century was made. To their amazement, Yau and co?workers
found a distribution which showed two peaks of higher
than expected activity. An enhanced number of meteorite
falls were recorded between circa 1550 to 1750 and from
circa 1840 to 1880. Unfortunately, it is not easy to understand
what the peaks might mean. The completeness of the accounts
is not known, and the observed rate of falls has to be de-biased
for the effects of an increasing population. That is, as the
population increases so the chances of someone observing a
fireball, and the fall of its accompanying meteorite, increases.
    One explanation of the peaks is that they are due to the existence
of meteorite swarms... This idea is not a new one, but it is
controversial. If nothing else, given that the peaks are real,
and Yau et al offer some statistical arguments to suggest that
they might be, they clearly imply that there are long-term
variations in the rate at which meteorites fall to Earth...
    In the course of their investigations, Yau and co-workers came
across seven accounts of meteorite falls in which human fatalities
and injuries were recorded. In AD 616, for example, it is reported
that "a large shooting star like a bushel fell onto the rebel Lu
Ming-yueh's camp. It destroyed his wall-attacking tower and
crushed to death more than ten people." Another account from
1341 reads, "it rained iron in Chin-ning. They damaged crops.
Most of the people and animals struck by them were killed."
The most recent account uncovered by Yau et al relates to a
fall (or April 25, 1915) in which a woman had her arm torn
off at the shoulder. [A twentieth-century Swedish man lost
his arm to a meteorite also; it was buried with him, the arm,
not the meteorite -- S&T]"

On the entire question of pre-scientific historical documents,
the degree to which ancient chronicles may be relied upon
for observations of astronomical events may be gauged by a
glance at this list of papers:
http://hbar.phys.msu.ru/gorm/eclipse.htm


The "Lewis List" or an expanded version of it is widely quoted
on websites from sober to whacky (who add Firestone, who is
whacky, and Baillie, who is not). He's not responsible for that.
Or do you hold him responsible?

Examples of such references (good and bad):

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/icq/meteorites.html

http://www.oberlin.edu/faculty/bsimonso/group9.htm

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/151954-Meteorites-Asteroids-and-Comets-Damages-Disasters-Injuries-Deaths-and-Very-Close-Calls

Another reference about historic damaging events is:
    Halliday, I., A.T. Blackwell, and A.A. Griffin.
"Meteorite Impacts on Humans and Buildings."
Nature 318, 317, but I can't find a copy.
    There are a number of interesting-sounding papers
by this team that bear on determining an accurate fall
rate, but I can't get to any of them without bribing The
Lords Who Own All Knowledge with exorbitant sums
from my hoard of ancient gold coins...

As the kid at Holbrook yelled, "Maw! It's raining rocks!"


Sterling K. Webb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: <lebofsky at lpl.arizona.edu>
To: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
Cc: <mail at mhmeteorites.com>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 5:02 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Meteorite Deaths? Interesting old
article-read


> Hi Sterling:
>
> The events quoted by you from John Lewis' book are open to
> interpretation.
> Similar interpretations give us:
>
> Ezekiel saw a flying saucer
>
> And, for those who like interpretations of the Bible and other
> writings:
>
> Joshua made the Earth stand still: This was due to the fact that Venus
> was
> a comet that was spun off(?) from Jupiter (do not remember if this was
> the
> source of the Great Red Spot) and flew by the Earth twice before
> becoming
> a new planet. My memory is a little hazy on this, but I think this is
> also
> the source of our oil. [I. Velikovsky] I think that it has been
> claimed
> that this was confirmed when we found out that Venus was hot, having
> been
> predicted by Velikovsky.
>
> Larry
>
> PS Sterling: Are you going to make me go back a reread the book to
> give
> you more specific references?
>
>> Hi, Matt, List,
>>
>> On September 14, 1511, in Cremona in Lombardy,
>> Italy, a monk, several birds, and a sheep were killed
>> by meteorites.
>>
>> Sometime between 1647 and 1654, two sailors on a
>> ship en route from Japan to Sicily, while in the Indian
>> Ocean, were killed by meteorites.
>>
>> Sometime between 1633 and 1664, a monk in Milan
>> was killed by a meteorite which severed his femoral
>> artery, causing him to bleed to death.
>>
>> Chinese records of lethal impact events include the
>> death of 10 victims from a meteorite fall in 616 AD, an
>> "iron rain" in the O-chia district in the 14th century
>> that killed people and animals, several soldiers injured
>> by the fall of a "large star" in Ho-t'ao in 1369, and many
>> others. The most startling is a report of an event in early
>> 1490 in Ch'ing-yang, Shansi, in which many people
>> were killed when stones "fell like rain." Of the three
>> known surviving reports of this event, one says that
>> "over 10,000 people" were killed, and one says that
>> "several tens of thousands" were killed.
>>
>> There is a discussion of these and many more such
>> incidents in John S. Lewis, "Rain of Iron and Ice," 1996.
>>
>> One could collect pages and pages of early accounts of
>> meteorite falls and pages more of events that could well
>> be meteoritic although those that wrote the accounts
>> did not know of the idea that stones could fall from the
>> sky. You could fill a book... and people have.
>>
>> A catalogue of meteorites is not a book of reported falls;
>> it is a book of collected and curated falls. The oldest
>> curated stone is NOGATA, which fell May 19, 861 AD.
>> It hit a shrine and has been kept there ever since. The
>> meteorite that hit a house in NARA (then the capital
>> city of Japan) in 764 AD doesn't count because nobody
>> has it safely curated.
>>
>>> ...can they be substantiated?
>>
>> No more or less than the rest of history. They tell me
>> Julius Caesar was assassinated. That's the story. Most
>> agree that it happened. No one wrote to deny it. It's the
>> story I always heard, so I believe it, like I do all the rest
>> of history. But I wasn't there, I haven't checked the DNA
>> on the dagger, I don't know where he was buried, I haven't
>> read the autopsy report. I'm more than a carpet fiber away
>> from proving the case...
>>
>> Three Chinese historical chronicles recount the huge
>> meteorite fall and thousands of deaths in Ch'ing-yang,
>> Shansi, in late February or early March of 1490. It's as
>> much history as Caesar's assassination is, no more, no
>> less. It's as "substantiated" as any history. There were
>> no Ming Dynasty tabloid news stories. History-writing
>> was politically sensitive and historians were occasionally
>> executed for falsity, particularly about "heavenly" events.
>>
>>
>> Sterling K. Webb
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: <mail at mhmeteorites.com>
>> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>> Sent: Monday, December 28, 2009 3:18 PM
>> Subject: [meteorite-list] Meteorite Deaths? Interesting old
>> article-read
>>
>>
>>>A friend sent this link to me in regard to the Bear Creek meteorite.
>>> <http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=Uk1ELzE4NjYvMDUvMTQjQXIwMDIwMA==&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-custom>
>>>
>>> Near the end of the text it details the deaths of 3 monks and 2
>>> Swedish sailors by meteorite impact!
>>> Has anyone heard of this? The passage reads:
>>>
>>> "A few instances are on record of buildings being struck and set on
>>> fire and persons struck dead by the fall of aerolites. These Three
>>> monks were killed, one on the 4th September 1611, at Crema (?),
>>> another at Milan, in 1650, and a third in the same place in 1660.
>>> In
>>> 1674 two Swedish sailors on board ship were killed by the fall of
>>> one."
>>>
>>> Having never heard of this I searched the Catalog of Meteorites and
>>> came up blank. Has anyone heard of these falls and can they be
>>> substantiated?
>>>
>>> Matt Morgan
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> http://www.meteoritecentral.com
>>> Meteorite-list mailing list
>>> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
>>> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> http://www.meteoritecentral.com
>> Meteorite-list mailing list
>> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
>> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
>>
>
>
Received on Tue 29 Dec 2009 05:26:54 PM PST