[meteorite-list] Bollide question

From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 15:05:29 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <68354.27044.qm_at_web36903.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

HI all -

I am passing this on from the mpml list. Contact Mr Handley if you care to:

I just received the following from a Robert Handley at utahsilver at yahoo. com. What I do _not_ know about meteor(ites) would fill several books so I can't answer his questions but hope someone here can.

Any takers?

Many thanks,

patrick

My father has asked me to help him find out about something that he had experienced in his youth. When he was around 10 years old, give or take a couple of years, which would have been about 1932. He was out side his home, which was located at Lofgreen, UT <a couple hour drive SW of Salt Lake City>. He and his sister were outside and he happened to be looking up at the sky when he saw like 6 or 7 fireballs/meteorite s pass thru the sky to the west of him. They passed by him and headed in northerly direction. Passing out of his sight in a second over the mountain. He said they were moving very fast, so fast that his sister who was with him never saw them, before she could look up and look in the direction of the fireballs. I?ve asked him a bunch of question about his experience and tried to figure a little bit about it. At first he thought they were quite high up in the air since they went over the mountains to the north. But he also told me he could
 hear them roaring very loudly thru the air and that he felt the heat of them on his face. He also told me that he felt like a pressure/force ripple thru his body. This I think my have been something like a shockwave caused by the fireballs/meteorite s as they passed thru the air over him, but that is just a guess on my part. I also asked him if the trajectory was steep or was it more flat, and he told me is was fairly flat. He told me the largest of them was like what he thought to be like 6 feet across down to like 2 feet across on the smaller ones. These were followed by a mass of small black tiny pieces that were not burning. He says it happened so fast and so long ago that it is hard to recall much of the detail about this experience. My thought is if he could hear and feel the heat and shockwave off them they couldn?t have been to high up in the sky.
My questions are, I was wondering if you know of any fireballs/meteors that passed over Utah in or around that time of 1931 to 1933? Also from what I have read not all of them hit the earth. Also I take they are not called meteorites unless they do hit the earth. The next question is how high up could they of been up in the air and still be able to hear and feel the heat off of them? Another question is with them being that low and with a fairly flat trajectory, how far do you think they could of traveled before falling to the ground if they did do that?
Not to bother you too much since I?m not sure if you have such answers for my dad and me I will end my letter here. I hope you can give me some sort of insight or information about my question or if not perhaps forward my letter to some one who might or let me know of such persons and/or groups that might help me understand and help my understand and know what he saw as a youth.



      
Received on Sun 07 Mar 2010 06:05:29 PM PST