[meteorite-list] NPA 02-09-1969 Allende Meteorite Meteor Report, 1

[MARK BOSTICK]

Paper: The Sunday Chronicle Telegram (The Chronicle Telegram)
City: Elyria, Ohio
Date: Sunday, February 9, 1969
Page: 1

'It was so bright we had to hide our eyes'

     CHIHUAHUA, Mexico (UPI) - A blinding blue-white fireball, believed to 
be a meteor, turned night into day across Mexico and the southwestern United 
States early yesterday then pounded to earth like a bomb.
     "The light was so brilliant we could see an ant walking on the floor," 
said Guillermo Asunsolo, a Chihuahua newspaper editor.
     "It was so bright we had to hide our eyes."
     The light from the fireball was sighted for at least 1,000 miles along 
a line stretching from central Arizona deep into the superstition-ridden 
outlands of northern Mexico.

     "THE PEOPLE, especially the people in the small villages, are very 
alarmed," Asunsolo said, 'They say this is an announcement that the world 
will soon end."
     Asunsolo and other witnesses in the two countries indicated the 
suspected meteor thundered to earth in the almost impassable terrain of the 
Sierra Madre mountains south of Chihuahua and north of Durango, Mexico.
     "It was the brightest light since Haley's comet in 1908," said 
Asunsolo, editor of the newspaper El Heraldo.
     "We ran up to the roof and saw a very big round ball moving from south 
to north,"  he said before the object crashed.  "It was not red, but an 
intense blue-white."
     Reports from such mountain towns as Parral, Santa Barbara de Oro and 
Valle Allende said the Mexico residents saw the fireball and felt it pound 
to earth.  Asunsolo said the impact created "a tremendous tremor" that shook 
the ground for hundreds of miles so hard that "some windows broke."
     Dr. Ronald Schors, an astronomer with the Jet Propulsion Lab at 
Pasadena, Calif., who was visiting the McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis, 
Tex., said the fireball might have broken up and never landed.  He said the 
tremors felt by residents might have been caused by a sonic boom created by 
the fireball streaking through the night sky.
     A spokesman for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, 
Mass., said the fireball "most probably" was a meteor but "could possibly" 
have been a "poor orbiting satellite."

     DR. CHARLES OLIVER of the American Meteorological Society said in 
Philadelphia the fireball had characteristics of both a meteor and a 
satellite.  He said both a meteor and burning satellite entering the earth's 
atmosphere have light brighter than the moon and can be seen over areas of 
500 to 1,000 miles.
     The Mexico City Seismological station said its instruments did not 
register any tremor during the early morning hours despite reports of sharp 
earth shocks from residents.

(end)

Clear Skies,
Mark Bostick
Wichita, Kansas
http://www.meteoritearticles.com
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http://www.kansasmeteoritesociety.com
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The NPA in the subject line, stands for Newspaper Article. The old list 
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