[meteorite-list] www.venusmeteorite.com - Let the experts decide

Fri Feb 16 01:00:56 EST 2007

Is this legitimate?
Sorry, but it reads like Boggy Creek.

Why don't you just send something to Dr. R. Korotev
and end the speculating.

http://www.meteorites.wustl.edu/what_to_do.htm
http://www.meteorites.wustl.edu/what_to_do.htm

Cheers,
Pete

By the way, jpegs attached to a List posting "ist verboten" ;)

From: Randall Gregory <randall_gregory at yahoo.com>
To: ken newton <magellon at earthlink.net>
CC: meteorite List <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Subject: [meteorite-list] www.venusmeteorite.com - Let the experts decide
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:06:48 -0800 (PST)

Ken,

   You said not to rely on your own conclusions but let the experts decide. 
I am inclosing a e-mail I send 10 months ago to another forum. Please look 
at the bold text. It was my intention from the very start to have experts 
evaluate my claim.

http://www.nuggetshooter.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6757&st=0&gopid=70581&#entry70581

   Dated April 7, 2006

   I have been searching for the impact site for about a year. I searched in 
remote and inhospitable areas. I've searched and camped out in the desert 
with a professor from the geology department from the National University 
here in Arequipa, Peru. And a short time ago, I found the impact site and a 
very large strewn field. I used satellite photos, eyewitness accounts, 
seismic data, and what really helped was the time difference between when 
the people saw the fireball and heard the impact. Knowing that the speed of 
sound in dry air travels at about 330 meters per second gave me a relative 
distance. I have collected quite a few samples and have had some testing at 
the National University here in Arequipa, Peru and some of my own testing.

I'm sorry if I implied that I witnessed the fall. I only wish I had seen 
this incredible event, but soon, my wife and I will interview people that 
did witness the huge fireball that fell at 12:00 in the afternoon. My wife 
and I will be filming all the interviews and translating them into English. 
I hope to come close to experiencing this event through their descriptions. 
I hope this fall, the impact zone, and the meteorites collected will 
contribute a little more to science and our understanding of our universe.

For my own curiosity, I did some crude testing on the meteorites when I 
first found them. The meteorites I found are composed of a very very hard 
black basalt type of rock with small crystalline structures. The fusion 
crust looks like melted shiny black plastic but is incredibly hard. A tested 
sample contains Nickel, Iron, and Manganese. I´ll go into more composition 
when further detailed scientific testing is completed, but I can say that 
their relative hardness exceeds 8.0. I can cut large quartz rocks all day 
long, but I wore out a industrial diamond coated stone cutting saw blade 
spining at 12,000 r.pm. trying to cut through a large fragment. A fragment 
will fracture when hit with a small sledge hammer.

I also tried to duplicate the fusion crust by taking a chip and heating it 
with a oxy-acetylene torch until melting point but found that it produced a 
more glassy and thicker crust. I tried putting it in a blacksmith's furnace 
for various lengths of time without success. I seriously doubt that anyone 
could reproduce this type of fusion crust using any kind of heating methods. 
I have videos of my temperature and hardness testing.

Some people I sent pictures to said my samples didn't look like known 
meteorites. I completely agree. I have looked at hundreds of photos of 
rights and wrongs. I really don't want to speculate but they are not like 
the meteorites I've seen on other web sites with the exception of one that I 
ran across recently. There is a fellow that claims to have found a meteorite 
from Venus.(www.venusmeteorite.com) His web site has a lot of information 
and I was almost convinced that this was another "Spaceslag" type of story. 
That was until I seen the first picture of the claimed basaltic meteorite. 
It is virtually identical to the meteorites that I am finding within the 
impact elipse. He found his in North America and I found mine in South 
America. As for the other pictures on his site I don't know if they are 
meteorites or not.

I have seen alot of junk claims concerning meteorites. "Spaceslag", "Emerald 
Meteorite", "it looks like a meteorite so it must be", etc. I am very 
cautious about releasing any detailed information and samples. I want my 
proof to be irrefutable and don't want to release any meteorites until they 
have been verified and cataloged. I suspect that this road may be longer and 
more difficult than actually finding the impact site.

I'm sure that many people believe the possibility that one day, someone will 
find a meteorite that falls out of normal classification. I suspect many 
years ago that nobody believed we would find meteorites from the Moon or 
Mars. Concerning my meteorites, it is not for me to guess where they came 
from but up to professional planetary geologists to determine their origin 
once they have been verified.

I can send you pictures of some samples I collected. What I can truthfully 
and positively say is that they are basaltic type (igneous) of rocks with a 
unreproduceable melted surface layer collected on a massive sedimentary 
plain with no traces of any other igneous rocks in a computed fall zone from 
an area where more than 300 people witnessed a massive fireball, saw a huge 
dust cloud form thousands of feet into the air, felt the ground shake, and 
heard a deafening explosion. At that instant, 2 separate sets of seismic 
sensors recorded a 3.8 quake in the vicinity. Approximately four hours 
later, the city of Arequipa experienced an extremely rare event that most 
residents have never seen in this very dry location. FOG. Satellite weather 
photos show a dramatic increase in cloudiness shortly after the event. At 
the time the people seen the fireball, the sky was clear. This I can prove, 
but I can't irrefutably prove the samples I collected are meteorites. 
Hopefully, someone else
  with the proper resources and training will do that.

More evidence will be gathered next week when we plan on spending 3 days in 
the desert filming impact areas, and gathering more samples. Additionally, 
my wife and I will be interviewing and filming people that actually 
witnessed the event. We will be gathering as much information as possible on 
every possible detail they can recall about the fireball, tremblor, dust 
cloud, and explosion. Everything. Color, shape, size, direction, sounds, 
vibrations, location, what they were doing at the time, what did they think 
it was, whatever. We have a list of about 60 questions. This was a 
once-in-a-lifetime event and I hope I can capture part of the awe and the 
intensity of this incredible fall from the recollections of the witnesses. 
We will also collect police reports, data and statements from the seismology 
and geology departments at the University here.

An estimate as to the amount of kinetic energy released in this fall is 
about 120 tons of TNT to produce a relatively light 3.8 shock wave. Do you 
have any idea what the total mass would be? A friend of mine estimated about 
1,000 tons but I suspect this might be a bit high.

   Randall

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