[meteorite-list] very small possible

[Michael Murray]

Hi List,
Hope you don't all throw me on the "crazies" pile after you read this  
but here goes...

It was August 17 at approximately 7:15 PM.  My wife Beverly and I were  
working on freezing some corn late in the afternoon.  Earlier, I had  
picked about 4 dozen ears out of the garden.  I had husked it on the  
back deck and was carrying the second sack of husks back out to the  
compost pile in the garden.  As I was approaching the east most edge  
of the lawn next to the garden, I saw a very small object dropping  
quickly down at a slight angle in front of me at about an arm's length  
away.  I continued on into the garden but as I was dumping the husks  
out of the sack, I was thinking about what I had just seen. I decided  
I would go get my big magnet rake and run it over the grass in that  
spot where the object had come down.  Maybe it wasn’t a bird drop or  
an insect.  It sure seemed to be traveling in a straight line as it  
fell.  It had me thinking possible meteorite.

I walked back out there with the magnet rake and drug it in two  
different directions over the area.  Then I carefully picked the rake  
up and carried it across the lawn over to a plastic table by the east  
end of the house and set it up on it.

It was getting late in the day and I needed to cut the front grass  
yet, so I hopped on the mower and got it cut.  I was also going to cut  
a small area out back so I headed out there.  I started to make a pass  
around that area when the mower picked up a short piece of nylon rope  
I had left laying in the grass.  I shut the pto off and decided time  
to call it quits for the night and went back to the garage with the  
mower.  After putting the mower away, I grabbed a small gold pan off a  
shelf in the garage and headed back out to the the magnet rake.   
Working carefully, I cleaned the magnets off real good putting  
everything I got off of them into the gold pan.

I put the magnet rake away and took the gold pan with its contents in  
the house to look at the little bits through the microscope.  After  
taking a seat at the scope, I shook the pan in a manner that could be  
likened in the gold panning world to the Blueberry Bounce.  That  
action allowed me to separate the very small bits from the more coarse  
pieces in the pan.  There was less than a half teaspoon of dry fine  
stuff all total in the pan so not a lot of material over all.  With  
the really fine stuff out of the way, I started checking over the  
little rock pieces one by one using the low-power scope.  As I  
searched through the pan and using a pair of plastic tweezers, I took  
four little bitty rocks out that looked like they might be possibles.   
I put them on a small child security magnet.

My wife walked into the room about that time and I told her about my  
seeing something very small fall in front of me when I was heading  
back out to the garden.  I explained that I was experimenting.  I  
wanted to see if by chance my supermagnets could have picked it up.

Back to the scope now, I inserted the 20x eyepieces and turned up the  
magnification on those 4 little pieces I had placed on the magnet.  
Bringing them into focus and looking at the third stone there it was!   
A small dark brown/black object that looks very much like a stony.   I  
said out loud to Bev, “There it it is!”  She had been on the computer  
right next to me so I asked her to come over and take a look at it  
through the scope.  She did. “Oh, yeah. Wow!”, she said as she studied  
it.

After she got up from the scope and walked back out into the living  
room, I sat back down and marveled at it through the scope again for a  
bit.  Certainly not for it's size but because of the high possibility  
that I may have just recovered a stony meteorite I had seen fall.   
Then the thought struck me...If it is the same small object I saw fall  
and it is actually a stony meteorite, chances are it will have a  
sulphur smell.  I cleaned the magnet off so that it was on there by  
itself and held it up close to my nose.  Yep, smells like sulphur.   
Without saying anything about what I had just smelled, I took the  
magnet with the stone on it out to the living room and asked Bev to  
put it up close to her nose to smell.  She did and she said, “Oh, it  
smells like sulphur!”  I took it off the magnet and placed it in a  
small vial.

It's about the thickness of pencil lead so very hard to photograph but  
here are a couple poor quality pictures anyway.  Maybe someone out  
there has the ability to brighten up the photos.  I don't have much of  
a photo program and wasn't successful trying to brighten them up.

<http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p124/mmurray_02/fallpic2.jpg>

<http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p124/mmurray_02/fall.jpg>

Mike in CO