No ballistic experts (or even gun nuts) came forward
to answer my question about how fast a meteoritic fragment would have to
traveling to penetrate a meter in loose sand. Reduced to just guessing,
I would say it would have to be hypersonic (like a rifle bullet). Hume's
report of 30 centimeter penetration at El Nakhla could be reconciled if
the soil there were more compact (like clay).
One of the accounts quoted somewhere in this long
thread says the dog was "turned to ashes in an instant." It seems to me
that the more likely result of an hypersonic impact on a dog would be a
wide and uniform distribution of dogburger! I suspect that the observation
of "ashes" was created by a witness to match his interpretation of the
event as "fire from Heaven."
The value of eyewitness testimony is greatly reduced
by the fact that the human brain re-writes its immediate sense memory to
better conform with its later interpretation of the events witnessed. A
classic witness experiment was to have a classroom of students "witness"
(without advance warning) a mock robbery in which the robber brandished
a bright yellow banana while demanding money. The "witnesses" all reported
he had a gun or a "dark object" in his hand; no one reported a robber armed
with ripe fruit.
In the case of observations of natural phenomena,
a good example is historic descriptions of lightening. From the earliest
times up to around 1800 AD, lightening was always described (one exception),
where color is mentioned, as "red," or "red-orange." This holds true for
all cultures: ancient Hindu scripture, Babylonian tablets, the ancient
Greeks, Romans, Middle Ages... In a search yielding over 400 descriptions
or references to lightening before 1800, I found only one (from Russia
c. 1050 AD) that called lightening "blue, blue-white, or white."
Why "red" lightening? Because "everyone knows" that
lightening is "fire" and fire is red. After the discovery that lightening
is an electrical discharge (Franklin), descriptions of lightening in literature
mutate over 2 to 5 decades to the more correct "blue, blue-white, white"
description tags. Does this mean that we are now "better" witnesses? No,
it only means that the learned interpretation that we impose on our sense
impressions is more accurate. The editing mechanism remains the same for
most observers.
An observation of "red" or "orange" lightening is
possible at a distance in an atmosphere dirty or dusty enough to produce
strong scattering. Ironically, nowadays, there are those who will argue
that red lightening is impossible because "everyone knows" that lightening
is blue or white!
So, in interpreting "eyewitness" evidence, we have
to deal with a situation in which some witnesses may be accurate
while it is likely that most are not, without knowing which is which.
The only solution (where there is enough evidence) is to sift all through
a logic sieve as best we can. In the case of the dog, more evidence would
help (unlikely as we are to get it).
For those who have a high stake in the animals-killed-by-meteorite
question, specifically, the question of whether it is possible or if there
are well-attested accounts, look up
The New York Times for March
11, 1897. I quote:
Parkersburg, West Virginia. March 10, 1897. A meteor burst over the town of New Martinsville yesterday. The noise of the explosion resembled that of a heavy artillery salute... When the meteor exploded, the fragments flew in all directions, like a volcanic upheaval, and solid walls were pierced by the fragments. David Leisure was knocked down by the force of the air caused by the rapidity with which the body passed before it broke. The blow rendered him unconscious. One horse had its head crushed and nearly torn from the trunk by a fragment of the meteor, and another horse in the next stall was discovered to be stone-deaf.I would call that a reasonably consistent and probably accurate account of an animal death by meteorite. There are no details in this report that I would quarrel with as unlikely or invented or too imaginative to be true. And The New York Times does have a pretty good reputation for a journalistic yellow rag!
Sterling K. Webb
--------------------------------------------
Ron Baalke wrote:
>
> The quote describing the circumstances of the fall contains a datum which is testable and
> could yield information:
>
> "The fearful column which appeared in the sky at Denshal
> was substantial. The terrific noise it emitted was an
> explosion which made it erupt in several fragments of
> volcanic materials. These curious fragments, falling to earth
> buried themselves into the sand to the depth of about one metre."
>
> Someone somewhere with more specific engineering experience ought to be able to tell us
> what velocity is necessary to drive a small rock fragment one meter deep in sand. More
> velocity, I would assume, than would be necessary to drive a bullet a meter deep in sand, since
> a bullet is shaped to penetrate and a meteorite isn't.
> Are there any ballistics experts among us who could tell us what size (and speed) of bullet
> penetrates a meter in loose sand?You bring up a good point. It turns out a similar report about meteorites
penetrating to a 1 meter depth came also from El Nakhla:"this explosion was followed by vapour and a fall of black stones...
which penetrated the earth to a depth of a metre"While I had pointed out that William Hume did not do any fieldwork in Denshal, he did
do excellent job of documentation of the meteorites found in El Nakhla. It turns
out no meteorite in El Nakhla penetrated any deeper than 30 cm into the ground.
So, why the discrepancy? Do we just discount the account entirely, and attribute
this as a product of a lively imagination? Or do we just allow for a little leeway
in some of the accounts, as it is obvious they did witness the meteorite fall.
I'd say the latter.Ron Baalke
