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 utahsil...@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.
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