Meteoriticists at once recognized the characteristic pattern of an exploding meteor and determined to find the remains. From newspaper reports and personal interviews with the witnesses, H. H. Nininger of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona plotted the path and determined that the probable point of explosion was thirteen miles west and three miles north of Norton, Kansas[[V-16]]. From similar investigations, Lincoln La Paz of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico determined the probable place of impact as an area eight miles long and four miles wide, about thirty-two square miles, on the Kansas-Nebraska line.
During the Easter vacation a field-survey party from New Mexico drove north into Kansas to hunt for the meteorite, but blizzards and snow-blocked roads stopped the work. A second search, begun on April 27, suggested that the main mass of the meteorite must have fallen somewhere in Furnas County, Nebraska. When persistent hunting failed to reveal it, the searchers moved south into Kansas, where a farmer had found a strange stone that smelled of sulphur and contained metallic specks. Although many stony meteorites of various weights turned up in this area, the main mass remained hidden until July 3 when a farmer located it, by accident, in a field that the official party had already examined and abandoned some three months earlier. This meteorite, although it weighed more than a ton and had dug out a six-foot crater in the ground, had eluded the hunters because “at the time of the fall the only dwelling close to the point of impact was unoccupied and ... the impact occurred in a field so overgrown with weeds and stubble that even the large crater made by the record-breaking main mass of the fall was finally located only when by chance a caterpillar tractor started to fall into it.”[[V-17]]
To find these meteorites, several highly trained searchers had spent days of effort, made a number of field surveys, driven more than 10,000 miles, and interviewed hundreds of persons who observed the flight of the fireball. Even so, they counted themselves lucky because many “meteorites of such composition and structure, although large enough to produce spectacular light and sound effects in the intermediate layers of the atmosphere, might disintegrate so completely during transit through the denser lower atmosphere that only dust would survive to reach the earth.”
The green fireballs of New Mexico were silent; they were probably icy structures and hence produced no meteorites. Even if they had, locating the place of fall would have been nearly impossible because the meteors appeared at night in a sparsely populated area.
To summarize: Many meteors do not leave fragments. Even when they do, finding the meteorite requires luck as well as hard work.
Unusual Fireballs
The officers and crewmen of a plane in flight have a front-row seat at the drama of the heavens, where astronomical events seem doubly vivid against the dark night sky. The pilot has been trained to recognize the major constellations, the brightest stars, and ordinary phenomena such as meteors and the Aurora Borealis. As a rule, however, he limits his study to the needs of the job. The few who have an astronomer’s intimate acquaintance with the heavens have often made valuable contributions to our knowledge. Comet 1957d was first observed by an airman and Comet 1948l was discovered by a pilot flying from the Fiji Islands to Australia. Comet Wilson, discovered on July 23, 1961 (and reported to the Air Force by some persons as a UFO), was first recognized by A. Stewart Wilson, navigator on a Pan American flight over the Pacific. All members of the crew were skilled and experienced fliers, but he alone was equipped to see the significance of the intruder in the constellation Gemini[[V-18]].
One of the most fantastic apparitions to confront a pilot is a group of luminous objects flaming through the air in more or less geometrical formation. The objects often seem to be heading directly toward the plane on a collision course but, as though under intelligent control, seem to veer off at the last possible instant and then disappear at incredible speed. The pilot usually recognizes this frightening phenomenon as an exploding meteor or a cluster of fireballs. Occasionally the sight is so extraordinary that he insists it could not have been a mere meteor but must have been some weird spacecraft. Airmen of unquestioned competence have made this mistake, sometimes because they more than half believed in extraterrestrial visitors, but more often because they knew less than they supposed about meteors.
In trying to identify the alarming objects approaching his plane, the pilot often thinks first of a meteor, then rejects the idea with some form of the remark, “Whatever it was, it was certainly not a meteor; I’ve seen meteors and I can’t be fooled.” He usually adds that no meteor could travel so fast (or so slowly) as the one he saw; so high (or so low); could have such a color; steer so “obvious” a collision course; fly as part of so orderly a group; move in so level (or so steeply angled) a path; maintain so steady a course; change course so abruptly; move so silently; or create so loud a detonation.
Such an incident occurred on a Pan American flight from New York to San Juan early on the morning of March 9, 1957. At about 3:30 A.M. when the plane was off Jacksonville, Florida, the pilot and the flight engineer saw a burning, greenish-white, round object coming out of nowhere, seemingly only a half mile away and headed across their nose on a direct collision course[V-19]. In such a situation a plane’s captain cannot waste time in analyzing what he sees, but must act. In a violent evasive move he put the plane into a climb of about 1500 feet, during which several passengers were thrown out of their seats and injured. At the same moment the crews of at least seven other flights within an area of 300 miles were reporting the same object. One witness saw it split in two and the fiery rear section drop away. About an hour earlier, the pilot of another plane in the area had seen the breakup of a similar meteor but had not reported it. In spite of all the evidence that the unknown was a normal meteor, breaking apart as many meteors do, the Pan American pilot, “having seen thousands of meteors,” could not accept the object as a natural phenomenon although he did realize, after he heard the other reports, that he had greatly underestimated its distance. The object showed all the characteristics of a typical fireball, but the flying-saucer cultists have still tried to convert this undoubted meteor into an unknown object.