Saturday, January 23, 2010

ET Drops In



Monday afternoon we were driving back to DC from NY. My wife was at the wheel while I was preoccupied with a new iTouch. Out of the blue she says "Wow, did you see that!?" or something along those lines. I missed the "that" but when I looked up I spotted a plume of smoke in the middle of the sky which ended in a big puff.

She on the other hand had seen "that", a bright fireball shoot across the afternoon sky. We figured it must have been a meteor (the first of its kind since 1924 or so they say). By the time we got home I had pretty much forgotten about our, or more accurately her extraterrestrial sighting.

Until last night.

From the Washington Post...
What are the chances, as he goes about his routine, that he'll get hit by a meteorite?

Not impossible.

It almost happened.

"I was in my office doing charts," Ciampi recalled. It was Monday, a little after 5:30 p.m. He was on the building's second floor. "And I heard a loud boom, almost like a small explosion."

At first, he said, he thought a bookcase had toppled nextdoor. "So I ran toward the office. And then I saw all the debris in the hallway," he said.

The floor just outside examination room No. 2 -- about 10 feet from where Ciampi had been doing paperwork -- was littered with small pieces of wood, plaster and insulation. Upon inspection, more debris lay inside the room. He saw three chunks of stone on the floor that together formed a rock about the size of a tennis ball, with a glassy-smooth surface. Then he saw a hole about the size of the rock in the tile ceiling, and a tear in the maroon carpet where the rock had landed.

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