Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls
Astronomy books and papers far too numerous to cite offer the assurance that "no one has ever been killed by a meteorite." (John S. Lewis, University of Arizona)
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| ©Julian Baum |
Over the past few years, while sott.net has been tracking the increasing flux of fireballs and meteorites entering the earth’s atmosphere, we have been, by turns, amused and horrified at the ignorant reactions and declarations that issue from academia and the media regarding these incursions. A few years ago, we read that "this is a ‘once in a hundred years’ event!" Not long after it was a "once in a lifetime" event. Still later, after a lot more incidents it became a "once in a decade" event. More recently, it has been admitted in some quarters that meteorites hit the ground (as opposed to safely burning up in the atmosphere) several times a year! And of course, we have discovered the fact that the governments of our planet are well aware that there are atmospheric explosions from such bodies numerous times a year. We have also learned in this series that the frequent reports of unusual booms and shaking of the ground is often due to such overhead explosions. Yet the media steadfastly refuses to honestly address this issue, though we have noted a plethora of recent articles presenting opposing academic arguments designed to put the populace back to sleep, to reassure them that there is nothing to worry about, that such things only happen every 100,000 years or so, and certainly, the Space Watch Program is going to find all the possible impactors and take care of things.
Recent articles we have covered on SOTT.net include:
Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics
Leading U.S. scientists called on Congress Thursday to make sure the next president does not do what they say the George W. Bush Administration has done: censor, suppress and falsify important environmental and health research. […]
Among the more than 15,000 government scientists signing onto the statement are Harold Varmus, preesident of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Anthony Robbins, professor of medicine at Tufts University and former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
"Although surely the worst, the Bush Administration is not the first, nor will it be the last administration to mistreat and misuse science and scientists," Robbins said. The White House itself has been directly involved in the suppression and falsification of science, Robbins stressed.
But interference from the White House is just part of the problem, said Francesca Grifo, a former government researcher and now a director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Industry lobbyists are all over government agencies, trying to influence research that will impact their corporations, she said. "These special interest groups are being given access at the highest level."
"Government scientists have had their findings subjected to censorship and misrepresentation," said Kurt Gottfried, professor of physics at Cornell University and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The public and Congress have often been deprived of accurate and candid scientific information."
"The pursuit of science in an open society has had a long and fruitful tradition in America," Gottfried said. "Unfortunately, this tradition has been violated in recent years by the government itself."
Another: Government’s funding framework breeds scientific conformity
Here is a list of beliefs in the biomedical and climate sciences that must not be questioned if you’re applying for a government grant:
- That global warming is caused by humans;
- That AIDS is caused by a virus;
- That radiation, cigarette smoke and other toxins are dangerous in proportion to their strength, no matter how small the dose;
- That heart disease is caused by saturated fats;
- That cancer is caused by mutations.
This is part of a list offered by a University of Washington professor of surgery, Donald W. Miller, who is a heart surgeon at the VA Medical Center in Seattle. Miller believes that all the above ideas may be false, and ought to be tested. […]
But much of science runs on government money. Some people find the stink of bias only in private money, and see government as free of it, but they are mistaken. Government likes certain beliefs. To get its money, you have to get the approval of the scientists it selects, and you are less likely to get it if they think your idea wrong.
What that means, Miller says, is that "If you say low doses of radiation aren’t bad for you, or that global warming is due to variations in the sun, you can’t get funded."
He says this happened to University of California scientist Peter Dues-berg, who challenged the viral theory of AIDS, and to Harvard’s Willie Soon, who challenged the pollution theory of global warming, and to others. In a paper published in 2007 in the Journal of Information Ethics, Miller argued that conformity is built into the system of government grants. […]
In 2005, in the scientific journal Cellular and Molecular Biology, Pollack made an argument similar to Miller’s. American science, he wrote, has become "a culture of believers" whose rule is, "just keep it safe and get your funding."
For science, the result has not been good. […]
Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, argued famously that science progresses in revolutionary bursts, in which the "dominant paradigm" is overturned. But what if the supporters of the dominant paradigm are the people vetting your application?
We most certainly can see that the issue of meteorite, cometary and asteroid impacts on our planet, and their true potential danger to each and every one of us, must be added to this list of unfunded research.
This is a very bad and dangerous state of affairs. As Victor Clube wrote in his letter to SOTT.net:
First, I should say your references to the (cosmically complacent) paleoclimate community and to my otherwise unread narrative report to the USAF european office strike a very considerable chord with me. After all neither Ms Victoria Cox nor your good self can be aware how very much Bill and I had reason to appreciate the timely injection of USAF funds at a time when the line of research we championed appeared to be successfully closed down by the UK scientific establishment. Thus we were both in turn obliged to relinquish our career posts at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh on account of this line of research - which gave rise to our reincarnation at a more tolerant haven namely my alma mater (Oxford).
Also, whilst I broadly accept your commentary regarding the role of "national elites" in the face of near-Earth threats, I am quite certain the elites in practice currently know VERY "much LESS than they let on" and that the situation for humanity is dire. Any comfort you may draw from the opposite opinion seems to me to be entirely misplaced. Thus although the globally modest efforts to assess the NEO threat with telescopes by a few semi-enlightened national administrations (eg USA) or by a few private enterprises (eg Gates) are certainly to be commended, I look upon this aspect of the NEO threat as basically intermittent and therefore more or less symbolic so far as generally more urgent and still largely undetected low mass NEO flux (which is demonstrably climatological in its effect) is concerned. This particular threat (evidently responsible for our planet’s evolving glacial/interglacial condition during the past 3 million years) is of course _fundamentally_ ignored by the current Body Scientific and hence by most of humanity as well.
And so, it seems, we here at SOTT.net, and some brave souls with the good of humanity at heart, are on their own, opposed by the governments that are supposed to be in place to look after the interests of their people.
Of course, the question arises: what led to this general and overall blindness on the part of the people we look to for interpretation and explanation of our reality? How can the people who write textbooks, teach in schools, even at the highest level, be so ignorant? The consequences of this ignorance are, after all, detrimental to everyone for many reasons, not the least of which is simple survival in a rather hostile environment.
The events that have been covered so far in this series have led us to understand that there have been many times when it is highly probable that the earth - or parts thereof - was bombarded with meteorites or exploding aerial cometary fragments. These events occurred, and were probably related to, periods of great stress on the environment and humanity as a whole. Climate changes brought floods, droughts, extreme temperatures, crop failures and famine. These pressures may have caused lowered disease resistance for given populations, and it is also conjectured that extra-terrestrial bombardments may have carried disease pathogens. Impacts or crustal disturbances could have placed stresses on the geological structures so that outgassings from fissures, the ocean, or lakes may have poisoned large numbers of people, not to mention the record of tsunamis that is now called into question. Do we know, for example, that the Christmas tsunami-causing earthquake near Malaysia was not impact induced? No, we don’t. And we can’t trust either our governments or the news media - or even most of academia who owe their livelihoods to the government - to tell us the truth.
Why do they lie to us?
Well, the main reason is rather simple: it’s all about control. All of these things, taken together, place intolerable stresses on the human social organism and, as is typical for human beings, this brings on a crisis of faith, demands for answers, demands for protection that governments simply find it too expensive to provide.
When the world shows itself to be a hostile environment, when the environment suggests that there is no god and humanity is cast adrift in an uncaring cosmos, most people cannot tolerate this; they desperately need to restore their belief in something "out there" that is going to save them, and if there is no one to save the, that means that someone has to be blamed for the disasters: a scapegoat. The corrupt governments do not want to be blamed, so they seek to blame someone else and convince the masses that this object of derision is the chief cause of all terrors. And the masses invariably buy into these maneuvers because, of course, if you can find someone or something to blame for calamity, you can continue in your illusion that "God is in his heaven and - but for the evil acts of the chosen scapegoat - all would be right with the world." Otherwise, the tension and anxiety of having no control (even vicarious, via prayer or ritual) over the hostile environment, would be unbearable. I’m sure that you notice that this also relieves the individual of any responsibility as well, so this approach works in all kinds of situations.
We are going to examine this problem in some depth further on, but for now, I would like the reader to become acquainted with the facts. What I have prepared for today is The List, by no means exhaustive, of all the incidents I have been able to uncover of meteorite, asteroid, or cometary impacts that have caused death and destruction, property damage, or were near misses. Major parts of The List are extracted from the work of John S. Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Codirector of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center, and Commissioner of the Arizona State Space Commission, in specific, his books entitled Rain of Iron and Ice and Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth. In this latter volume, he writes:
The most intensively studied impact phenomenon, impact cratering, is of limited importance, due to the rarity and large mean time between events for crater-forming impacts. Almost all events causing property damage and lethality are due to bodies less than 100 meters in diameter, almost all of which, except for the very largest and strongest, are fated to explode in the atmosphere. … [W]e are forced to conclude that the complex behavior of smaller bodies is closely relevant to the threat actually experienced by contemporary civilization.
Based on the data he collected, Lewis noted that:
[O]n the century time scale, firestorm ignition and direct blast damage by rare, strong, deeply penetrating bodies are the most common threats to human life, with average fatality rates of about 250 people per year. … On a 1000-year scale, the most severe single event, which is usually a 10 to 100 megaton Tunguska-type airburst, accounts for most of the total fatalities. On longer time scales, regional impact-triggered tsunamis become the most dangerous events. …The exact impactor threshold size for global effects remains poorly determined. […]
Perhaps most interesting is the implication that the large majority of lethal events (not of the number of fatalities) are caused by bodies that are so small, so faint, and so numerous that the cost of the effort required to find, track, predict, and intercept them exceeds the cost of the damage incurred by ignoring them. [Lewis, 1999]
Unfortunately, Prof. Lewis did not have to hand the information presented by Mike Baillie in his book New Light on the Black Death, nor did he consider the global events of 12000 years ago revealed by the work of maverick scientists, Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith. If he had added the estimated numbers of fatalities from those events into his calculations, it might not have decided that the small, faint, and numerous bodies were so easily ignored. I think that if ALL the data were plugged in, the average deaths per year would be a lot higher than 250. Regarding impacts from history, Lewis writes in Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth:
Many ancient sources from many cultures treat comets as literal, physical harbingers of doom. Such phenomena as the burning of cities and the overthrow of buildings and walls by aerial events are mentioned many times in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese records, but there is no evidence of physical understanding of the nature of the bombarding objects or their effects until quite recently. […]
There is indeed a language problem in understanding the ancient reports, but it is largely a matter of the lack of an appropriate technical vocabulary in the older writings. […] In certain locations and periods, especially in medieval Europe, all unusual heavenly events were interpreted as signs sent by God. Therefore, the surviving accounts are strongly biased toward explaining the moral purpose of these events, not their physical nature. Such fundamental information as exact date and time, exact location, place of appearance of the phenomenon in the sky, its duration and physical extent, luminosity, precise nature of the damage done, and the like were generally regarded as unimportant, and therefore rarely recorded for posterity. […] Even in 20th century newspapers, bolide explosions may be described (and indexed) as "mysterious explosions," aerial blasts, aerolites, aeroliths, bolides, earthquakes, fireballs, meteorites, meteors, shocks, thunder, and so on. […]
Reports of meteorite falls, often with consequent damage, extend back to the fall of a "thunderstone" in Crete in 1478 BC, described by Malchus in the Chronicle of Paros. The earliest Biblical source is the account of a lethal fall of stones in … Joshua 10:11. […]
Other ancient reports in the West are found in the writings of Pausanius, Plutarch, Livy, Pindar, Valerius Maximus, Caesar, and many others. The report of a great fall of black dust at Constantinople in 472 BC, perhaps the result of a high-altitude airburst, is documented by Procopius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Theophanes, and others.
Colonel S. P. Worden has called to my attention the following passage in The History of the Franks, written by Bishop Gregory of Tours:
"580 AD in Louraine, one morning before the dawning of the day, a great light was seen crossing the heavens, falling toward the east. A sound like that of a tree crashing down was heard over all the countryside, but it could surely not have been any tree, since it was heard more than fifty miles away… the city of Bordeaux was badly shaken by an earthquake … a supernatural fire burned down villages about Bordeaux. It took hold so rapidly that houses and even threshing-floors with all their grain were burned to ashes. Since there was absolutely no other visible cause of the fire, it must have happened by divine will. The city of Orleans also burned with so great a fire that even the rich lost almost everything."
Astronomers who have sought documentary evidence of ancient astronomical phenomena (eclipses, comets, fireballs, etc.) have found that East Asian records are far superior to European records for many centuries. Kevin Yau has searched Chinese records and found many reports of deaths and injuries (Yau et al., 1994). The Chinese records of lethal impact events include the death of 10 victims from a meteorite fall in 616 AD, an "iron rain" in the O-chia district in the 14th century that killed people and animals, several soldiers injured by the fall of a "large star" in Ho-t’ao in 1369, and many others. The most startling is a report of an event in early 1490 in Ch’ing-yang, Shansi, in which many people were killed when stones "fell like rain." Of the three known surviving reports of this event, one says that "over 10,000 people" were killed, and one says that "several tens of thousands" were killed.
On 14 September 1511, a meteorite fall in Cremona, Lombardy, Italy, reportedly killed a monk, several birds, and a sheep. In the 17th century we find reports of a monk in Milano, Italy, who was struck by a meteorite that severed his femoral artery, causing him to bleed to death, and of two sailors killed on shipboard by a meteorite fall in the Indian Ocean.
In addition to these shipboard fatalities, there have been several striking accounts of near disasters involving impacts very close to ships. Near midnight of 24 February 1885, at a latitude of 37 degrees N and a longitude of 170 degrees 15 minutes E in the North Pacific, the crew of the barque Innerwich, en route from Japan to Vancouver, saw the sky turn fiery red: "A large mass of fire appeared over the vessel, completely blinding the spectators; and, as it fell into the sea some 50 yards to leeward, it caused a hissing sound, which was heard above the blast, and made the vessel quiver from stem to stem. Hardly had this disappeared, when a lowering mass of white foam was seen rapidly approaching the vessel. The noise from the advancing volume of water is described as deafening. The barque was struck flat aback; but, before there was time to touch a brace, the sails had filled again, and the roaring white sea had passed ahead."
A strikingly similar event occurred only 2 years later on the opposite side of the world. Captain C.D. Swart of the Dutch barque J.P.A. reported in the American Journal of Meteorology 4 (1887) that, when sailing at 37 degrees 39 minutes N and 57degrees W, at about 5 pm on 19 March 1887, during a severe storm in which it was "as dark as night above," two brilliant fireballs appeared as in a sea of fire. One bolide "fell into the water very close alongside the vessel with a roar, and caused the sea to make tremendous breakers which swept over the vessel. A suffocating atmosphere and perspiration ran down every person’s face on board and caused everyone to gasp for fresh air. Immediately after this, solid lumps of ice fell on deck, and everything on deck and in the rigging became iced, notwithstanding that the thermometer registered 19 degrees C."
On 20 August 1907, the steamship Cambrian arrived in Boston from England with an equally extraordinary tale to tell. When the ship was several hundred miles south of Cape Race, Newfoundland, steaming along under a clear sky, a brilliant fireball appeared near the northeastern horizon and "rushed across the sky like a rocket. The next moment it passed over the topmast of the liner with a tremendous roar and plowed up the sea about fifty yards from the boat. The upheaval of the water was terrific, but the ship was not damaged." The report of this event was carried in the New York Times.
Next, according to the Times, on 13 September 1930, a fireball plunged into the sea near Eureka, California, barely missing the tug Humboldt, which was towing the Norwegian motorship Childar out to sea. It requires little imagination to appreciate that such an event, if it were to strike a ship, should easily cause fatalities, or even the loss of the vessel with all hands. [Lewis, 1999]
Now, that just gives you a taste of what is to come. (I would like you to notice the highlighted mention of the fall of chunks of ice.) So, without further ado, here is:
THE LIST: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls
10,000 - 11,000 B.C. - The earliest disaster we know of from our historical or mythic records is, of course, the legendary Deluge of Atlantis. The description of the end of Atlantis given by Plato in the "Timaeus" and "Critias" dialogues bears striking resemblance to what many scientists are now agreed would be the inevitable result of an oceanic impact by a disintegrating comet or large asteroid. The resultant ‘tsunami’, or tidal waves, would easily reach 2000 ft. high as they approached land, wiping out any and all coastal settlements. The deluge traditions, of which there are literally hundreds worldwide, appear in this light to be variations on Plato’s account, and could even be actual observation-based tales, eye-witness accounts of the same, or similar, events. This is very likely the event discussed by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture. As I have discussed in my book, The Secret History of the World, the North and South American continents in the Western Hemisphere fit all the descriptions of "Atlantis," and it is very likely that the event that led to the extinction of about 30 species of large mammals about 12,000 years ago was the source of the legends of Atlantis and probably the legends of a global deluge: Noah’s Flood. Let’s look at some descriptions of what such an event can do.
Back in the 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the University of New Mexico led an expedition to Alaska to look for human remains. He didn’t find human remains; he found miles and miles of icy muck just packed with mammoths, mastodons, and several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the members of the expedition watched in horror as bulldozers pushed the half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animal tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades "like shavings before a giant plane". The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death, most of them "pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric catastrophic disturbance."[Hibben, Frank, The Lost Americans (New York: Thomas & Crowell Co. 1946)]
The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles in every direction.[ibid.] There were trees and animals, layers of peat and moss, twisted and tangled and mangled together as though some Cosmic mixmaster sucked them all in circa 12000 years ago, and then froze them instantly into a solid mass. [Sanderson, Ivan T., "Riddle of the Frozen Giants", Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960.]
Just north of Siberia entire islands are formed of the bones of Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the freezing Arctic Ocean. One estimate suggests that some ten million animals may be buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousands upon thousands of tusks created a massive ivory trade for the master carvers of China, all from the frozen mammoths and mastodons of Siberia. The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were found in its mouth.
What kind of terrible event overtook these millions of creatures in a single day? The evidence suggests an enormous tsunami raging across the land, tumbling animals and vegetation together, to be finally quick-frozen for the next 12000 years. But the extinction was not limited to the Arctic, even if the freezing at colder locations preserved the evidence of Nature’s rage.
Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, confessing, "no one knows the answer." He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time. [Simpson, George G., Horses, New York: Oxford University Press) 1961] The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth, the saber-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. These creatures didn’t die because of the "gradual onset" of an ice age, "unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question." [Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., "Bestiary for Pleistocene Biologists", Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967]
Massive piles of mastodon and saber-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida. [Valentine, quoted by Berlitz, Charles, The Mystery of Atlantis (New York, 1969)] Mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountain glaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.
This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct at the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska, the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the American camels. It is obvious that the cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres, and that it was not gradual. A "uniformitarian glaciation" would not have caused extinctions because the various animals would have simply migrated to better pasture. What is seen is a surprising event of uncontrolled violence. [Leonard, R. Cedric, Appendix A in "A Geological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge", Special Paper No. 1 ( Bethany: Cowen Publishing 1979)] In other words, 12000 years ago, something terrible happened - so terrible that life on earth was nearly wiped out in a single day.
Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks encased in the Siberian permafrost present an "insuperable difficulty" to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, "even if they died in winter." [Lippman, Harold E., "Frozen Mammoths", Physical Geology, (New York 1969)] Especially when many of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly. Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form, states: "Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of the animals and their full stomachs … the animals were robust and healthy when they died." [Farrand, William R., "Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology", Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17, 1961] Unfortunately, in spite of this admission, this poor guy seems to have been incapable of facing the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of the Pleistocene. Hibben sums up the situation in a single statement: "The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period, which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive." [Hibben, op. cit.] [Quoted from The Secret History of The World]
Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith write:
"Until recently, the astronomical mainstream was highly critical of Clube and Napier’s giant comet hypothesis. However, the crash of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994 has led to a change in attitudes. The comet, watched by the world’s observatories, was seen split into 20 pieces and slammed into different parts of the planet over a period of several days. A similar impact on Earth, it hardly needs saying, would have been devastating."
The Carolina Bays date to this time. The Carolina bays are mysterious land features often filled with bay trees and other wetland vegetation. Because of their oval shape and consistent orientation, they are considered by some authorities to be the result of a vast meteor shower that occurred approximately 12,000 years ago. What is most astonishing is the number of them. There are over 500,000 of these shallow basins dotting the coastal plain from Georgia to Delaware. That is a frightening figure.
Let me repeat: there are over 500,000 of these shallow basins.
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| ©Unknown |
| Carolina Bays |
Unlike virtually any other bodies of water or changes in elevation, these topographical features follow a reliable and unmistakable pattern. Carolina Bays are circular, typically stretched, elliptical depressions in the ground, oriented along their long axis from the Northwest to the Southeast. [T]hey are further characterized by an elevated rim of fine sand surrounding the perimeter. […]
Robert Kobres, an independent researcher in Athens, Georgia, has studied Carolina Bays for nearly 20 years in conjunction with his larger interest in impact threats from space. His recent, self-published, investigations have profound consequences for Carolina Bay study and demand research by academia as serious, relevant and previously unexamined new information. The essence of Kobres’ theory is that the search for "debris," and the comparison of Bays with "traditional" impact craters, falsely and naively assumes that circular craters with extraterrestrial material in them are the only terrestrial evidence of past encounters with objects entering earth’s atmosphere.
Kobres goes a logical step further by assuming that forces associated with incoming bodies, principally intense heat, should also leave visible signatures on the earth. And, finally, that physics does not demand that a "collision" of the bodies need necessarily occur to produce enormous change on earth. To verify that such encounters are possible outside of the physics lab, we need look no further than the so-called "Tunguska event."
At the epicenter of the explosion lay not a large crater with a "rock" in it, as might be expected, but nothing more than a number of "neat oval bogs." The Tunguska literature generally mentions the bogs only in passing, since the researchers examining the site failed to locate any evidence of a meteorite and went on to examine other aspects of the explosion. (The Secret History of The World)
Now, how many human deaths ought we to assign to this event? As Firestone, et al discuss, it was global in effect and the evidence of a sharply reduced population of not only animals, but humans, is there in the geological record. But what was the total human population? What kind of numbers can we plug into Lewis’ calculations? Frankly, we don’t know. Undoubtedly, multiplied millions of human beings perished at that time along with the extinction of many animal species. One thing that seems certain is that if these numbers were included in Lewis’ assessment, it would make a significant change in the "average number of deaths per year". Though, of course, this was a very big event, and those don’t happen every year, or even every century. They happen on a scale of thousands of years and there hasn’t been one like that for 12000 years.
3195 B.C. - Eco-disaster as shown in tree rings. What evidence is there then that something unusual happened around 3100 BC other than the Mayan year zero supposedly relating to 3114 BC?
- Newgrange construction.
- Flood in paleoclimatic data.
- Stonehenge number one
- The unification of Egypt
- Methane peak (fires).
- Cold time according to bristlecone pines.
- The coastal menhirs in Brittany.
Although anyone of these in itself would not be unusual, the timing of them within a frame of only 100 years, is what makes us suspect that something unusual was going on. The next 1000 years or so were very restless time globally.
The postulated bombardments and dust-veils at around 3195 BC, another narrowest tree-ring date, would have wreaked havoc on both the local and global climate, and any and all cultures affected would have taken many decades, maybe even centuries, to recover. The sheer terror that ‘multiple-Tunguska-class fireballs’ would have instilled into the peoples of those times would have understandably motivated them towards building some form of observatories to help predict future meteor showers/storms as a matter of perceived urgency.
Stonehenge may very well have been built to help in the watch for comets. And, yet again, we have no numbers of human fatalities to plug into the calculations but they must have been enormous.
3123 B.C. - 29 June - Germany - ‘The clay tablet that tells how an asteroid destroyed Sodom 5,000 years ago’
A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for more than a century has been identified as a witness’s account of an asteroid that destroyed the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah 5,000 years ago.
Researchers believe that the tablet’s symbols give a detailed account of how a mile-long asteroid hit the region, causing thousands of deaths and devastating more than one million sq km (386,000 sq miles).
The impact, equivalent to more than 1,000 tons of TNT exploding, would have created one of the world’s biggest-ever landslides.
The Old Testament story describes how God destroyed the ‘wicked sinners’ of Sodom with fire and brimstone but allowed Lot, the city’s one good man, to flee with his family.
The theory is the work of two rocket scientists - Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell - who have spent the past eight years piecing together the archaeological puzzle.
At its heart is a clay tablet called the Planisphere, discovered by the Victorian archaeologist Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Royal Palace at Nineveh.
Using computers to recreate the night sky thousands of years ago, they have pinpointed the sighting described on the tablet - a 700 BC copy of notes of the night sky as seen by a Sumerian astrologer in one of the world’s earliest-known civilisations - to shortly before dawn on June 29 in the year 3123BC.
Half the tablet records planet positions and clouds, while the other half describes the movement of an object looking like a ’stone bowl’ travelling quickly across the sky.
The description matches a type of asteroid known as an Aten type, which orbits the Sun close to the Earth. Its trajectory would have put it on a collision course with the Otz Valley. [In Germany; in other words. In short, the story wasn’t about Abraham and Lot in Palestine!]
‘It came in at a very low angle - around six degrees - and then clipped a mountain called Gaskogel around 11 km from Köfels,’ said Mr Hempsell.
‘This caused it to explode - and as it travelled down the valley it became a fireball.
‘When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures which pulverised the rock and caused the landslide. But because it wasn’t solid, there was no crater.’
The explosion would have created a mushroom cloud, while a plume of smoke would have been seen for hundreds of miles.
Mr Hempsell said another part of the tablet, which is 18 cm across and shaped like a bowl, describes a plume of smoke around dawn the following morning.
‘You need to know the context before you can translate it,’ said Mr Hempsell, of Bristol University.
Geologists have dated the landslide to around 9,000 years ago, far earlier than the Sumerian record. However, Mr Hempsell, who has published a book on the theory, believes contaminated samples from the asteroid may have confused previous dating attempts.
Academics were also quick to disagree with the findings, which were published in A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels’s Impact Event.
John Taylor, a retired expert in Near Eastern archaeology at the British Museum, said there was no evidence that the ancient Sumerians were able to make such accurate astronomical records, while our knowledge of Sumerian language was incomplete.
‘I remain unconvinced by these results,’ he added.
2345 B.C. - Eco-disaster focused in the Levant as shown in tree-rings.
The French archaeologist, Marie-Agnes Courty, presented a paper at the Society for Inter-Disciplinary Studies’ July 1997 conference at Cambridge University, in which she first detailed the findings of excavations at a site in northern Syria, at Tell Leilan. This was the first time ever that an archaeological excavation had been initiated where the main purpose was to examine the stratigraphical record of the area with a view to searching for evidence of ’scorched earth’ due to a suspected episode of extra-terrestrial ‘fireball bombardment’.
She and her team found much evidence of microscopic glass spherules typical of melted sand and rock which is caused by the intense heat resulting from an asteroid impact or air-burst. She recommended further excavations there and at other sites. It would make sense that attention should be focussed on sites once occupied at dates where the tree-ring chronologies show evidence of abrupt climate changes - as at Tell Leilan in northern Syria, where the ‘burn event’ has now been dated by Courty as immediately prior to 2345 BC, a ‘narrowest tree-ring’ date.
Another with no human fatality numbers included in the calculations.
Scientists have found the first evidence that a devastating meteor impact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapse of civilisations more than 4,000 years ago.
Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile- wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs. Today’s crater lies on what would have been shallow sea 4,000 years ago, and any impact would have caused devastating fires and flooding. The catastrophic effect of these could explain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline around 2300 BC. - The crater’s faint outline was found by Dr Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on satellite images of the Al ‘Amarah region, about 10 miles north-west of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates and home of the Marsh Arabs. (Robert Matthews Science Correspondent, The Telegraph - London 11-4-1)
1628 B.C. - "The Exodus" - Biblical scholars have been debating the date of the so-called Exodus for hundreds of years. The most recent researches have indicated that there was no exodus as depicted in the Bible, it was all made up by post-exilic priests - to create a "history" justifying their elite status and privileges. More than that, based on historical knowledge of how things were done in those times, they probably were not even related to any of the people "carried away to Babylon" in the first place. And so, it seems logical to speculate that the background information contained in the Exodus story - and other related stories in the Bible, such as the collapse of Jericho and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - were legendary stories of events that occurred around the time of the eruption of Thera which has been fairly securely fixed around 1600 B.C. plus or minus 50 years. Mike Baillie reports that whatever happened at this period of history that includes this monstrous eruption, it was global in effect as is shown in the tree-ring chronologies. In other words, more was going on than just a volcanic eruption. Again, no numbers of fatalities to plug into the calculations though there are many ancient reports of plague and mass death and Egyptian records report many strange sky, weather, and plague phenomena.
1159 B.C. - Collapse of Shang and Mycenean cultures. Collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean region. Wikipedia tells us:
The Bronze Age collapse is the name given by those historians who see the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, as violent, sudden and culturally disruptive, expressed by the collapse of palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia, replaced after a hiatus by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Age period of history of the Ancient Middle East.
Mike Baillie points out that a series of impacts/overhead explosions, would more adequately explain the longstanding problem of the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century BC. At that time, many - uncountable - major sites were destroyed and totally burned and it has all been blamed on those supernatural "Sea Peoples." If that was the case, if it was invasion and conquest, there ought to at least be some evidence for that, like dead warriors or signs of warfare… but for the most part, that is not the case. There were almost no bodies found, and no precious objects except those that were hidden away as though someone expected to return for them, or didn’t have time to retrieve them. The people who fled (extra-terrestrial events often have precursor activities and warnings because a comet can often be observed approaching for some time) were probably also killed in the act of fleeing and the result was total abandonment and total destruction of the cities in question.
John Lewis did not include this in his calculations either.
207 B.C. - Scientists Say Comet Smashed Into Southern Germany In 200 BC
A comet or asteroid smashed into modern-day Germany some 2,200 years ago, unleashing energy equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs, scientists reported on Friday.
The 1.1-kilometre (0.7-mile) diameter rock whacked into southeastern Bavaria, leaving an "exceptional field" of meteorites and impact craters that stretch from the town of Altoetting to an area around Lake Chiemsee, the scientists said in an article in the latest issue of US magazine Astronomy.
Colliding with the Earth’s atmosphere at more than 43,000 kms per hour, the space rock probably broke up at an altitude of 70 kms), they believe.
The biggest chunk smashed into the ground with a force equivalent to 106 million tonnes of TNT, or 8,500 Hiroshima bombs.
"The forest beneath the blast would have ignited suddenly, burning until the impact’s blast wave shut down the conflagration," the investigators said.
"Dust may have been blown into the stratosphere, where it would have been transported around the globe easily… The region must have been devastated for decades."
The biggest crater is now a circular lake called Tuettensee, measuring 370 metres (1,200 feet) across. Scores of smaller craters and other meteorite impacts can be spotted in an elliptical field, inflicted by other debris.
The study was carried out by the Chiemgau Impact Research Team, whose five members included a mineralogist, a geologist and an astronomer. […]
Additional evidence comes from local discoveries of Celtic artefacts, which appear to have been scorched on one side.
That helped to establish an approximate date for the impact of between 480 and 30 BC.
The figure may be fine-tuned to around 200 BC, thanks to tree-ring evidence from preserved Irish oaks, which show a slowing in growth around 207 BC.
This may have been caused by a veil of dust kicked up the impact, which filtered out sunlight.
In addition, Roman authors at about the same time wrote about showers of stones falling from the skies and terrifying the populace.
The object is more likely to have been a comet than an asteroid, given the length of the ellipse and scattered debris, the report says.
44 B.C. - Pliny states that there were "Portentous and protracted eclipses of the sun occur, such as the one after the murder of Caesar the dictator…." Yet there were no solar eclipses visible from anywhere in the Roman Empire from Feb. of 48 B.C. through Dec. of 41 B.C., inclusive. There was a spectacular daylight comet in 44 B.C., perhaps the most famous comet in antiquity. A dust veil occluded the sky over Italy in the spring of 44, and has often been attributed to an (unconfirmed) eruption of Mt Etna. There are sulfate deposits in the Greenland ice cores for this year and there is tree ring evidence from North America, where dendrochronology points to a climatic change in the late 40’s B.C. What hit and where it hit, has yet to be determined, and whether or not there was death and destruction somewhere on the globe, is unknown.
John S. Lewis does not include this event in his calculations.
60 - 70 AD - The destruction of Jerusalem.
The story Josephus tells of the sixties is one of famine, social unrest, institutional deterioration, bitter internal conflicts, class warfare, banditry, insurrections, intrigues, betrayals, bloodshed, and the scattering of Judeans throughout Palestine. … There were wars, rumors of wars for the better part of ten years and Josephus reports portents, including a brilliant daylight in the middle of the night! (Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, 1988, 2006)
We recognize that brilliant daylight at night from the Tunguska event.
Josephus gives several portents of the evil to befall Jerusalem and the temple. He described a star resembling a sword, a comet, a light shining in the temple, a cow giving birth to a lamb at the moment it was to be sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple, armies fighting in the sky, and a voice from the Holy of Holies declaring, "We are departing" (Josephus, Jewish Wars, 6). (Obviously, the voice was apocryphal.)
Some of these portents are mentioned by other contemporary historians, Tacitus for example. However, Tacitus, in book five of his Histories, castigated the superstitious Jews for not recognizing and offering expiations for the portents to avert the disasters. He put the destruction of Jerusalem down to the stupidity or willful ignorance of the Jews themselves in not offering the appropriate sacrifices.
Thus there was a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city [Jerusalem], and a comet, that continued a whole year… (Josephus, Jewish Wars 6.3)
In short, it very well may be that the eschatological writings in the New Testament, the very formation of the Myth of Jesus, was based on cometary events of the time, including a memory of the "Star in the East." The destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem may very well have been an "act of God," as reported by Mark in his Gospel.
312 A.D.- Italy - A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock’s impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity. The small, circular Cratere del Sirente in central Italy is clearly an impact crater, said the geologists because its shape fits and it is also surrounded by numerous smaller, secondary craters, gouged out by ejected debris, as expected from impact models.
Radiocarbon dating puts the crater’s formation at about the right time to have been witnessed by Constantine and there are magnetic anomalies detected around the secondary craters - possibly due to magnetic fragments from the meteorite. It would have struck the Earth with the force of a small nuclear bomb, perhaps a kiloton in yield. It would have looked like a nuclear blast, with a mushroom cloud and shockwaves.
476 A.D. - I-hsi and Chin-ling, China - "Thundering chariots" "like granite" fell to ground; vegetation was scorched.
526 A.D. - Great Antioch earthquake
…those caught in the earth beneath the buildings were incinerated and sparks of fire appeared out of the air and burned everyone they struck like lightning. The surface of the earth boiled and foundations of buildings were struck by thunderbolts thrown up by the earthquakes and were burned to ashes by fire… it was a tremendous and incredible marvel with fire belching out rain, rain falling from tremendous furnaces, flames dissolving into showers … as a result Antioch became desolate … in this terror up to 250,000 people perished. (John Malalas quoted by Jeffreys, E., Jeffreys, M. and Scott, R. 1986, "The Chronicle of John Malalas", Byzantina Australiensia, Australian Assoc. Byzantine Studies 4, Melbourne.)
536 - 545 A.D. - reduced sunlight, mists or "dry fogs, crop failures, famines in China and the Mediterranean, and plagues."
The Praetorian Prefect Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator wrote a letter documenting the conditions.
All of us are observing, as it were, a blue coloured sun; we marvel at bodies which cast no mid-day shadow, and at that strength of intensest heat reaching extreme and dull tepidity … So we have had a winter without storms, spring without mildness, summer without heat … The seasons have changed by failing to change; and what used to be achieved by mingled rains cannot be gained from dryness only.
Procopius of Caesarea, a Byzantine, wrote:
And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed.
John of Ephesus, cleric and a historian, wrote:
The sun was dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months; each day it shone for about four hours; and still this light was only a feeble shadow … the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes.
In the wake of this inexplicable darkness, crops failed and famine struck. And then, pestilence. But here we mean "pestilence" as Jacme d’Agramaont, a doctor writing in 1348 described it in reference to the "Black Death".
… Agramont said nothing concerning the term epidemia, but he extensively developed what he meant by pestilencia. He gave this latter term a very peculiar etymology, in accordance with a from of knowledge established by Isidore of Seville (570=636) in his Etymologiae, which came to be widely accepted throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. He split the term pestilencia up into three syllables, each having a particular meaning: pes = tempesta: ’storm, tempest’; te = ‘temps, time’, lencia = clardat: ‘brightness, light’; hence, he concluded, the pestilencia was ‘the time of tempest caused by light from the stars.’ [Jon Arrizabalaga, see Part One]
During the time of Justinian, this "pestilence" ravaged Europe, reducing the population of the Roman empire by a third, killing four-fifths of the citizens of Constantinople, reaching as far East as China and as far Northwest as Great Britain. John of Ephesus documented the progress of this "pestilence" in AD 541-542 in Constantinople, where city officials gave up trying to count the dead after two hundred thirty thousand:
The city stank with corpses as there were neither litters nor diggers, and corpses were heaped up in the streets … It might happen that [a person] went out to market to buy necessities and while he was standing and talking or counting his change, suddenly the end would overcome the buyer here and the seller there, the merchandise remaining in the middle with the payment for it, without there being either buyer or seller to pick it up.
This was also the time assigned to the legendary King Arthur, the loss of the Grail, and the manifestation of the Wasteland. Although scholars place the historical King Arthur in the fifth century, the date of his death is given as AD 539. According to Mike Baillie, the imagery from the Arthurian legend is in accordance with the appearance of a comet and subsequent famine and plague: the "Waste Land" of legend. Ireland’s St. Patrick stories feature a wasteland as well. And although St. Patrick is credited with ridding Ireland of snakes, we might consider that there never were snakes in Ireland, and that snakes and dragons are images associated with comets.
Until that point in time, the Britons had held control of post-Roman Britain, keeping the Anglo-Saxons isolated and suppressed. After the Romans were gone, the Britons maintained the status quo, living in towns, with elected officials, and carrying on trade with the empire. After AD 536, the year reported as the "death of Arthur", the Britons, the ancient Cymric empire that at one time had stretched from Cornwall in the south to Strathclyde in the north, all but disappeared, and were replaced by Anglo-Saxons. There is much debate among scholars as to whether the Anglo-Saxons killed all of the Britons, or assimilated them. Here we must consider that they were victims of possibly many overhead cometary explosions which wiped out most of the population of Europe, plunging it into the Dark Ages which were, apparently, really DARK, atmospherically speaking.
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The mystery of the origins of the red dragon symbol, now on the flag of Wales, has perplexed many historians, writers and romanticists, and the archæological community generally has refrained from commenting on this most unusual emblem, claiming it does not concern them. In the ancient Welsh language it is known as ‘Draig Goch’ - ‘red dragon’, and in "Y Geiriadur Cymraeg Prifysgol Cymru", the "University of Wales Welsh Dictionary", (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1967, p. 1082) there are translations for the various uses of the Welsh word ‘draig’. Amongst them are common uses of the word, which is today taken just to mean a ‘dragon’, but in times past it has also been used to refer to ‘Mellt Distaw’ - (sheet lightning), and also ‘Mellt Didaranau’ - (lightning unaccompanied by thunder).
But the most interesting common usage of the word in earlier times, according to this authoritative dictionary, is ‘Maen Mellt’ the word used to refer to a ‘meteorite’. And this makes sense, as the Welsh word ‘maen’ translates as ’stone’, while the Welsh word ‘mellt’ translates as ‘lightning’ - so literally a ‘lightning-stone’. That the ancient language of the Welsh druids has words still in use today which have in the past been used to describe both a dragon and also a meteorite, is something that greatly helps us to follow the destructive ‘trail of the dragon’ as it was described in early Welsh ‘riddle-poems’. […]
The exact nature and sequence of events in the mid-6th. century A.D. that gave rise to the period we refer to as the European ‘Dark Age’ is still a matter for speculation amongst historians and archæologists. Over the past 20 years or so, certain paleo-climatologists have begun comparing notes with archæologists and astronomers, and interestingly, in the absence of written records, many have begun to look a little more closely at mythology in their efforts to corroborate the findings of their researches. While much of this recent bout of inter-disciplinary brainstorming has focussed on the 6th.C. AD start of the European Dark Age, earlier dates are also of great interest to those embroiled in this veritable ‘paradigm shift’.[…]
In recent years certain astronomers have increasingly come to appreciate that encoded in the folklore and mythologies of many cultures are the accurate observations of ancient skywatchers. Almost all tell of times when death and mass destruction came from the skies, events that are often portrayed as ‘celestial battles’ between what they variously depicted as ‘the Gods’. And curiously the imagery in these ‘myths’ have many common features, even between the mythologies of cultures widely spaced in time and location.[The European ‘Dark Age’ And Welsh Oral Tradition]
Out on the Asian steppes, whatever happened in AD 536 caused political upheaval. The horse-based economy of the warlike Avars foundered, and their vassals, the cattle-herding Turks, overthrew them. Driven from the steppes, the Avars joined forces with the Slavs in Hungary on the borders of the Roman empire.
Gildas, who was writing at approximately 540 AD, says that the island of Britain was on fire from sea to sea " … until it had burned almost the whole surface of the island and was licking the western ocean with its fierce red tongue."[5] . In "The Life of St. Teilo" contained in the Llandaf Charters, of St. Teilo, who had recently been made Bishop of Llandaf Cathedral in Morganwg, South Wales, it says:
" … however he could not long remain, on account of the pestilence which nearly destroyed the whole nation. It was called the Yellow Pestilence, because it occasioned all persons who were seized by it to be yellow and without blood, and it appeared to men a column of a watery cloud, having one end trailing along the ground, and the other above, proceeding in the air, and passing through the whole country like a shower going through the bottom of valleys. Whatever living creatures it touched with its pestiferous blast, either immediately died, or sickened for death … and so greatly did the aforesaid destruction rage throughout the nation, that it caused the country to be nearly deserted".
St. Teilo is recorded as having left South Wales for Brittany to escape the Yellow Pestilence, and that it lasted for some 11 years.
In 540 AD, in Yemen, the Great Dam of Marib, dating from around the seventh century B.C., one of the engineering wonders of the ancient world and a central part of the south Arabian civilization, broke and began to collapse. By 550 AD, the dam was a complete loss and thousands of people migrated to another oasis on the Arabian peninsula, Medina. The Arab tribes, traumatized by the environmental disasters around them, began to think of conquest for the sake of survival. In 610 AD, a new leader unified them: Muhammad.
Although a great many historical changes happened in the seventh century, such as the Roman war with Persia, the rise of Islam, rebellion and civil war in the Roman empire, and the advance of the Slavs driven by the Avars, it can be said that the seeds of these changes, the destruction of the old that made way for the new, can be traced to the environmental catastrophe of 536 AD.
John Lewis does not include any estimates of the death and destruction occurring at that time in his "average number of annual deaths by comets."
580 A.D. - France - Great fireball and blast; Orleans and nearby towns burned.
588 A.D. - June 25 - China - "Red-colored object" fell with "noise like thunder" into furnace; exploded; burned several houses
616 A.D. - Jan. 14 - China - Ten deaths reported in China from meteorite shower; seige towers destroyed
679 A.D. - Coldingham, England - Monastery destroyed by "fire from heaven" as reported in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
764 A.D. - Nara, Japan - Meteorite strikes house.
810 A.D. - Upper Saxony - Charlemagne’s horse startled by meteor; throws him to the ground.
1064 A.D. - Chang-chou, China - Daytime fireball, meteorite fall; fences burned.
1178 A.D. - 18 June on the Julian calendar, 25 June, Gregorian
In this year, on the Sunday before the Feast of St. John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon had first become visible a marvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who were sitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tileted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the divisin a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole lengthe, took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes, and are prepared to stake ther honour on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the above narrative. (Gervase of Canterbury)
1321- 1368 A.D. - O-chia district, China - Iron rain kills people, animals, damages house.
1347 - 1348 A.D. - Black Death - The Black Death - not included in John Lewis’ calculations - killed about half the population of Western Europe. The effects of this event were possibly global though the number of deaths worldwide is unknown.
1348 - 25 Jan. - Earthquake in Carinthia, 16 cities destroyed, fire fell from heaven; over 40,000 dead. John Lewis does not include this event in his calculations.
1369 - Ho-t’ao, China - "Large star" fell, starts fire, soldiers injured.
1490 - 3 Feb. - Ch’ing-yang, Shansi, China - Stones fell like rain; more than 10,000 killed.
1492 - Ensisheim, Alsace - 280-pound meteorite landed; in the same year Columbus reported "a marvelous branch of fire" that fell into the sea as he crossed the Atlantic.
1511 - 14 Sept. - Cremona, Lombardy, Italy - Monk killed with several birds, a sheep.
1516 - May - Nantan, China - "During summertime in May of Jiajing 11th year, stars fell from the northwest direction, five to six fold long, waving like snakes and dragons. They were as bright as lightning and disappeared in seconds". Many of them were recovered by local farmers in 1958 when China needed steel for the "Great Leap Forward" advocated by Mao Zedong. They have coarse octahedral structure and contain 92.35% iron & 6.96% nickel, belonging to IIICD classification of Wasson et al (1980)’s. Most Nantan meteorites weight 150 to 1500 kg. Due to the humid condition, smaller pieces buried in soils of lower valleys have been extensively weathered and oxidized into limonite.
1620 - Punjab, India - Hot iron fell, burned grass; made into dagger knife, two sabres.
1631 - Fall of Magedeburg, Germany
[A] grand storm-wind picked up, the town was inflamed at all possible places, so that even little aid (rescue) was of help (appreciated). … then I saw the whole town of Magdeburg, except dome, monastery and New Market, lying in embers and ashes, which raged only about 3 or 3 1/2 hours, from which I deduced God’s strange omnipotence and punishment. (Geoffrey Mortimer, German Life and Letters 54:2, "Style and Fictionalisation in Eyewitness Personal Accounts of the Thirty Years War")
A "second sun" was seen on and around May 29, 1630, and on May 20, 1631, one year later, Magdeburg fell as described above. The standard historical description of the Fall of Magdeburg goes pretty much as follows:
The fall of Magdeburg horrified Europe. The city had been starved and then was bombarded unmercifully. The artillery shelling grew so bad, the town caught on fire. Over 20,000 of the citizens perished in the siege and the cataclysm that ended it. The city itself was burned to the ground. The cruel and pointless devastation marked a new low, an act abhorred by a generation well accustomed to horrors.
1639 - China - Large stone fell in market; tens killed; tens of houses destroyed.
1648 - Ship near Malacca - Two sailors reported killed on board ship en route from Japan to Sicily.
1654 - Milano, Italy - Monk reported killed by meteorite.
1661 - 9 August - China - Meteorite smashes through roof; no injuries.
1670 - 7 Nov. - China - Meteorite fall, breaks roof beam of house
1761 - Chamblan, France - House struck and burned by meteorite.
1790 - 24 July - Barbotan and Agen, Gascony, France - Meteorite crushes cottage, kills farmer and some cattle.
1794 - 16 June - Siena, Italy - Child’s hat hit; child uninjured
1798 - 19 Dec. - Benares, India - Building struck by meteorite
1801 - 30 Oct. - Suffolk, England - "Dwelling-house of Mr. Woodrosse, miller, near Horringer-mill, Suffolk, was set on fire by a meteor, and entirely consumed, together with a stable adjoining."
1803- 4 July - E. Norton, England - White Bull public house struck, chimney knocked down, grass burned, flight of object nearly horizontal.
1803 - 13 Dec - Massing, Czech. - Building struck by meteorite.
1810 - July - Shahabad, India - Great stone fell five villages burned; several killed.
1823 - 10 Nov. - Waseda, Japan - Meteorite strikes house.
1825 - 16 Jan. - Oriang, India - Man reported killed, woman injured by meteorite fall.
1827 - 27 Feb. - Mhow, India - Man struck on arm, tree broken by meteorite.
1835 - 13 Nov. - Belley, Dept. de l’Ain, France - Fireball sets fire to barn.
1836 - 11 Dec. Macaé, Brazil - Several homes damaged, several oxen killed by meteorite.
1841 - Chiloe Archipel, Chile - Fire caused by meteorite fall.
1845 - 6 May - Ch’ang-shou, Szechwan, China - Stone meteorite damages more than 100 tombs.
1847 - 14 July - Braunau, Bohemia - A 37-lb iron smashes through roof of house.
1850 - 17 Oct. - Szu-mao, China - Meteorite falls through roof of house.
1858 - 9 Dec. Ausson, France - Building hit by meteorite.
1860 - 1 May - New Concord, Ohio - Colt struck and killed by meteorite.
1868 - 8 Aug. - Pillistfer, Estonia - Building struck.
1869 - 1 Jan - Hessle, Sweden - Man missed by few meters.
1870 - 23 Jan. - Nedagolla, India - Man stunned by meteorite. (Don’t know if this means the man was "amazed" or if he was hit and physically knocked senseless.)
1871 - 8 Oct. - Great Chicago Fire. See Comet Biela and Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow (Another item that John Lewis has not entered into his calculations.)
1872 - Banbury, England - Fireball fells trees, wall
1874 - 30 June - Chin-kuei Shan, Ming-tung Li, China - Thunderstorm; huge stone fell, crushed cottage, killed child.
1876 - 16 Feb - Judesegeri, India - Water tank struck by meteorite.
1877 - 3 Jan. - Warrenton, Missouri - Man missed by few meters.
1877 - 21 Jan. - De Cewsville, Ontario - Man missed by few meters.
1879 - 14 Jan. - Newtown, Indiana - Leonidas Grover reported killed in bed by meteorite. (possible hoax in Paducah Daily News).
1879 - 31 Jan. - Dun-le-Poelier, France - Farmer reported killed by meteorite.
1879 - 12 Nov. - Huan-hsiang, China - Rain of stones; many houses damaged; sulfur smell.
1881 - 19 Nov. Grosliebenthal, Russia - Man reported injured by meteorite.
1887 - 19 March - Barque J.P.A., N. Atlantic - Fireball "fell into water very close alongside".
1893 - 22 Nov. - Zabrodii, Russia - Building struck by meteorite.
1897 - 11 Mar - New Martinsville, West Virginia - A man was reportedly struck, a horse killed, and walls pierced.
1906 - 4 Nov. - Diep River, S. Africa - Building struck
1907 - 5 Sept - Hsin-p’ai Wei, Weng-Li - Stone fell; whole family crushed to death
1907 - 7 Dec. - Bellefontaine, Ohio - Meteorite starts fire, destroys house.
1908 - 30 June - Tunguska valley, Siberia - Two reportedly killed, many injured by Tunguska blast.
1909 - 29 May - Shepard, Texas - Meteor drops through house.
1910 - 27 April - Mexico - Giant meteor bursts, falls in mountains, starts forest fire.
1911 - 16 June - Kilbourn, Wisconsin - Meteorite struck barn
1911 - 28 June - Nakhla, Egypt - Dog struck and killed by meteorite
1912 - 19 July - Holbrook, Arizona - Building struck; 14,000 stones fell; man missed by a few meters
1914 - 9 Jan. - W. France - Meteor explosions break windows
1914 - 22 Nov - Batavia, New York - Meteorites damage farm
1916 - 18 Jan. - Baxter, Missouri - Building struck
1917 - 3 Dec - Strathmore, Scotland - Building struck
1918 - 30 June - Richardton, N. Dakota - Building struck
1921 - 15 July - Berkshire Hills, Mass. - Meteor starts fire in Berkshires
1921 - 21 Dec. - Beirut, Syria - Building hit
1922 - 2 Feb. - Baldwyn, Mississippi - Man missed by 3 meters
1922 - 24 April - Barnegat, New Jersey - Rocked buildings, shattered windows, clouds of noxious gas - overhead explosion of comet fragment.
1922 - 30 May - Nagai, Japan - Person missed by several meters
1924 - 6 July - Johnstown, Colorado - Man missed being hit by 1 meter
1927 - 28 April - Aba, Japan - Girl struck and injured by "dubious" (?) meteorite
1929 - 8 Dec. Zvezvan, Yugoslavia - Meteor hits bridal party, kills 1
1930 - 13 Aug. - Brazil - The "Rio Curaca event." Brazlilian "Tunguska event"; fire and "depopulation" - "An ear-piercing "whistling" sound, which might be understood as being a manifestation of the electrophonic phenomena which have been discussed in WGN over the past few years; the sun appearing to be "blood-red" before the explosion. The event occurred at about 8h local time, so that the bolide probably came from the sunward side of the earth. If the object were spawning dust and meteoroids– that is, it was cometary in nature–then, since low-inclination, eccentric orbits produce radiants close to the sun, it might be that the solar coloration (which, in this explanation, would have been witnessed elsewhere) was due to such dust in the line of sight to the sun. In short, the earth was within the tail of the small comet. There was a fall of fine ash prior to the explosion, which covered the surrounding vegetation with a blanket of white.
1931 - 10 July - Malinta, Ohio - Blast, crater, smell of sulfur, windows broken in farmhouse; four telephone poles snapped, wires down; overhead cometary fragment explosion
1931 - 8 Sept. - Hagerstown, Maryland - Meteor crashes through roof in Hagerstown
1932 - 4 Aug. - Sao Christovao, Brazil - Fall destroys warehouse roof
1932 - 10 Aug - Archie, Missouri - Homestead struck, person missed by less than 1 meter
1933 - 24 Feb. - Stratford, Texas - Bright fireball, 4-lb metallic mass falls, grass burned
1933 - 8 Aug. - Sioux Co., Nebraska - Man missed by a few meters.
1934 - 16 Feb. - Texas - Pilot swerves to avoid crash with fireball
1934 - 18 Feb - Seville, Spain - House struck, burned.
1934 - 28 Sept. - California - Pilot escapes fireball shower (one assumes this means he performed evasive maneuvers)
1935 - 11 Aug. - Briggsdale, Colorado - Man narrowly missed by meteorite
1935 - 11 Dec. - 21h local time - British Guyana - Lat: 2 deg 10min North, Long: 59 deg 10 min West, close to Marudi Mountain. A report from Serge A. Korff of the Bartol Research Foundation, Franklin Institute (Delaware, USA) suggested that the region of devastation might be greater than that involved in the Tunguska event itself. Eye-witness accounts were n accord with a large meteoroid/small asteroid entry, with a body passing overhead accompanied by a terrific roar (presumably electrophonic effects), later concussions, and the sky being lit up like daylight. A local aircraft operator, Art Williams, reported seeing an area of forest more than twenty miles (32 kilometers) in extent which had been destroyed, and he later stated that the shattered jungle was elongated rather than circular, as occurred at Tunguska and would be expected from the air blast caused by an object entering away from the vertical (the most likely entry angle for all cosmic projectiles is 45 degrees).
1936 - 14 Mar. - Red Bank, New Jersey - Meteorite through shed roof
1936 - 2 Apr. -Yurtuk, USSR - Building struck
1936 - 19 Oct. - Newfoundland - Fisherman’s boat set on fire by meteorite
1938 - 31 Mar. - Kasamatsu, Japan - Meteorite pierces roof of ship
1938 - 16 Jun. - Pantar, Phillipines - Several buildings struck
1938 - 24 Jun. - Chicora, Pennsylvania - A cow struck and injured
1938 - 29 Sep. - Benld, Illinois - Garage and car struck by 4-lb stone
1941 - 10 Jul. -Black Moshannon Park, Pennsylvania - Person missed by 1 m
1942 - 6 Apr. -Pollen, Norway - Person missed by 1 m
1940s - Qatar - A crater, believed to have been created by the impact of a falling meteor, found near Dukhan. Sheikh Salman bin Jabor al-Thani, head of the astronomical department at Qatar Scientific Club, said yesterday the club believed that the meteor had hit Qatar in the 1940s. The club started a search for evidence three years ago because of stories of a "falling star" told by people of that era. The club took the help of Google Earth in the search. They succeeded in locating five craters, which were just visible on the surface.
1946 - 16 May -Santa Ana, Nuevo Leon - Meteorite destroys many houses, injures 28
1946 - 30 Nov. -Colford, Gloucestershire, UK - Telephones knocked out, boy knocked off bicycle
1947 - 12 Feb. -Sikhote Alin, Vladivostok - An iron meteorite that broke up only about 5 miles above the earth rained iron. It produced over 100 craters with the largest being around 85 feet in diameter. The strewnfield covered an area of about 1 mile by a half mile. There were no fires or similar destruction like that found at Tunguska. Shredded trees and broken branches mostly. A total of 23 tons of meteorites were recovered and it’s been estimated it’s total mass was around 70 tons when it broke up.
1949 - 21 Sep. - Beddgelert, Wales - Building struck
1949 - 20 Nov. -Kochi, Japan - Hot meteoritic stone enters house through window
1950 - 23 May. - Madhipura, India - Building struck
1950 - 20 Sept. -Murray, Kentucky - Several buildings struck
1950 - 10 Dec. - St. Louis, Missouri - Car struck
1953 - 03 Mar. -Pecklesheim, FRG - Person missed by several meters
1954 - 07 Jan. -Dieppe, France - Meteorite-building explosion, smashed windows
1954 - 28 Nov. -Sylacauga, Alabama - Mrs. Annie Hodges struck by 4-kg meteorite that crashed through roof, destroyed radio
1955 - 17 Jan. -Kirkland, Washington - Two irons break through amateur astronomer’s observatory dome; one sets a fire.
1955 - one of the few documented case of a person being hit by a meteorite occurred. (Source - need more details)
1956 - 29 Feb. -Centerville, S. Dakota - Building hit
1959 - 13 Oct. -Hamlet, Indiana - Building hit
1961 - 23 Feb. -Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia - Loading dock struck
1961 - 6 Sept. -Bells, Texas - Meteorite strikes rook of house
1962 - 26 Apr. -Kiel, FRG - Building hit
1963 - Massachusetts - meteorite fell (need more details on this one.)
1965 - 24 Dec. - Barwell, England - Two buildings struck and a car struck
1967 - 11 Jul. -Denver, Colorado - Building struck
1968 - 12 Apr. -Schenectady, New York - House hit
1969 - 25 Apr. -Bovedy, N. Ireland - Building hit
1969 - 7 Aug. -Andreevka, USSR - Building hit
1969 - 16 Sept. -Suchy Dul, Czechoslovakia - Building hit
1969 - 28 Sept. -Murchison, Australia - Building hit
1971 - 8 Apr. -Wethersfield, Connecticut - House struck by meteorite
1971 - 2 Aug. -Havero, Finland - Building hit
1973 - 15 Mar. -San Juan Capistrano, California - Building hit
1973 - 27 Oct. -Canon City, Colorado - Building hit
1974 - 18 Aug. -Naragh, Iran - Building hit
1977 - 31 Jan. -Louisville, Kentucky - Three buildings and a car struck
1979 - 7 Jun. -Cilimus, Indonesia - Meteorite fell in garden
1979 - 22 Sept. - The Vela Incident (sometimes known as the South Atlantic Flash) - The flash was detected on 22 September 1979, at 00:53 GMT, by a US Vela satellite that was specifically developed to detect nuclear explosions. The satellite reported the characteristic double flash (a very fast and very bright flash, then a longer and less-bright one) of an atmospheric nuclear explosion of two to three kilotons, in the Indian Ocean between Bouvet Island and the Prince Edward Islands at 47° S 40° E. Hydrophones operated by the U.S. Navy detected a signal which was consistent with a small nuclear explosion on or slightly under the surface of the water near the Prince Edward Islands. The radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, also detected an anomalous traveling ionospheric disturbance at the same time. "There remains uncertainty about whether the South Atlantic flash in September 1979 recorded by optical sensors on the U.S. Vela satellite was a nuclear detonation and, if so, to whom it belonged."
1981 - 13 Jun. -Salem, Oregon - Building hit
1982 - 8 Nov. -Wethersfield, Connecticut - Pierced roof of house
1984 - 15 Jun. - Nantong, PRC - Man missed by 7 m
1984 - 30 Jun. -Aomori, Japan - Building struck
1984 - 22 Aug. -Tomiya, Japan - Two buildings hit
1984 - 30 Sept. - Binnigup, Australia - Two sunbathers missed by 5 m
1984 - 5 Dec. -Cuneo, Italy - Strong explosion, building flash; windows broken; daytime fireball "bright as Sun"
1984 - 10 Dec. -Claxton, Georgia - Mailbox destroyed by meteorite
1985 - 6 Jan. -La Criolla, Argentina - Farmhouse roof pierced, door smashed; 9.5-kg stone misses woman by 2 m
1985 - 26 June - Hartford, Conn. - a 1,500-pound slab of ice, six feet long and eight inches thick flattened a picket fence. The ground shook with the impact. A 13-year-old boy and his friend were standing 10 feet away.
1986 - 29 Jul. -Kokubunji, Japan - Several buildings hit
1988 - 1 Mar. -Trebbin, GDR - Greenhouse struck by meteorite
1988 - 18 May -Torino, Italy - Building struck
1989 - 12 Jun. -Opotiki, New Zealand - Building hit
1989 - 15 Aug. -Sixiangkou, PRC - Building hit
1990 - 7 Apr. -Enschede, Netherlands - House hit by believed fragment of Midas
1990 - 2 Jul. -Masvingo, Zimbabwe - Person missed by 5 m
1991 - Tahara, Japan - Meteorite struck deck of car-transport ship; made crater
1991 - 31 Aug. -Noblesville, Indiana - Meteorite fall missed two boys by 3.5 m
1992 - 14 Aug. -Mbale, Uganda - Forty-eight stones fall; roofs damaged, boy struck on head
1992 - 9 Oct. -Peerskill, New York - Car trunk, floor pierced by meteorite
1994 - 18 Jan. - Cando, Spain - an explosion that occurred in the village of Cando, Spain, in the morning of January 18, 1994. There were no casualties in this incident, which has been described as being like a small Tunguska event. Witnesses claim to have seen a fireball in the sky lasting for almost one minute. A possible explosion site was established when a local resident called the University of Santiago de Compostela to report an unknown gouge in a hillside close to the village. Up to 200 m³ of terrain was missing and trees were found displaced 100 m down the hill.
1994 - 16 July - Fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy begin impacting Jupiter.
1994 - 20 Oct. -Coleman, Michigan - Meteorite penetrated roof of house (1997)
1995 - Neagari, Japan - Meteorite penetrated car trunk
1996 - 26 Nov. - Honduras - According to the Associated Press: "A meteorite slammed into a sparsely populated area of Honduras last month, terrifying residents and leaving a 165-foot-wide crater, scientists confirmed Sunday. Near San Luis, in the western province of Santa Barbara.
1997 - 11 Apr. -Chambrey, France - Meteorite penetrated roof of car; set fire
1998 - 13 Jun. -Portales, New Mexico - Meteorite penetrated barn roof
1998 - 12 Jul. -Kitchener, Ontario - Meteorite falls 1 m from golfer
2000 - January - Canada - a 150-tonne meteoroid lit the skies over Whitehorse, and exploded over a lake about 100 kilometres south of the city. The Tagish Lake meteor produced a treasure of information about a rare kind of meteorite.
2000 - January - Iberian peninsula - ice chunks weighing up to 6.6 pounds rained on Spain for 10 days causing extensive damage to cars and an industrial storage facility. At first, scientists thought the phenomenon was unique to Spain. During the past three years, however, they’ve accumulated strong evidence that megacryometeors are falling all around the globe. More than 50 falls have been confirmed, and researchers believe that’s a small fraction of the actual number, since others may hit unoccupied areas or melt before discovery. Most megacrymeteor falls occur in January, February and March. Megacryometeors show the telltale onionskin layering seen in hailstones. They also contain dust particles and air pockets found in hail. But they are formed in cloudless skies, a notion that defies research on hail formation.
2001 - 25 July to 23 Sept. - Kerala, India - red rain sporadically fell; staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. The rains were the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student Santosh Kumar. The red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin. The findings published in the international journal ‘Astrophysics and Space Science’ state that the cometery fragment contained dense collection of red cells.
2002 - 6 June - asteroid/comet explosion over the Mediterranean. Estimated at five to 10 meters in diameter, it released a burst of energy comparable to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
2002 - 24 Sept. - near Bodaibo (Bodaybo), near Irkutsk, Siberia - 1:50 am - Eye-witness accounts of the event reported a large luminous object falling to Earth near Bodiabo in Siberia. Hunters in the region have also reported the existence of a crater surrounded by burnt forest suggesting that an impact event had occurred. The event was detected by near-by geophones as a moderate-earthquake. The event was also detected by a U.S. anti-missile defense military satellite. Some attempts were made to define the magnitude of the explosion. US military analysts calculated it was between 0.2 - 0.5 kilotons, while Russian physicist Andrey Olkhovatov estimates it at 4 - 5 kilotons. Information about the event appeared in the mass media and among scientists after only a week. Another report says it occurred on the 25th of September at 10:00 p.m.
2004 - June - Auckland, New Zealand - Meteor crashes through roof of home, damages sofa. The meteorite was a four billion-year-old 1.3 kg rock. "There was this huge bang and a cloud of dust and debris went through the front room. I thought a car had hit the house." In the only account in New Zealand of a meteorite crashing into a house, the chunk of space rock punched a hole through the roof of the Archers’ home, bounced off their couch, ricocheted off the ceiling and back on to the couch before ending up on the floor.
2004 - 3 Sept. - a small asteroid exploded in the stratosphere above Antarctica depositing sufficient micron-sized dust particles to cause ‘local cooling, and much speculation as to the possible effects on the ozone layer.
2006 - 1 Feb. - Canada - In Calgary on February 1st, 20 people reported seeing a fireball, an exceptionally bright meteor, streak across the sky just before 7 a.m., lasting for several seconds before breaking up into fragments. It was estimated that remnants of the meteorite landed about 400 km south of Calgary somewhere in Montana about two minutes after it appeared as a ball of fire.
2006 - 1 Feb. - Bangladesh - A ‘meteor’ from outer space fell with a big bang on a field in Singpara village of sadar upazila yesterday afternoon creating panic and curiosity among people. No one was reported hurt. On information Superintendent of Police Khandker Golam Farooq rushed to the spot and asked his companions and villagers to dig the earth near the house of one Fazlur Rahman from where smoke was still emitting. To their amazement they found a lead-like black material three feet below the earth. Hot and weighing 2.5kg, the triangular material looked like a mortar shell, witnesses said. The meteor was kept in custody of the Thakurgaon Police Station.
2006 - 17, 20 Feb. - Scotland - The hunt is on for the crash sites of two meteors near Stirling Castle. Scientists have been spurred into action by reports of spectacular "balls of fire" falling in the area. If discovered, they would be the first meteorites confirmed to have hit north of the Border for almost 100 years. The incidents, reported by several witnesses, were on the evenings of Friday, February 17 and the following Monday, February 20. "Although meteorite falls are rare everywhere, Scotland seems to have escaped remarkably lightly. There have only been four meteorites recovered from Scotland, compared with more than 18 from England and Wales. Statistically, we are overdue another one."
2006 - 12 April - Australia - A Perth astronomer says a spectacular light show in the sky 12/3 was a meteor. Sightings were made as far south as Albany and inland through the Wheat Belt. It lit up the countryside for hundreds of kilometres around the south-west of Western Australia." Witnesses say the the sky lit up about 9:00pm AEDT, and the light was followed by a thundering sound that shook buildings.
2006 - 4 May - TEXAS - Astronomers said a large meteor shower crossed straight over El Paso just before 9:45 p.m. Thursday the 4th of May. One meteor was so large that it cast an orange glow against the mountain. "The animals were going wild, the horses were bucking and dogs were barking and howling and then, all of a sudden right above my house, there was a big bright light and then just ‘Bang!’ And it lit up the five acres that are around us, and then I covered my eyes like this because it was bright and when it got past I saw there was a tail and it just went ‘Shhhh’ toward the Hueco Mountains."
2006 - 2 June - Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Canada - a fireball was spotted estimated to be some 20 miles above the Earth’s surface. A sonic boom was heard in the Lake of the Woods area of Minnesota, so there may be some pieces of the meteor that survived the fall.
2006 - 7 June - Norway - A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, June 7th, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle. ‘I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke. I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away.’ The meteor struck a mountainside in Reisadalen. The country’s leading astronomer said he expects the meteor to prove to be the largest to hit Norway in modern times, even bigger than the 198-pound Alta meteorite of 1904. ‘If the meteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may be able to compare it to the bomb.’
2006 - 19 June - Pennsylvania - Residents of the Tuscarawas Valley who heard a deafening boom about 12:40 a.m. Monday the 19th and stepped outside likely saw what one person described as "a marvelous fireball with red streaks in the sky." It probably was a meteor falling through the atmosphere. Numerous callers reported a large red fireball. Several said their homes shook. New Philadelphia police said they received reports from several callers who witnessed the fireball or heard the boom. One woman described it as "a blue light that lit up the sky and went down." Police in Dover said multiple callers reported they heard a loud bang and something rattled their windows. Air Traffic Command in Washington, D.C. confirmed that Cleveland’s control center was checking into a meteor shower that occurred within its air space.
2006 - 10 July - South Africa - An ice ball that landed in Douglasdale, South Africa, might be one of the first ‘megacryometeors’ recorded in Africa. The ice ball, which landed on the pavement in suburban Douglasdale last week, was about the size of a microwave oven. The impact of the ice ball’s fall created a small crater on the pavement, which was covered with pieces of broken ice. Despite sharing many chemical characteristics with hail, ice balls are formed under clear-sky conditions. Ice balls have been recorded since the 19th century. They have the potential to damage people, buildings and cars, but no injuries were reported as a result of this one.
2006 - 14 July - Norway - At 10:20am a bus driver from Ås, south of Oslo, was sitting in the outhouse at his holiday cabin near Rygge on the 14th of July when he heard an enormous blast. Right after that, some particles from a meteor that exploded over the Oslo area rained down just outside. He said he didn’t think too much about the surprising blast at first, dismissing it as probably coming from an exercise at a nearby military air station at Rygge. But he said the blast and the rumbling it caused was terrible. He was just hooking the door when he heard a new noise, a whistling sort of sound, followed by a new bang on some aluminum plates lying near the outhouse. Sure enough, it was particles from a meteor that exploded somewhere over the Oslo Fjord area on Friday morning. Astronomers confirm Martinsen’s remarkable discovery of meteorite particles on his property. "This is Norway’s 14th meteorite, but we’ve never heard about a meteorite landing so close to a person before." — A family from Moss, south of Oslo, came home from their summer holidays to find a meteorite in their garden. It’s another remnant of the meteor that exploded over the Oslo Fjord area on the 14th of July. Astronomers in Norway are calling the discovery of meteorites around southeast Norway "incredible," and urge local residents to keep looking for more. "Two branches on our plum tree were broken. I lifted them up and there lay this stone." It had made a hole measuring about seven centimeters in his lawn.
2006 - 12 Sept. - New Zealand - A small piece of rock that has been found in a paddock in New Zealand may be a piece of the meteorite that streaked across the sky there Tuesday the 12th, panicking residents who flooded emergency hotlines. A farmer found a 10cm by 5cm piece of "almost weightless" rock in his field today near the town of Dunsandel, south of Christchurch. It has been sent to New Zealand’s National Radiation Laboratory for analysis. The meteorite tore across the sky over the northern half of the South Island in the afternoon, leaving a bright, burning trial behind it and causing a sonic boom that rattled houses and shook the ground. It then apparently erupted into a fireball, sending forth a thick puff of smoke. People were sent running from the homes and offices when they heard the boom, fearing buildings could collapse. The sonic boom was registered on earthquake-detecting equipment. The boom meant the meteorite was probably travelling "very low". It was probably about the size of a basketball as it shredded through the sky and became a "terminal fireball" at a speed of about 40,000kph. "If this had happened at night, it would have lit up the whole countryside."
2006 - 10 Oct. - A fire that destroyed a cottage near Bonn and injured a 77-year-old man was probably caused by a meteor and witnesses saw an arc of blazing light in the sky, German police said on Friday. Burkhard Rick, a spokesman for the police in Siegburg east of Bonn, said the fire gutted the cottage and badly burnt the man’s hands and face in the incident on October 10.
2006 - 1 Dec. - NASA reports - Meteoroids are smashing into the Moon a lot more often than anyone expected. - That’s the tentative conclusion of Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, after his team observed two Leonids hitting the Moon on Nov. 17, 2006. "We’ve now seen 11 and possibly 12 lunar impacts since we started monitoring the Moon one year ago," says Cooke. "That’s about four times more hits than our computer models predicted."
2007 - January - Tampa, Florida - a 200-pound chunk of ice streaked through the clear Florida sky and landed in the back seat of a really nice red Ford Mustang. The car was totaled.
2007 - 4 Jan - Authorities were trying to identify a mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a house in eastern New Jersey. Nobody was injured when the golf-ball sized object, weighing nearly as much as a can of soup, struck the home and embedded itself in a wall Tuesday night. … Approximately 20 to 50 rock-like objects fall every day over the entire planet, said Carlton Pryor, a professor of astronomy at Rutgers University. "It’s not all that uncommon to have rocks rain down from heaven," said Pryor, who had not seen the object that struck the Monmouth County home. "These are usually rocky or a mixture of rock and metal."
2007 - 10 January - Russia - a meteorite fell in January in the Altai Territory in southern Siberia and searchers found an extraterrestrial substance which could be meteorite fragments. "We have collected about 50 samples, and vitreous threads (traces of comet substance) were discovered in the first of them using a microscope." Local motorists and residents witnessed the impact of a fiery ball, which eventually ended in a loud sound resembling an explosion. ~~ Another expedition arrived to the Altai Republic to search for meteorite, which has fallen this January, and to talk with people, who witnessed this event. Expedition crew will visit Uglovsky and Egorievsky districts, where an unknown celestial body has fallen. - Later report: Russian social science and research expedition "Kosmopoisk" has sent four meteorite fragments found in Altai to Moscow laboratory. Research, carried out in field, showed that there exists high probability that two stones out of four are real meteorite fragments. The expedition found a meteorite crater 1.5 kilometer away from their camp, but nasty weather prevented them from detailed studying of said crater.
2007 - 24 Jan. - Virginian, U.S. - Giles County residents were a little shaken after a tremor-like event, others say they heard a loud "thunder-like" sound. Virginia Tech researchers say they received several calls about a meteor sighting the same time of the tremors. The bizarre incident took place around 8pm. Researchers say the seismic station in Giles County did get a very short but intense seismic signal.
2007 - 31 Jan. - Turkey - Police were inundated with calls from scores of people from Didim to Bodrum after they heard a big bang and a flash of light across the skies. The flashing green, yellow and red lights were from a meteorite which crashed through the earth’s atmosphere and landed in Yesilkent. A startled man revealed that the rock had smashed a hole in the ground at the Green Park Complex, at Yesilkent, narrowly missing him by ten metres. Police reported that people from Bodrum, Milas and Didim had heard a bang and seen the flashing light across the skies at about 5:30pm.
2007 - 4 Feb. - Midwestern U.S. - Scores of people all over the Midwest and Upper Midwestern United States reported seeing flames and fiery explosions in the sky Sunday night. From southeastern Wisconsin to as far as Des Moines, Iowa and St. Louis, people reported seeing balls of fire, possibly meteors, streaking across the sky on Sunday night. "We had a pilot reporting seeing a meteor". Reports came from residents in central Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
2007 - 15 Feb. - Ohio - Something happened at around 9 p.m. that a lot of people heard. But nobody seems to have any idea what it was. "It" was a loud bang, something loud enough to be heard all over the county, and loud enough to make small objects move in houses. Rumors range from an earthquake to a meteor strike, a sonic boom to something ice-related. While we may never know for sure, at least one scientist believes the meteor could be the answer. There’s no evidence to suggest an earthquake could have caused the bang, especially not over the range specified. One man said he saw a meteor with a relatively long trail, with red, green and gold coloration. It was headed east to west and lasted about three seconds; after it faded, the sonic boom washed over him. "I saw it first. It was the most eerie, cool, scary, wonderful thing. You just see this dragon tail going across the sky. All of a sudden, everything goes boom."
2007 - 22 Feb. - Rajasthan, India - Three people were killed and four injured in a mysterious blast in a village in India’s northern Rajasthan state Thursday that villagers claim was caused by a meteorite, news reports said. Residents of Banchola village in Bundi district, about 200 kilometres south of Rajasthan capital Jaipur, said the victims were sitting with some iron scrap in an open field when an "object" fell from the sky and hit them, IANS news agency reported.
2007 - 23 Feb. - Panama - Panamanian geologists found a meteorite at Rio Hato, a coastal town west of the capital Panama City. The meteorite fell onto Rio Hato’s beach on Friday. The landing was witnessed by a security guard, who described it as a ball of fire crashing down from the sky onto the sand. The 4.2 kg red object, measuring 20 cm in diameter, was to be X-rayed for more details. The meteorite shows burn marks on its exterior, and appears to be mainly carbon-based, in contrast to most meteorites, which mainly contain iron.
2007 - 15 Mar. - What Richard Yip-Chuck saw fall into a farmer’s field Sunday evening looked like a long, white ball with orange sparks shooting off the back. The Holland Landing resident was driving along Hwy. 7 with his wife, Ele, and sons Kyle, 12, and 10-year-old Dylan, when they saw what looked like a fireball plummet to earth.
2007 - 29 Mar - Flaming debris of a possible meteor almost hit a plane - The pilots of a Chilean passenger jet reported seeing flaming debris fall past their aircraft as it approached the airport at Auckland, New Zealand. The captain "made visual contact with incandescent fragments several kilometres away". The pilots reported the near-miss to air traffic controllers, reportedly saying the noise of the debris breaking the sound barrier could be heard above the roar of his aircraft’s engines.
2007 - 10 May - Spain - Fireball spotted across central Spain. Scientists think some fragments may have fallen to earth in the Ciudad Real area. A fireball fell across the centre of the country on Thursday night with sightings in Cuenca, Toledo, Ciudad Real and Valladolid. Scientists believe it was a meteorite and say it’s quite a normal phenomenon, possibly a fragment from a comet which fell from earth orbit.
2007 - 14 May - Hubbardton, Vermont - Recorded as a 2.1 temblor on the Richter scale, a quake hit at 4:10 a.m. One Hubbardton resident who said he was wide awake at 4 a.m. said he not only felt the earthquake, he saw what caused it. He said he saw something in the sky to the northeast of Lake Hortonia. He believes he saw a meteorite and that’s what triggered the earthquake. "It was like a streak of fire. I’ve heard meteorites hit before and that was what it sounded like. It was no earthquake, it was a meteor."
2007 - 26 May - Woburn, Mass. - Meteorite punched a hole through a warehouse roof.
2007 - 7 June - Norway - A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, June 7th, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle. ‘I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke. I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away.’ The meteor struck a mountainside in Reisadalen. The country’s leading astronomer said he expects the meteor to prove to be the largest to hit Norway in modern times, even bigger than the 198-pound Alta meteorite of 1904. ‘If the meteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may be able to compare it to the bomb.’
2007 - 10 June - Sri Lanka - The strange objects that lit the night skies on June 10 have now been confirmed as meteors. "This is the first time that meteors of such magnitude have fallen in Sri Lanka. The shockwaves and vibrations have been heard throughout the country, from Galle to Puttalam. A Senior Consultant believes that two large meteoroids entered the atmosphere, the larger one splitting into two and the smaller one into about 25 fragments. The loud explosions were some of the particles exploding, probably about 50 to 100 km above the ground. In Kovinna, Andiambalama, at 9.05 p.m. on the 10th, a woman had noticed something unusual in the western sky. A bright light, almost as large as the full moon, appeared to be moving towards her in a wide arc. Alarmed by thoughts of terrorist air attacks, she called out to her neighbour. Together they watched fearfully as the glowing object drew closer, landed on the roof and vanished completely. A few minutes later the air vibrated with a loud explosion. The next day they discovered that parts of the asbestos sheets on the roof were charred and cracked. A few pieces of rock and sand were scattered around the damaged area. Similar incidents were reported around the country that night. Several people in areas such as Puttalam, Maho and Bingiriya also noted the appearance of the bright light in the sky as well as the loud explosion. "In Kimbulapitiya a woman watched a flaming object land on a house and heard the booming sounds soon afterwards." In Campbell Place, Dehiwala, the roofs of two buildings were damaged, and a loud noise was heard. "24 asbestos sheets were broken."
2007 - 6 July - Cali, Colombia, S. America - an incoming object broke apart in the lower atmosphere with a trio of ferocious explosions that shattered windows and shook the ground violently. Moments later, stones rained from the sky and pelted homes in the poor barrios surrounding the city. Some smashed through the roofs of homes. Recovered objects were chondritic (rocky) meteorite.
2007 - 26 July - Iowa - 5:30AM - A Dubuque woman said she is lucky to be alive after a 50 pound chunk of white ice crashed through the roof of her home, landing about 15 feet away from where she was standing. She said it sounded like a bomb exploded when the massive ball of ice hit her roof. Other large chunks of ice fell from the sky in this northeast Iowa city, tearing through nearby trees. Dubuque had clear skies at the time the ice fell.
2007 - 1 August - India - Hotipur (Sangrur) village near Khanauri hit the headlines when a meteorite fell in the fields on Wednesday night, leaving many villagers baffled. The police have taken possession of the 8-cm meteorite to hand it over to a three-member team of Geological Survey of India. Curious villagers queued up in the fields to see the "heavenly object", while the farmer, who was the only witness to the fall of the "fireball", said, "I got scared of the big fireball that was coming my way at 8:45 pm on Wednesday night. I ran for cover as I felt that it will fall on me." (May be hoax.)
2007 - 11 Aug. - 12:09 am - Representatives with the Sonora Police Department and both the Tuolumne and Calaveras County Sheriff’s Departments say they fielded numerous calls early in the morning in regards to a "loud boom," and "structures shaking." There were several calls from residents who reported seeing "a blue light," just before the "loud boom." The incident reportedly occurred at 12:09am. The Police Department notes that it also received a call from a resident in Tuolumne, in which a female reported seeing what she thought was fireworks, and then something spiraling over her house. Early indication from the law enforcement agencies is that the loud boom was somehow the result of a meteor shower.
2007 - 15 Sept. - Peruvian Highlands - The meteorite’s impact sent debris flying up to 820 feet (250 meters) away, with some material landing on the roof of the nearest home 390 feet (120 meters) from the crater. Nearby residents who visited the impact crater complained of headaches and nausea.
2007 - 3 Oct. - Minnesota - Shortly after 2 p.m., people across the Twin Cities reported seeing a "metallic" object or "flaming ball" falling from the sky. Broadcasters and emergency dispatchers got hundreds of calls from people who saw the object traveling from the northeast to the southwest. Residents of Lyon County in far southwestern Minnesota reported a loud boom that might have been connected with the sightings in the Twin Cities. A man who lives near the town of Amiret says it shook his house and sounded like a sonic boom from an F-14 breaking the sound barrier at close range. Coincidentally, at the same time, drivers in the Twin Cities metro were dodging debris in the middle of Interstate 94. Some drivers said the debris fell from the sky shortly after 2:00 p.m. Wednesday.
2008 - 31 January - Didim - POLICE were inundated with calls from scores of people from Didim to Bodrum after they heard a big bang and a flash of light across the skies. A startled Abdullah Arıtürk revealed that the rock had smashed a hole in the ground at the Green Park Complex, at Yeşilkent, narrowly missing him by ten metres.
2008 - 19 Feb. - An apparent meteor streaked through the sky over the Pacific Northwest early Tuesday, drawing reports of bright lights and sonic booms in parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Although a witness reported seeing the object strike the Earth in a remote part of Adams County, in southeast Washington, it still has not been found. People in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia reported seeing the bright fireball streaking across the sky about 5:30 a.m. At least one person said the object exploded on impact in eastern Washington and another report from southeastern Washington said someone felt tremors from the blast.
2008 - 5 Mar. - The Physics and Astronomy Department at Western has a network of all-sky cameras in Southern Ontario that scan the sky monitoring for meteors. Associate Professor Peter Brown, who specializes in the study of meteors and meteorites, says that Wednesday evening (March 5) at 10:59 p.m. EST these cameras captured video of a large fireball and the department has also received a number of calls and emails from people who actually saw the light.
2008 - 8 Mar. - Turkey - A resident of Yaka said he heard a loud roaring noise at around 11:20 a.m. on the day the meteorite fell, sounding as if "a plane had crashed."
"We were amazed to find such a small stone after that thunderous sound. It was black and about 40 centimeters in diameter, weighing three kilograms at most," another said, adding that the meteorite opened a small crater in the ground and created a cloud of dust.
2008 - 10 Mar. - Sudbury, Canada - great balls of fire were seen falling from the sky - While most sightings were reported around 1:30 p.m. near Sudbury, Hagar, Highway 69 North and North Bay, Wayne Lachance spotted something in the sky earlier in the morning. Lachance was driving home to Massey after a night shift at Vale Inco Ltd. when something caught his eye around 7:30 a.m. "I thought it was a real bright star," he said. "It was getting brighter and coming down with sparks." Lachance arrived home and looked outside his bedroom window to see "spirals of smoke" falling.
2008 - 13 Mar. - Meteorite videotaped hitting the Moon.
2008 - 6 April - Argentina - The space rock reportedly crashed late Sunday somewhere in Entre Rios Province, some 260 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, reports the daily Clarin, which quoted a witness, Milton Blumhagen, a student and astronomy buff: "For three or four seconds I saw an object in flames, changing color until it turned blue when it approached the ground.'’ A fire department source said the impact was felt for miles around. No damage was reported.
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As I said, this list is not exhaustive, though I am exhausted from transcribing and pulling the data together! In addition to updating this list from other sources over time, I hope that readers will send in their finds and we can have the most complete list available anywhere, excluding, of course, the classified data that we won’t be getting from our governments.
Meanwhile, of course, we begin to understand why Bill Gates - formerly a regular guy turned elitist - has invested in his Seed Bank.
Ah, the joys of being at the top and the perils of being at the bottom of the pyramidal hierarchy on this planet!
