Diesen laminierten Zeitungsartikel im Posterformat (56 x 34 cm) zum Fall der Holbrook Meteorite hat mir Twink Monrad vor einiger Zeit mal geschickt, vor allem wegen der Augenzeugin
Pauline, denn so wird meine bessere Hälfte von den meisten Leuten in Anlehnung an meinen Nachnamen genannt. Im Zeitungsartikel steht dies:
Bernd
ACCENT Tribune, May25, 1999 (?)
"We thought we were going to die"
Pauline McCleve of Tempe will never forget when a meteor fell from the sky 86 years ago
By Guy Webster THE TRIBUNE
Pauline McCleve of Tempe doesn't need to go to the movies to see scary scenes of meteors streaking toward frightened people.
She can just rerun one of the memories in her head.
Now 103, McCleve remembers the explosion in the sky when a rock from outer space fell near Holbrook, in northern Arizona, on July 19, 1912.
That was the loudest sound I ever heard in my life," she recalled last week.
"There was no sound from us except a gasp of terror."
She was 17, standing outside her family home in Holbrook with her parents and some of her 10 brothers and sisters.
The meteor dominated the early evening sky.
"It was coming right toward us. We thought we were going to die. The closer it came, the more frightened we were. We just stood there paralyzed."
The boom was heard as far away as 100 miles north and south of the city, according to newspaper accounts from that week.
"People ran into the streets and stared at the sky," the Holbrook News reported.
Witnesses in Winslow, 30 miles farther west, saw a smoke trail streaking eastward toward Holbrook.
McCleve remembered it as a glowing fireball with a bright tail.
The boom came from a chunk of asteroid shattering into thousands of pieces. It probably was about the size of an office desk when it first entered the atmosphere, according to Carleton Moore, director of the Arizona State University Center of Meteorite Studies.
"Holbrook is still the only observed fall in Arizona," Moore said. "All the other meteorites in Arizona have just been found sitting on the ground."
Observed falls, in which a meteorite is seen in the air and then recovered on the ground, occur only about once every two or three years anywhere in the world.
Several pieces of the dense black stone now sit in one of the center's public display cases on campus, including the biggest chunk that hit the ground, weighing 14 pounds, and tiny bits the size of peas. Mc Cleve remembered, "It exploded like shrapnel".The pieces landed in a 3-mile-long ellipse centered about six miles east of Holbrook. One baseball-sized hunk knocked the limb off a tree.
"Papa said, 'Oh, it missed us, but that landed very close. I’ll go out in the morning and look for it.’"
Other folks had the same idea and many of them went out to collect pieces of the dense black stones.
More than 14,000 pieces were collected that summer, mostly on the surface of the ground, but some of the largest were embedded up to 6 inches deep. Many were purchased by a Philadelphia collector, Warren Foote, who wrote the first scientific paper about the Holbrook meteorite four months later.
McCleve’s father Richard Greer and her younger brother, Pratt Greer, earned nearly $2000 gathering and selling pieces of the Holbrook meteorite. The man she married the following year, James Cyrus McCleve , made $400.
"It was hard times and everybody was glad to get what they could," she said.
In 1912, $2,000 was enough to buy a modest home.
About 2,000 additional pieces of the Holbrook meteorite have been found since 1912, some as recently as 1991.
Moore gave a talk about meteorites to the Kiwanis Club at the Friendship Retirement village center in Tempe last month. Afterward, he received a note that McCleve, a resident of the center, would like to talk with him.
Some of the pieces of the Holbrook meteorite at ASU were part of Foote's collection, so some may have originally been picked up by McCleve's father, Moore said.
McCleve has remembered the meteor many times in the past 86 years.
"That was the most terrifying time in all my years," she said, "those few seconds of the meteor coming toward us."