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(1) CAR-SIZED METEOR EXPLODES, SHOWERS ROCKS ON MIDWESTERN HOMES
From Associated Press, 27 March 2003
By RICK CALLAHAN, Associated Press Writer
INDIANAPOLIS - The midnight sky flashed an eerie blue early Thursday over four Midwestern states as a meteorite exploded in the atmosphere, sending rocks as big as softballs crashing through some houses.
Residents in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin reported seeing the disintegrating meteorite flash across the sky about midnight. Police were soon deluged with reports of falling rocks striking homes and cars.
Chris Zeilenga, 42, of Beecher, Ill., said he and his wife, Pauline, were watching TV war coverage around midnight.
"The sky lit up completely from horizon to horizon. We've seen lightning storms, but this was nothing like that," he said. "A minute or so later the house started rumbling and we heard all these tiny particles hitting the house."
Outside his home about 30 miles south of Chicago, Zeilenga found tiny gray and black pieces of stone. He didn't realize their origin until he heard people talking about meteorites as he rode the morning train to work in Chicago. "When I heard that I thought, 'That's what it was!'"
Kenneth and Karen Barnes of Park Forest, Ill., told WGN-TV in Chicago they were sleeping when a 5-pound meteorite crashed into their living room. Thursday morning their son spotted a hole in the ceiling.
"I didn't know what to think, so we went looking through the house for it and found it," Kenneth Barnes said.
Commander Mike McNamara of the Park Forest Police Department said about 60 pieces of space rock ranging from gravel-sized to softball-sized were brought in to the police station.
He said three homes in Park Forest were damaged, along with the fire department and possibly one car. Two homes in the nearby town of Matteson also were struck by meteorite pieces.
Paul Sipiera, a professor of geology and astronomy at Harper College in Palatine, Ill., spent Thursday examining dozens of pieces of meteorites and plotting where they fell. The largest he saw was about 7 1/2 pounds.
He said the debris field appears to cover a path about 80 miles long by 20 miles wide from north of Bloomington, Ill., to Chicago's south side and possibly part of northwestern Indiana.
He said all of the pieces came from a stony meteorite he estimates was about the size of a Volkswagen bug when it exploded as it plunged into Earth's atmosphere.
A spokesman for the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb., said the defense installation was not tracking any manmade space objects in the area at the time that the light show appeared over the Midwest.
Sipiera said it's very rare for meteorites to fall on populated areas.
"For me, it's a dream come true," he said. "I always tell my wife that when I die, I hope I get hit in the head by a meteorite flying through the roof and it came pretty close," he said.
Copyright 2003, AP
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(2) METEORITES SHOWER CHICAGO'S SOUTH SUBURBS
March 27, 2003
Contact: Steve Koppes
773-702-8366
MEDIA ADVISORY
Meteorites shower Chicago's south suburbs
University of Chicago meteorite experts Lawrence Grossman and Steven Simon usually commute from Chicago's south suburbs to their laboratory on the Hyde Park campus to study rocks that have fallen from space. But at midnight last night a shower of meteorites came to them.
"I heard a detonation," said Grossman, a Professor in Geophysical Sciences who lives in the south suburb of Flossmoor, Ill. "It was sharp enough to wake me up."
Simon, a Senior Research Associate in Geophysical Sciences, lives in nearby Park Forest, where much of the meteorite fell. Simon, who works in Grossman's laboratory, is spending the day collecting information from area residents who brought samples of the meteorite to the Park Forest police station.
Grossman said meteorites from the fall have been found in Park Forest, which is approximately 30 miles south of downtown Chicago, as well as the nearby communities of Steger to the south and Olympia Fields to the north. He said the meteorite is classified as a chondrite, a common type of meteorite.
Journalists may arrange an interview with Grossman or Simon; call Steve Koppes at the University of Chicago News Office, 773-702-8366.
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(3) METEOR BLAZES PATH TO PARK FOREST
By Joseph Sjostrom and Nancy Ryan
Tribune staff reporters
Published March 27, 2003, 1:20 PM CST
Chunks of rocks believed to be the remains of a meteor that lit up the Midwestern sky as it exploded rained down across the southern suburbs early this morning, damaging homes and other buildings but injuring no one.
The meteor streaked across the sky about midnight before apparently blowing up with a bright flash and a thundering boom. About 100 fragments ranging in size from small stones to softball-size chunks were recovered from yards, driveways, streets and even the insides of houses in Park Forest, Matteson and Steger.
One piece reportedly struck a Park Forest fire station. Another grayish, five-pound rock landed in the second-floor bedroom of Noe and Paulette Garza, of the 400 block of Indiana Avenue in Park Forest.
"I could have gotten hit in the head by that thing," Garza, a 48-year-old steelworker, said as he surveyed the damage caused when the rock crashed into his home about 12:30 a.m.
The rock punched a hole through the roof and ceiling, shredded a set of venetian blinds, ricocheted off a metal window sill, shot about 15 feet across the bedroom and shattered a floor-to-ceiling mirror before coming to rest on the floor.
Garza said he was in bed when heard his dog barking and what sounded like thunder. He got out of bed and was downstairs when the meteor hit.
This morning, he called his boss and told him he wasn't coming into work today. "I told him what happened, and he said, 'Okay, but don't use that excuse again.'"
The fall could be a boon for local scientists. Most meteors, also called "shooting stars," burn up in the atmosphere. The few that survive all the way to the ground are called meteorites. For one to cause damage is almost unheard of.
Park Forest police said the National Weather Service was notified, and officials there confirmed a meteor shower had taken place over the Midwest and the sky had brightened just before midnight.
Residents of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin reported seeing the flash of bright blue light as the meteor streaked overhead. Some people expressed fears the apparition might have something to do with the war in Iraq.
Tia McConathy, a next-door neighbor of the Garzas, said she was standing by a window of her home and was startled by an intense light, brighter than lightning and lasting much longer.
"I thought, 'Is it God? Is it an attack? Are we going to die?' The light freaked me out. It felt really funny, like it went through me," she said.
Several witnesses called the Tribune, including Lauren Ellis, 18, of southwest suburban Plainfield.
"About five of us were in the car, and we were driving down the street in Plainfield near our house around midnight, and the sky just lit up. We were in shock. We pulled over because we thought it was a bomb," Ellis said.
"With all that's going on in Iraq, we were wondering what it was," she said. "We all heard a sound about two minutes after. It was like a sonic boom."
Chris Zeilenga, 42, of Beecher, said he and his wife Pauline were "watching Iraqi stuff on TV when a couple minutes after midnight, the entire sky lit up. It was like daylight, and it lasted maybe two to three seconds. We said, 'What the heck was that?'
"A minute to 2 1/2 minutes later, we heard a trembling sound, like a train," Zeilenga said. "The rumbling lasted about a minute, and then we heard pieces hitting the house. The whole thing was strange. I've never seen anything like it."
Jim Kaplan, of the Romeoville office of the National Weather Service, told the Associated Press he was outside checking a rain gauge when he saw a flash of light in the sky.
"First, it got very bright and the sky lit up,'' Kaplan said. ``You could see something streaking across the sky and breaking up into glowing chunks as it went from west to east.''
Lauren Bishop, 19, a freshman at Loyola University on Chicago's North Side, was in her dorm room in the Rogers Park neighborhood around midnight when she and her roommate saw the flash of light.
"We were in our dorm facing north when something lit up the entire sky. I didn't hear any noise," Bishop said. "Then we talked to a friend in Indiana who saw the same exact thing at the same time."
WGN-Ch. 9 and the Associated Press contributed to this story.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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(4) CHICAGO FIREBALL
From Space Weather News for March 27, 2003
CHICAGO FIREBALL: Sky watchers in Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana were surprised around local midnight on March 26th-27th when a brilliant fireball streaked across the sky and exploded. "It was a small space rock (perhaps only 1 or 2 meters wide) with a mass of about 10 metric tons," reports Bill Cook of the Marshall Space Flight Center. "Some 500 fragments scattered over a 10-km wide zone in the suburbs south of Chicago." Meteorites struck houses, cars, roads--but no people. Scientists are scouring the area now to collect debris for further study. News reports:
These events are surprisingly common. "We expect an asteroidal object one meter in diameter or larger to strike Earth's atmosphere about 40 times per year," says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at JPL. Few are seen, however, because the fireballs usually appear over unpopulated areas.
How bright was this one'? "About half as bright as the Sun," says Robert Soltysik, who saw the fireball through the window of his house in Valparaiso, Indiana. "The flash lit up the room like daylight just before sunset." A freelance photographer in the Chicago suburb of Park Forest captured this picture of the fireball, which "turned midnight (left) to noon (right)" for several seconds. Photos courtesy NBC5.com.
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