Stories in Stone: How Geology Influenced Connecticut History and Culture

7. Visitors from Space: The Weston and Wethersfield Meteorites

Visitors from Space The Weston and Wethersfield Meteorites The question is not what God’s got against Wethersfield, it’s what God’s got for Wethersfield. —Barbara Narendra, 1982 Most people have looked up and seen meteors flash through the night skies. Their lights flare and vanish within seconds. Unknown to them, some of these objects continue their voyage and reach the Earth’s surface, occasionally even invading homes. After he woke up early in the morning of April 8, 1971, Paul Cassarino walked downstairs and noticed a fine coat of whitish dust covering the floor and furniture of his living room. Looking up at the ceiling, he saw a substantial dent, surrounded by an array of small cracks. During the night, a meteorite weighing about 12.3 ounces had broken into his Wethers field home without waking him or his wife.1 The black stone had crashed through the roof and lodged in the ceiling of the living room. Early in the evening of November 8, 1982, a little more than a decade after Cassarino’s foreign visitor arrived, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Donahue of Wethersfield were watching TV when they heard what appeared to be “the muffled roar of a Mack truck coming through the front door.” They leaped up and ran into the living room, which they found in chaotic disorder: dust, wood splinters, and pieces of plaster 1. Meteor is used for the streak of light produced in the upper atmosphere by the entry of a small body from space, meteorite for an object that survived its passage through the atmosphere and landed on the Earth’s surface. Asteroids are small planetlike bodies (or fragments thereof) that orbit the sun. c 7 covered the floor and furniture. When they looked up, they noticed a sizeable hole in the ceiling. The air was filled with what they thought was smoke. Realizing that something had crashed into the house, they went outside and saw a large gap in the roof just above the front door. Firefighters called in to assess the damage found a crusty black rock (fig. 7–1) weighing almost six pounds below the table in the dining room. The meteorite had blown a hole through the roof and ripped through a closet on the second floor before entering the living room (fig. 7–1, bottom). From there, it jumped into the adjacent dining room and bounced around until it wound up under the table. Within a relatively short period, two meteorites had hit homes less than two miles apart in the same residential town south of Hartford. The 158 stories in stone Fig. 7–1. The 1982 meteorite that crashed through the roof of the Donahue home in Wethersfield, and the hole it left in the ceiling. Courtesy Dan Haar, Hartford Courant. 2. Friction caused by high-speed flight through the atmosphere heats the outer layer of the meteor, continuously stripping molten material from it and producing a trail of incandescent gas. At heights between six and ten miles above the Earth’s surface, the frictional melting ends, quickly extinguishing the fireball. chances of this happening defy all odds. In an article in the Wethersfield Post, the events were hyperbolically referred to as “a fantastic solar coincidence , unmatched in history.” Douglas Preston wrote that the probability of two meteorites falling on houses in the same town approximated “the chance of two blind flies colliding somewhere in the Grand Canyon.” When a TV reporter asked the rhetorical question “What does the man upstairs have against Wethersfield?” Barbara Narendra, from Yale’s Peabody Museum meteorite division, replied, “The question is not what God’s got against Wethersfield; it’s what God’s got for Wethers field.” Obviously, some unique presents! Meteorites have hit homes elsewhere in the United States. There are about twenty authenticated reports of such collisions in the twentieth century, two of which are especially interesting. On November 30, 1954, two pieces of a meteorite fell two miles apart in Sylacauga, Alabama . The larger one, weighing 8.5 pounds, crashed through the roof of the Hodges home at about 1:00 p.m. It penetrated the ceiling, bounced around, and headed for the couch, where Mrs. Hodges lay fast asleep. She was struck on the hip and hand and suffered serious bruises. Another meteorite came very close to Connecticut, but it landed in...