The Day NASA called Me

The night the meteorite fell on my small town, a lot of people missed it because they were inside watching television.
I was outside on the patio, which faces due north, at 10 p.m. one July night. I glanced up at the sky.
A fireball blazed an orange flaming path vertically down the sky.
For seconds I gaped at it, until the flame disappeared behind the tree line.
A plane was going down!
I shoved back my chair, dashed into the house, grabbed the car keys, and raced up the road, looking for the flaming debris.
A helicopter circled in the northern sky, its searchlight beaming down into what appeared to be the riverbed. Then it headed off in the direction of the airport.
But I saw no impact area, came home, and called the sheriff’s office to report what I saw.
I was told it was a meteor shower. But I am an enthusiast of meteor showers, have stayed up late and driven far to see them. I know the difference between a bunch of shooting stars and a flaming mass headed for the earth in my neighborhood.
The first person I saw the next day was a lady named Dolly. She had seen the same thing I saw, and it was headed right for her bedroom! She saw the flames, heard the whistle of a speeding object, and saw what she thought was an impact out the window of her house near the golf course.
We got online with the trusty little computer and searched for meteors. Dolly left to go look for meteorites. I hooked up with a science site and found a photo of a great fireball that struck the Yukon in January 2000.
That led me to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and an email address for Ron Baalke, a fellow who knows lots about meteors.
I sent him a message about our event here in Paso Robles, described the fireball, asked a few questions, then went back to my work.
That’s when NASA called my office.
Our fireball intrigued Ron Baalke enough that he tracked down the my office web site, found our phone number and then called me up.
He’s a near-earth-object specialist, he said. He’s one of the guys who hunt the asteroids that might be hazardous to Earth’s health. “We think there are about a thousand of them,” he said. “We’ve identified about half of them.”
That gives you pause, doesn’t it?
Anyway, fireballs like ours, he said, are normally either space junk or a large meteor. Space junk was out since debris wasn’t scheduled to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on that date.
So there’s a decent possibility that the local fireball was “a reasonably large meteoroid,” said Ron. “It’s very possible the object survived the passage through the atmosphere and reached the surface as meteorites.”
And maybe the bits landed within—oh, say—50 miles of the downtown park.
Ron suggested Dolly, myself, and a few other witnesses triangulate our views to find the true location of the fall site. If we can find it, we can look for meteorites—“black rocks,” he said, “any size, from a thimble to a bowling ball.” They’ll have a dark crust with an interior of a different color.
Are fireballs like ours fairly common? I asked.
“They’re reported roughly once a month around the world,” Ron said, “but they’re actually more common than that.” There’s a lot of ocean and unpopulated land out there, he reminded me.
“What made you call me?” I asked him, still dumbfounded that NASA personally telephoned me in Paso Robles.
“You were the only person in the state who contacted me about the event,” Ron said.
Which just goes to show where a few questions in the right direction, even at the top, will get you.

Ph0t0 courtesy NASA