(ORDO NEWS) — In the XVII-XVIII centuries. Lavoisier, Gassendi and other prominent scientists were engaged in checking reports of stones falling from the sky.
They felt these stones, took samples, questioned the witnesses of their fall and… could not understand anything.
“There are no stones in the sky,” Lavoisier reported to the Academy of Sciences. “That’s why rocks can’t fall from the sky.”
“Stones cannot fall from the sky, they have nowhere to come from!
On September 13, 1768, a stone weighing seven and a half pounds fell with a crash in the town of Luce in the French department of Maine.
Lavoisier first questioned the witnesses, then examined the stone and decided that it had a completely earthly origin and arose, perhaps, from a lightning strike.
“Whatever the ancients might say,” he wrote, “true physicists have always doubted the existence of such stones.”
Fortunately, not a single “true physicist” was nearby when on November 7, 1492, a huge stone fell in Ensisheim in front of the entire army of Emperor Maximilian I.
The meteorite theory received general recognition only at the beginning of our century, however, we are primarily interested in “heavenly” stones that are not of a meteorite nature, the fall of which is accompanied by other equally strange phenomena.
The Dhurmsallai meteorite, which was a huge, ice-covered stone, fell on July 28, 1860.
The Deputy British Representative in Dhurmsalla (India) reported in the proceedings of the Canadian Institute that for several months after the fall of the stone, there were cases of fish falling from the sky in Benares, an unknown red the substance fell on Furrukabad, an earthquake occurred, a dark spot was found on the sun, it suddenly became dark for a while, and finally, a strange glow of the sky was observed.
The evening after the rock fell, he himself saw many lights in the sky that would today be called UFOs.
Rare, unusual falls of stones are recorded in a large number of sources, so we will give only a few stories taken at random. The Times newspaper of May 1, 1821 writes that stones were falling all the time on one of the houses in the town of Truro (Cornwall, England).
Reports of such rockfalls date back to the time when the Lord “threw large stones from heaven” on the Amorites (Josh. 10:11). Livy[7] reports that when Tullus Hostilius conquered the Sabines, stones began to fall from the sky onto the sacred grove on the top of Mount Alban.
The Romans sent observers, and they saw the fall of the stones with their own eyes. Greg’s list recorded more than two thousand meteorite falls since the 2nd century BC. n. e., and many of them were not “real” meteorites.
At the Fort, hundreds more falls of “non-meteorites” have been recorded. Miriam Allen de Ford, American writer longest correspondent with Fort, writes in a biographical essay about Fort, published in Science and Non-Science Fiction, January 1954, that: “In 1922, the famous rockfall occurred over Chico in California.
I went there to find out everything for the Fort, and with my own eyes I saw how from an invisible cloud in the sky a pebble fell softly at my feet.
In Charleston, South Carolina, on September 4, 1886, stones clattered on the pavement just outside the windows of the Charleston News and Courier. It happened at 2:30 am, so no one found the attacker, if there was one.
The stones were warm. In its September 6 issue, the newspaper published an article by its editor who was an eyewitness to the rockfalls that occurred on the same day at 7:30 am and 1:30 pm. He noted that it was as if all the stones were falling from one point overhead onto a 75-square-foot area.
An even stranger story was published by the Rand Daily Mail of May 29, 1922. In Johannesburg, South Africa, for several months, stones fell on a pharmacy, as if they wanted to hit a Hottentot girl who worked there.
The police cordoned off the garden around the house, and the girl was sent to the store, and as she walked, stones fell around her sheer. The sheerness of the fall was recorded by the police, who hoped to find the “criminal” along the trajectory of the stones.
However, the police searched all the surroundings, but did not find anyone, although the stones did not stop falling near the girl. For several weeks, the police continued to monitor and made sure that large stones fell exactly where the girl appeared.
An old engraving depicts the fall of crosses from the sky in 1503.
The unpleasant selectivity of rockfall was noted in the INFO Journal. On the evening of October 27, 1973, two men were fishing in a lake near Skanithles, New York State, when a large rock fell into the water next to them, followed by two larger ones.
They searched the area with torches, but found nothing and no one. Then a hail of small pebbles forced them to hurry to the car.
As they ran, they were pursued by stone rain. When they finally; decided to stop to change clothes, stones fell again on them, and when they left the bar, where they went to quench their thirst, they were again met by a rockfall.
At the house where they parted, the rockfall even intensified. An analysis by the Department of Geology at Syracuse University showed that the fallen pebbles belonged to the local rock.
Rockfalls that occur in rooms and enclosed spaces are interesting. We want to mention a relatively recent case. For five whole days, stones fell around a young Aboriginal who worked on a farm near the city of Pumphrey, Western Australia.
Scientists could not think of anything better than to explain what happened with the “whims of the wind.” However, where did their conceit go when two eyewitnesses testified under oath that, being in a closed tent with the said young man, they saw stones falling right at their feet.
There was no trick here, as well as holes in the tent fabric through which “fancy winds” could penetrate or stones that turned out to be “the most ordinary pebbles” (Daily Express, March 22, 1957).
In stories about various objects falling from the sky, irregularly shaped pieces of ice often appear. However, one should not trust too much such a rational explanation that they simply fall off an icy aircraft, especially since such cases occurred even when there were no aircraft yet.
Flammarion mentions a piece of ice 15 feet long, 6 feet wide and 11 feet thick, which fell in the era of Charlemagne (“L-Atmosphere”, 1888).
Even if we assume that in the first half of the XIX century, there were planes in our understanding of the word, they were hardly capable of lifting such blocks of ice into the air and not falling.
In 1802 an ice floe up to a yard wide fell on Kadeish in India. On August 14, 1849, The Times reported that the night before, an irregularly shaped block of ice had fallen at Ord, in Rossshire, after an exceptionally violent thunderstorm.
In circumference, the block reached 20 feet and must have weighed about half a ton. Ron Willis collected 46 such cases from Fort’s books and other sources and published them in the INFO Journal.
Readers can familiarize themselves with his tables, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the theories according to which ice falls from aircraft, is a meteorite, and can also form in the air with a wind of a certain strength.
Several exceptional cases are known. In November 1950, a farm in Exmoor near North Moreton in Devon was littered with chunks of ice the size of a “large plate”. Among them lay a dead sheep, its neck broken by a 14-pound block of ice (London Evening News, November 9, 1950).
However, this case cannot even be compared with the hailstorm that fell in Texas and killed thousands of sheep, as reported in the Mansley Weather Review of May 1877, or with what happened on January 10, 1950 in Düsseldorf, when the ice lance 6 inches thick and 6 feet long struck a carpenter to death on the roof of his house.
Frank Edwards wrote about this in the book “The Strangest”, published in 1956.
Almost every case of objects falling from the sky is not like the other. We can mention the fallout of stinking ice, colored ice, salt crystals, copper alloys, slag and alabaster, hailstones from drinking soda, rains from nitric acid long before such phenomena began to occur everywhere due to industrial environmental pollution.
Falls of metal fragments were observed, which cannot be explained from the standpoint of meteorology. For example, in Cunnifton, Ontario, a soft cake fell, which turned out to be a mixture of glass fragments with almost pure zinc (Belleville Intelligent, November 11, 1968).
A strange limestone ball fell near Blekenstad in Sweden on April 11, 1925. According to Professor Hadding of the University of Lund, sea shells were found in its fragments, as well as traces of an animal that resembled a trilobite (P. G. Gittens. “Space Exploration”).
Engraving of “thunder stones”
On September 13, 1768, a rockfall took place in France. Stones fell from the sky in three provinces in northwestern France. After some time, the three parts of the once single space object (which will become known much later) met each other again – at the Paris Academy of Sciences.
The samples were sent by an amateur mineralogist, corresponding member of the Academy and part-time abbe Charles Bachelai, lieutenant general of the district court G. de Boyaval and not marked by special titles Moran the son of Coutances. Everyone was interested in approximately the same question – what was it all about?
The question did not arise out of nowhere. The appearance of mysterious stones was accompanied by unusual acoustic phenomena, attempts to pick up in hot pursuit were unsuccessful – pieces of an unknown rock were very hot.
Before the academic committee, created specifically to analyze the proposed flights, there was a difficult task.
On the one hand, the description of the events that accompanied the discovery of aerolites strongly resembled the legend of “thunder stones” falling to the surface of the Earth along with lightning during a thunderstorm (belemnites, for example, were regularly mistaken for “thunder stones”); on the other hand, there is a striking similarity between the samples and the details of their discovery.
It was difficult to suspect a conspiracy of persons so widely separated spatially and socially, but it was simply blasphemous not to trust the abbot.
Therefore, three authoritative experts: L. A. Lavoisier, O. D. Fougereau and L. K. Cadet conducted a very detailed study, a brief (but, as we will see, rather distorted) presentation of the results of which is now familiar, probably, to any non-lazy student: ”
A detailed committee report on the study of mysterious stones was reported in 1772 and published a little later – in 1777 in the Physics Journal of the Paris Academy.
In the first lines it is noted that “no other stones have such a long history as the “thunder stones”, and that “modern physicists consider the existence of these stones to be very little certain.”
The following is a description of the fall from the abbot Bachelai: the appearance of a thundercloud; “the dry crackle of a thunderous blow, reminiscent of a cannon volley; no fiery flash was noticed, but a whistle and sounds were heard in the air, reminiscent of the roar of a bull.”
Several workers in a vineyard, three leagues from the city of Luce, looking up, “saw an opaque body, describing a curved line and falling on a lawn near the main road to Mains …”. Running up, they “found some kind of stone, The part of it that went into the ground was “ash-gray”, and outside – “very black”.
This was followed by a description of the results of mineralogical and chemical studies of this stone, carried out by members of the committee in Paris.
The part of it that went into the ground was “ash-gray”, and outside – “very black”. This was followed by a description of the results of mineralogical and chemical studies of this stone, carried out by members of the committee in Paris.
Tellingly, scientists have identified almost all the typical signs by which in our time a stone meteorite is distinguished from a simple cobblestone (those who wish can compare it with the Chebarkul meteorite).
In the pale gray substance of the stone, “an innumerable number of small brilliant metallic points of a pale yellow color” were found. They also noted that the part of the stone sticking out of the ground was covered with a thin film of melted black mass.
Academicians obtained the same vitreous film on the particles of the stone substance during the explosion of gunpowder mixed with them (perhaps, this was the first experiment on the synthesis of meteorite melting crust). When tapping the sample, it was found that sparks are cut out only from the melted crust.
The specific gravity of the alleged flying object turned out to be about 3.5 g/cm3, “even much more than that of flint masses” (2, 5 g/cm3). Such a significant excess was attributed (and quite rightly) to a significant admixture of sulfides and metal.
The chemical composition was determined by the “wet” method of analysis – dissolution, precipitation and evaporation. As a result, it turned out that 100 weight parts of the substance contained 8.5 parts of sulfur, 36 parts of iron, 55.5 parts of “earth capable of vitrifying” (“de terre vitrifiable” – obviously, SiO2).
At the same time, the academicians “missed” nickel, which had already been discovered by that time, the most characteristic impurity in meteoric iron.
Finally, one more accurate observation belongs to the Parisian academicians. They correctly concluded that the stone they examined “was not subjected to particularly strong heat for a long time.” Otherwise, as the researchers noted, all the sulfur would have been released from it.
Meanwhile, in the experiments, when the temperature of the substance approached red heat, sulfuric vapors rapidly came out of it.
Even more modern is the following conclusion: “The heat was strong enough to melt part of the surface … but it did not last long enough that it did not penetrate into the stone, so the stone did not decompose” (i.e. retained its complex internal structure) .
So, there were the following details revealed by the Parisian academicians. The stones studied by them consisted of substances known on Earth, but in unusual proportions – primarily iron, sulfur and fusible “earth parts”; an unusually large specific gravity of the stony mass was noted due to its saturation with iron.
The stone had a complex internal structure in the form of a mixture of an almost homogeneous stony mass with grains of a yellowish substance (cast with a metallic sheen), taken as the only known form of iron sulfide at that time – pyrite, FeS2 (in reality it was then unknown troilite (FeS), discovered in 1834, moreover, in meteorites, by Jens Berzelius).
The complexity of the structure of the stones spoke more about their “cold” formation. Reflow was noted only on their surface. An insidious clue to the erroneous theory of stone formation was provided by the details of the description given by the abbot.
The black crust allegedly formed only on the above-ground, not submerged in the soil part of the stone, discovered after the appearance of a thundercloud and a thunderclap. If we add the report of eyewitness peasants about the observation of a stone in flight, then there will be, so to speak, a classic example of a “thunder stone”!
In these circumstances, natural scientists had to either accept the reality of the notorious “thunderstones”, which completely contradicted the new theory of thunderstorms, or deny the reliability of some observations. The academicians chose the second: you never know what the peasants will imagine with fear …
The final conclusion of the academic report turned out to be quite logical, although absolutely wrong from the point of view of grateful descendants.
The stone was defined as a completely terrestrial rock – “a kind of pyrite sandstone”, and its melting in the above-ground part was explained by the effect of lightning on the terrestrial rock.
To the credit of the academicians, they noted two more mysterious circumstances: the difference between the substance of the investigated stone from “ordinary pyrites” (according to the reaction to hydrochloric acid – it gave off a special “liver” smell) and the amazing similarity with the Bashelai stone of others sent at the same time from different regions of the country.
The latter, however, they quite logically explained by the ability of pyrite (i.e., saturated with iron) sandstones to attract lightning.
Is it worth it on the basis of the foregoing to accuse academicians of short-sightedness and inertia? I don’t know…
Let’s think well of people. Suffice it to say that the withdrawal of academicians did not slow down the development of meteoritics, and in 1794 Ernst Chladni published a work that combines, at first glance, incompatible: “shooting stars”, fireballs-bolides and finds of strange pieces of iron in places not associated with ore deposits, and interpreting meteorites as complex cosmic-atmospheric formations.
Which, in fact, they are.
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