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Reproduced with permission from the author and from
Habitat, Journal of the Maine Audubon Society
February 1985, Volume Two, Number Three
Lincoln Dresser was unprepared for his encounter with the world beyond that morning of August 5, 1898. While crossing his pasture at 7:30 a.m. under a ''cloudy and threatening sky,'' strange thunder drew his attention to the northwest. There he beheld a ''gaseous ball of fire,'' hurtling towards him at an angle of 75 degrees, trailing dark cloudy smoke and making ''a loud noise resembling a buzz saw.'' The blazing object tore its way through an elm tree not 25 feet away, sent a shower of branches to the ground, glanced off a stone wall and buried itself noisily in the earth.
Two days later Dresser dug his visitor up: embedded 2 l/2 feet below the surface he found to his surprise, a 7 1/2 pound blackened lump of what he termed ''the finest granite'' studded with ''shallow dents like finger points'' and flashing on its broken edges with glittering iron.
That August morning, farmer Dresser of Andover, Maine, joined the handful of Mainers who have witnessed one of nature's most strange and startling visitations, a meteorite fall. In the last century, Maine had four other such sightings and recoveries - more than any other New England state - all of them celebrated in the scientific press of the day and each of them a memorable example of the prophetical ''stones that do fall from the sky.''
Maine's first recorded meteorite arrived shortly after statehood. On August 7, 1823, one A. Dinsmore of Nobleboro was working outside ''in the cool of the day, ''between 4 and 5 p.m., when it seemed he heard the rattle of musketry in the sky. The firing grew urgent and loud. A white cloud perhaps 40 feet wide suddenly spiraled downwards toward him with a rushing sound ''like a whirlwind stirring leaves'', and something struck the ground nearby, startling a flock of sheep that promptly decamped for the woods.
The meterorite had hit on the land of Dinsmore's neighbors, John and David Flagg. Dinsmore dug down half a foot and found 5 or 6 pounds of sulphrous-smelling material that had fragmented on a buried stone. Other pieces were recovered around Nobleboro, where the noises had alarmed other folks (and other sheep) but no record was kept of their weight. Prof. Parker Cleveland, the worthy Bowdoin naturalist, proudly reported on the event in the November 1823 American Journal of Science. It was Maine's premier appearance in the scientific press.
Twenty-five years later, on Saturday, May 20, 1848, one Charles Blaisdell, a yeoman mechanic who lived about a mile outside Castine, was early out and about. At 4:30 a.m. the sky became Biblically ominous: dark clouds gathered from various points amid a great flash of lightning, and a bright moon-like object fell through the sky trailing a vivid wake. Neighbor Giles Gardiner joined Blaisdell in the road in front of his house while above them sounded a report ''like a cannon'' followed by a series of sharp explosions, climaxing in a long whistle.
Suddenly an object forcibly struck the road a few feet away, bounded once and buried itself two inches deep in the dirt. Being a curious man, Blaisdell dusted himself off, walked over and picked up a charred egg-sized and wedge-shaped meteorite wavy on one side and smooth on the other. He broke off a piece, revealing silver-white specks of bright nickel and iron. Being a practical man - after all, it had missed - he then threw it away.
From up to 40 miles away reports came from others who had heard and seen the explosions and flash that Blaisdell took for cannon and lightning. Gardiner and Blaisdell believed that a number of other fragments had rattled down around them, but only one piece - at three ounces, Maine's smallest recovered meteorite - was ever found.
Had Blaisdell been standing at Searsmont almost 23 years to the day later, when Maine's largest known meteorite fell, the encounter might have been of a kind too close indeed. At 8:15 a.m. on May 2l, 1871, explosions sounding at Searsmont startled people to the southwest in Warren; to the northeast at Searsport, Postmaster E.B. Sheldon heard an explosion like the blast of a cannon and a ''rumbling and rushing'' sound ''resembling steam escaping from a boiler.''
Reading a book that Sunday morning in Searsmont, a Mrs. Buck thought the racket must be blasting in the lime quarry a quarter mile away. Looking out the front door she instead saw earth fly into the air 150 yards away in neighbor Bean's field. No one dared go near the spot for more than 20 minutes. A Mr. Luce then cautiously approached and, digging 2 feet down in hard gravel, tossed up warm and sulphrous-smelling fragments from a meteorite that had shattered on 3 stubborn Maine rocks in the bottom of the hole. About 12 pounds of fragments, the largest weighing two pounds, were recovered; all were charred black outside but flashed iron-grey interiors.
All meteorites, like all Caesar's Gaul, are divided in three parts: technically speaking, the pieces of stony rubble orbiting in space are called meteoroids. The burning particle falling to earth - the fireball, or ''bolide'' - is a meteor. A meteorite is that piece which survives the fall and is recovered on the ground.
Despite the alluring imagery, meteorites are not ''shooting stars,'' nor were they ever - strictly speaking - part of a star. Crude diamonds (of industrial quality and thus, alas, worthless) have been found in meteorites, but none have ever been found to contain alien fossils or elements unknown on Earth. Since no known meteorite is older than the Earth itself - about 4.6 billion years - their common age and common makeup suggest a single common birth for all matter in our solar system.
Meteoroids orbit our Sun in great swarms, each particle on its own path parallel to its neighbors, most being little more than dust-sized bits that burn quickly and brightly when they stray into the upper atmosphere of our planet. About 25 million bits of this cosmic dust - from 10 to 100 tons of matter - burn up in our atmosphere and filter down, quietly adding to the weight of our Earth every day.
So consuming is the friction of that fall through the atmosphere that most meteorites have little left to offer us but a happy memory. Castine's three ounce stone weighed several tons when it began its plunge; Andover's 7 l/2 pound and Searsmont's 12 pound stones, in their former glory, were multi-ton objects the size of boxcars.
More than pleasant coincidence brought our meteorites to Earth at Andover and Nobleboro on Aug. 5 and Aug. 7, and at Castine and Searsmont on nearly the same day, May 20 and 21, 23 years apart. Random meteorites fall every day. But in its annual circuit of the Sun, the Earth passes through certain great meteoroid swarms at the same point and same time every year, making for predictable shows. The bright August meteor showers are called the Pereseids because to Earthbound eyes they seem to fall from one point in the sky - called the radiant - near that constellation. When farmer Dresser opined to scientists that his Andover meteorite ''in all probability came from the Constellation of Perseus'' he was nearly right - and surprisingly well-read.
In pedigree-conscious Yankeedom, Maine's four meteorites are classified only as common ''stones'' - made mostly of stony silicates and 10-15% nickel and iron flakes. By contrast, iron meteorites, such as the one that formed the great Berringer Crater in Arizona 22,000 years ago, are alloys of nickel and 85-95% iron. Rare stony-iron meteorites are half iron and half stony silicates, and are the aristocrats of their breed.
The major component of all meteorites, of course, is romance. In the 19th century, the lure of these strange stones and their new knowledge sent gentlemen collectors and great museums scrambling to all the exotic reaches of the globe - including such spots as Andover, Maine.
One such man, Prof. Henry Augustus Ward of Rochester, New York (founder of museums and father of the great Ward-Coonley Meteorite Collection) descended on Lincoln Dresser not long after the meteorite did. Ward blew into Andover, inspected Dresser's pasture on hands and knees, measured Dresser's dented stone wall, pocketed a piece of the stone, and (though over 68 years old) eagerly scaled Dresser's elm tree to saw off branches nicked in the fall and carried all the mementoes happily home. His full report went to the Rochester Academy of Science in November 1902, and a bit of Andover went into his museum.
Because of enthusiasts like Ward, bits of Maine's meteorites have traveled nearly as far across the globe as they once did to get here. Bits of Maine's adopted stones now lie in the far corners of museums in the far corners of the world. The Andover stone today rests on two continents: the main mass is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and 19.7 grams are at London's British Museum, donated by Prof. Ward in 1903. Bits of Castine's meteorite found their way into the Smithsonian, Amherst College, Yale, and even the National Museum at Budapest (which was lost in the 1956 uprising). In 1862 the British Museum paid 69 Pounds for 23 meteorite specimens, among them 2.5 grams of Castine - more than triple its weight in gold!
Probably fewer than a thousand meteorites survive their fall to Earth in a year. Undoubtedly, many more than four have fallen into Maine, unobserved and unrecovered. Others, perhaps picked up as curios, must rest today in thrifty Yankee households as deskweights and doorstops, and a few others do turn up now and then.
In 1953, while hauling up a lobsterboat for the winter at Round Pond near Bristol, one resident found a 5 lb. 10 oz. meteorite sitting quietly on shore at his feet. In 1969 the same person found a 6 lb. 4 oz. meteorite on the same shore - a remarkable piece of luck and Maine's only known double find.
In 1973 a Great Chebeague Islander found a 321 lb. metallic stone - a record size if a meteorite - evidently thrown up on shore by a storm. Being of a practical bent, he displayed it at his vegetable stand the next summer.
In 1978 a North Yarmouth man found a palm-sized meteorite lodged on a beam in his garage, where it had rammed a hole through his roof. It was a mixed pleasure, he sighed; a foot to the south and it would have been buried and lost forever, but at least it would have missed the garage.
In March of 1980 residents of Cumberland's Forest Lake were awakened by ''sonic booms'' at 4 a.m. and rose to find a ''strange-looking hole'' in the lake ice. Word spread fast, the press moved in, and for several days neighbors of what the papers called the ''celebrated hole'' endured a barrage of the curious, the cranks, and the media. ''I don't see why everyone's making a big deal out of it,'' sighed one weary resident. ''It is fascinating, but it's just a big dumb rock.''
Wrong. It was just a big dumb hole. Scuba divers found only an undisturbed bottom and dismissed the ''celebrated hole'' as a pressure fracture. Too bad. Headlined the Portland papers: ''Fun while it lasted.''
Herbert Adams is a writer, actor and historian from Portland.
Creation Date: September 3, 1996
Reproduced with permission of Herbert Adams and
Habitat, Journal of the Maine Audubon Society
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