The Peekskill Meteorite, Friday, October 9, 1992.

I have no journal entry for this event. The description here, written on September 27, 2012, is based on my recollections, which I am setting down owing to heightened public interest around this 20^th anniversary of the meteorite falling from the sky and hitting a car in Peekskill New York.

I was then, as I am now, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades NY. My name and phone number, together with several of my colleagues’, was on a list that had been distributed to police and other emergency personnel, in case they had need of expert advice on matters concerning the earth sciences. Most often, a call would concern the infrequent small earthquakes that occur in our area.

The call that I received on that October evening was very different. A man identifying himself as a police officer from Peekskill NY said that a woman’s car had just been damaged by an object that had fallen from the sky. He said that he had the object at the police station and asked whether I could identify it and determine whether it posed any sort of safety hazard. I called my Lamont colleague Mark Anders, a professor of geology, and the two of us drove to Peekskill. I think this must have been on Saturday morning, for the fall itself was at 7:50PM on Friday night, and I remember being there in daylight.

Although the possibility that it was a meteorite had passed my mind, I initially thought that a more likely possibility was that it was debris that had fallen off an airplane or, maybe, a fragment of a satellite. The latter could indeed have posed a danger, for during that period – 1992 was just after the end of the Cold War - some satellites were nuclear powered. As it turned out, and to my surprise, the object was plainly a stony meteorite.

The police were keeping it in a metal box, of the sort that is used to store equipment. It was about the size of a football and weighed about 25 pounds. Most of the surface was smooth and covered with a brown fusion crust, a lava-like substance that is created when the surface of the meteorite melts from the atmospheric friction that it experiences during its fiery fall through the atmosphere. Some parts of the crust were scratched, I suppose from the collision with the car. The fusion crust had broken away on one end, presumably the end that struck the car, revealing the grey rock of the meteorite itself. Its interior looked a more-or-less uniform grey.

The police officer took us to visit the site where the meteorite had landed and showed us the Chevy Malibu, owned by Peekskill resident Michelle Knapp, which had been struck by it. The car was parked outside of a white frame house. The meteorite had struck the rear corner of the car, and punched a hole through both the decklid and floor of the trunk. The decklid was quite warped and the gas tank, which had been grazed, was leaking a bit of gasoline. Beneath the car was a very small crater, just two or three feet across and six inches or so deep. I had been expecting something larger, but apparently the speed of the meteorite, which can be five miles per second or more while it is up in space, was very substantially slowed by its descent through the atmosphere. I inspected the ground around the car, and found a few crumbs of rock that had broken off the meteorite during the collision.

After discussion with the police and Ms. Knapp, and after promising to return it undamaged, we took the meteorite back to Lamont in order to examine it. Owing to it being a weekend, I brought the meteorite first to my house in Tappan New York, where my spouse Dr. Dallas Abbott, also a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty examined it, too. Several family friends were visiting, and they were amazed by the story. In those years I did little photography, and I wound up taking only three images of it: a shot of the meteorite sitting on my dining room table; a family shot with me holding it, while Dallas and our two children, Hannah and Josh, look on, and which we sent to friends and family at Christmas; and a photo of my friend Dr. Christian Iosso (who is a theologian, not an earth scientist) holding it. In later years, I have regretted not taking more, but we were thinking then of the occasion simply as a fun episode and not something of historical significance. Mark Anders later went back to Peekskill, and took a photo of the car.

During the weekend, I showed the meteorite to Ed Mathez, a curator at the American Museum, taking it to his house, which is nearby mine. At first he thought I was trying to pull his leg by showing him a volcanic bomb that I had picked up on one of my volcanic fieldtrips. After I assured him that I was not playing a trick, he examined it more closely and identified it as an acondrite, one of the many types of stony meteorites. I later read that a more thorough examination had led to its being classified as an H6 monomict breccia meteorite.

On Monday, I showed it to Dave Walker, another of my Lamont colleagues. He pointed out that some of the mineral grains exposed on the chipped faces were metallic in nature. He also microprobed one of the tiny fragments that I had picked up near the car. I don’t remember any of the details of chemistry that the analysis revealed, but it verified the presence of nickel-iron and was otherwise consistent with it being a meteorite.

Later, I examined it with a Geiger counter, just to verify that it was emitting no more than the normal background radiation. No problem there!

I did several press interviews at the time. The meteorite had fallen around the time of the Draconids meteor shower, and so several reporters asked if the two were related. I explained that it was likely a coincidence, for the meteor shower is thought to be debris from an icy comet, not something made of stone. They also asked how rare an event was this. I explained that while uncommon, many meteorite falls are well-documented. In a few instances, houses and even a person have been hit. In the weeks after the event, several colleagues came up to me and told me stories of other meteorites that had fallen in communities where they had lived over the years.

My experience with the meteorite was an exciting and thought provoking one, a reminder that nature can always surprise you. I have not kept us with many of the more recent developments associated with the meteorite, but I was awed by the video of its fireball that was taken that October night. I saw it only a few years ago when my colleague Terry Plank used it in a course she and I co-teach. I understand that many were taken by people with video cameras at Friday night sports events that they have enabled the meteorite’s trajectory to be calculated.

Someone told me that the Peekskill meteorite was sold to a collector for about $68,000. I’m glad that Ms. Knapp made some money from the incident, for the meteorite certainly ruined her car!

Bill Menke

Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University

September 27, 2012