Meteor Theme Week

The Benld Meteorite

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Meteor Theme Week

The Benld Meteorite The scene: Benld, Illinois. The date: 29 September 1938. This story offered two strange things to my world. The larger anecdote we’ll get to in a bit, but let’s start with the second, smaller interesting point. How in the world do you pronounce Benld? What is a Benld? Who is or was […]

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Sylacauga

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Meteor Theme Week

Sylacauga   In the last issue, we traveled to the strangely-named Benld, Illinois, to investigate a close encounter with a meteorite. In 1938, some humans had the closest recorded brush with a meteorite impact. Just 50 feet away, a space rock hit a garage, went through the ceiling of a car, its cushion, its floorboard, bounced

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The Chelyabinsk Fireball

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Meteor Theme Week

The Chelyabinsk Fireball This week the newsletter touched on a couple of important points in the study of meteorites. We started with a sharpshooting rock in Benld, Illinois, that left an interesting path to its final resting place in 1938. At the time it was the closest a human had been to a strike in recorded history.

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