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 Benld? After some digging into local sources, apparently, the name is spoken like “Ben-ELD.” But why? Benld, Illinois, was founded by a gentleman named Benjamin L. Dorsey. Either the guy decided to simply name the town after himself in a quirky way (first name + middle initial + last initial) or, as one source I encountered claimed, according to regional folklore, there was a sign being painted in his honor and they only got as far as Ben L D. Either way, we end up with a strange proper name.

And in 1938 and even stranger thing happened in Benld.

Benld, Illinois

Edward McCain’s Pontiac Coupe was a decade old but still running strongly. McCain used a small, wooden building as a garage for the automobile. Situated on top of dirt, as was common in the early 20th century, the car had been parked so many times in ten years that it had worn ruts into the ground. Presumably, on the night of 28 September, McClain stored the car in the garage and retreated to this abode for the evening.

The next morning, at approximately 9:00 AM, Mrs. McCain and a neighbor, Mrs. Crum, reported hearing the sound of an airplane in a power dive. They saw no flash, no fire, and no smoke. Suddenly, they heard a great cracking sound, as if boards had snapped. As both women looked around, they were astonished to see nothing out of the ordinary. The sky was clear and no nearby structures seemed to be damaged at all.

After work, to which McCain did not need the car to travel, he entered the garage to take his vehicle into town. He immediately noticed a giant hole in the seat. McCain called to his neighbor, Mr. Crum, to come to take a look at “what the rats have done” to his seat cushion. According to Ben Hur Wilson, a writer who covered this story for Popular Astronomy, McCain continued, “I knew the rats were getting thick around here, but I never supposed they could do that much damage in twenty-four hours!”

When Mr. Crum came to inspect the cushion, he knew immediately it wasn’t rats who had been busy. They noticed a hole in the car’s ceiling. When they backed the Pontiac out of the garage, they lifted the cushion and noticed the floorboards also featured a heck of a hole. When they examined the cushion, it felt a bit heavy and they discerned, caught in the springs, a black object the size of two fists.

Mr. Crum went to retrieve pliers to remove the object. When he reached his house and relayed the story to his wife, the sounds she experienced that morning suddenly made sense. Joining the men, she discovered a hole in the roof of the garage. Finally, things started to add up.

A meteorite had fallen through the sky, hit the garage, hit the top of the car, plowed through the cushion, crashed through the floorboards, where it hit the muffler, and, shockingly, bounced back upward into the car, where it finally stopped, lodged in the cushion. Mrs. Crum had stood a mere 50 feet from the location of the strike!

As you can imagine, in small-town, 1938 Illinois, this occurrence was big news. Word of the close encounter spread across the zone. The local newspaper even featured an article, titled “Should Have Had Meteorite Insurance.” Two days after the strike, Wilson, a member of the Joliet Astronomical Society, desired to investigate, but he feared a hoax. After all, the story seemed incredible and, strangely, it would have been only the second recorded meteorite to hit the state of Illinois. Wilson and another member of the society traveled to Benld to see for themselves.

When McCain produced the rock to Wilson, he knew immediately he was looking at the real deal. It featured the surefire sign of a meteor: a thin layer of black, fused material coating the interior, kilned by the fires of the universe. Wilson also discovered round pieces on the inside, known as chrondules, which are, according to Astronomy Magazine, “molten drops of silicate minerals from the early solar system.”

While it might seem odd today, this event was a stroke of luck for astronomers in 1938. The eyewitnesses and the holes allowed Wilson to measure the object’s path and to deduce from where in the sky the meteorite arrived. This examination was a scientific first. Never before had a visitor from the cosmos left the necessary evidence to detect such information.

Today, some meteors find themselves the stars of video cameras and their origins in space can be pinpointed thanks to computers. In 1938, those possibilities weren’t even pipe dreams.

Obviously, the following conclusion is tough to definitively state, but it is thought that Mrs. Crum was the closest a human was to a live meteorite landing in recorded history. The record has since been surpassed, but we will leave that tale for another newsletter entry.

Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History now has a wonderful exhibit on the Benld meteorite. There you can see the rock itself, in addition to all the original pieces of Edward McCain’s automobile and garage that were damaged by the strike. As McCain himself noted in 1938, he was fortunate not to be parking his car when the fateful event transpired. Indeed, he is a lucky guy, for, as Ben Hur Wilson wrote, the “small stony-iron meteorite came crashing out of the battlements of heaven, aimed apparently with the precision of a crack artilleryman.”

BONUS FACT: There are differences between asteroids, meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites. Asteroids are large, rocky objects that orbit the sun, which are smaller than planets and moons. However, they are larger than meteoroids, which are usually quite small on a cosmic level and are often tiny pieces of asteroids or comets that have broken away from the main body. When a meteoroid enters the atmosphere of Earth, we call it a meteor. Most meteors burn up before they can reach the ground. We often call them shooting stars, though, of course, they are not stars. Rarely, a meteor reaches the surface of the planet before it completely burns up. In that case, we call the object a meteorite. So the Benld object probably started as an asteroid, became a meteoroid, then moved into the atmosphere as a meteor, crashed through all the levels of Edward McCain’s property, blossoming into a meteorite.