3 days ago
Suspected meteorite hits Massachusetts home. Scientist says "it looks pretty convincing"
A Massachusetts couple suspects their home was hit by a meteorite. Late last week, Jim Dolan was sitting upstairs reading in his Gloucester townhouse when he heard something slam into the side of it. He ran out to the balcony to find his wife on the lower deck. She heard the same noise.
"I said what's going on, what happened," Dolan recalled. "She says I don't know but there are all kinds of rocks down here on the deck."
Dolan's wife Sue walked out and found a few rocks at her feet. "I am picking them up and I am looking around and I am like there is nobody here," Sue Dolan said. "There's nobody out on the water, there's nobody throwing rocks at the house."
When she picked the rocks up, Dolan said they smelled of sulfur and had black markings on the exterior.
With no one around she looked up and found damage to the corner of her house where the trim had recently been replaced. "There's no way a rock could've splashed up or come from anywhere else so it must be a meteor," she said.
WBZ-TV sent a picture of the rocks to Boston College professor, and senior research scientist at the Weston Observatory, John Ebel.
He noted the rocks mineral composition, where they appeared to have made contact with the house, and its reported smell as reason to conclude these rocks were the real deal.
"It looks pretty convincing to me that is was a meteorite," said Ebel. "First of all, obviously it came down from above. There would be no reasons for rocks to fly out of the sky."
Ebel compared the likelihood of one hitting your house to that of winning the lottery but said it's not uncommon for meteorites to make landfall. "Every day and every night there are meteorites coming into the atmosphere," he said.
