If you found a meteor fragment, would you send it to someone for analysis?

You are walking through the woods and hear a massive boom, you look up and see this ball of fire heading for you and then it explodes. You hit the ground and cover your head. Pieces of it rain down, some still red hot.
Luckily you have a pair of tongs on you and some zip lock baggies handy, just for such an occasion, so you wait for the fragments to cool and bag them up (without touching them).
Looks like you got most of them, the big ones anyway.
You see meteor hunters arriving, all excited, some of them driving impossibly fantastic cars and wearing suits. They have specialized meteor detecting gear on, something that looks like night vision goggles, metal detectors, rubber gloves, and they are all battling for position, checking maps, scanning the area frantically.
Immediately behind them come the army vehicles who quickly surround the area and scare all the collectors away. You melt in with them and exit.
Are you going to send the fragments off to some place to have them examined? LOTS of places want these, they are worth a lot of money to some. A man in Michigan received 8.5 million for his fragment from a collector.

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

Punxi · F

A man calling himself Mel Waters phoned into the late-night radio show hosted by Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM in the late 1990s.

The story, in short:
Mel claimed he owned land in Ellensburg, Washington and on his property he'd discovered a perfectly circular hole.
He said it had no measurable bottom...people supposedly lowered hundreds (even thousands) of feet of line without hitting anything.

Mel's Hole.

Then it got written off as a hoax....to where is became urban legend.

Not the only group certainly as it's well documented but while in college I traveled with others to Ellensburg, WA and with GPS got kinda close to the property...
That is now fenced off as inaccessible government land.

🤷🏻

Northwest · M

@Punxi Mel Waters does not exist, or has property in Kittitas County. No one has been able to locate Mel's Hole, but it's good for tourism.

I've been to Ellensburg dozens of times. Nothing much to do there, other than cheep farming, hiking and river rafting.

No Mel.

Punxi · F

@Northwest Guess we were directed to a fenced in area Federally posted for nothing perhaps.

Northwest · M

@Punxi

Guess we were directed to a fenced in area Federally posted for nothing perhaps.

🤣🤣

I hope you didn't pay for your "excursion".

42% of Kittitas County is Federally managed. The largest chunks are off limits to the public and you lose your cell coverage if you get close, as it should because the DOW conducts training for all branches. If you travel along 90 or 82, you have a 100% chance or hitting military convoys, equipped like they're going to war and live ammunition could be heard at times.

As the food, most of the "good" places, get 4 stars. Domino's gets 4.5 stars. 🤣🤣

Punxi · F

@Northwest Thats crazy! Listen, Im not a believer in any of it. Just went tho' . Cant recall paying anyone but went with a group. Was a road trip from Nevada. Had a blast. 🤷🏻

Northwest · M

@Punxi

Had a blast.

It's part of the tourism industry now. I've had a blast doing river rafting in the area, where the Yakima river moves at a lazy pace, or down 90 on the Skykomish where the water moves at a much faster rate (season about to start, when temperatures get above freezing.

No one can run an 80,000 feet line below ground, without running into some major physics limitations. And for the record, NO ONE has been to point to exactly where Mel's Hole is located.

Up the road, if you go 82 and connect to 84, you will get to another massive federal land called the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. That's where we produced the fissile material used in the bomb that we dropped on Nagasaki. You don't want to trespass there either. If the thing goes active, it will punch a hole through the center of the planet.