CAL FIRE - Arson investigation - Meteorite strikes car

A meteorite may have been what smashed into the windshield of a Cottonwood couple's sport utility vehicle late last month, destroying much of the dashboard and melting some of the glass.

"I hate to say it, but I think something fell out of the sky and did some damage to a car," said Mike Birondo, a fire inspector with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Birondo is used to figuring out the cause of a fire amid soot, ash and other debris, but he said he is perplexed by the amount of destruction apparently caused by an object about the size of a golf ball.

Linda Lang and her boyfriend Richard Orsot stand in front of her Isuzu Trooper that was struck possibly struck by a meteorite February 26th. "I'm frustrated, I wish it didn't happen but what can you do," Lang said who hasn't been asked by officials to leave her truck, their only vehicle, parked until test results come back on the object that left a hole in her windshield. The glass was melted around the hole and the explosion pushed her dashboard towards the back of the car.Nathan Morgan/Record Searchlight

The glass was melted around the hole and the explosion pushed her dashboard towards the back of the car Linda Lang said.Nathan Morgan/Record Searchlight

One of two fragments of an unknown material found in the destroyed dashboard of a Cottonwood couple's car late last month. Thinking it could potentially be part of a meteorite, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection investigator sent the other piece to a state crime lab in an attempt to determine what it is. Dylan Darling

"I can't make heads or tails of it because I haven't experienced something like this," Birondo said.

Neither had Richard Orsot, 61, or his girlfriend, Linda Lang, 46, who are learning the reality of doing daily chores - trips to the grocery store and laundromat - without a car because of something that seems out of science fiction.

It occurred at 4 a.m. Feb. 26 outside their cottage on Frances Street in Cottonwood.

"There was a loud explosion and bright light," Orsot said.

Rustled from his sleep, Orsot looked outside but didn't see anything unusual, so he went back to bed.

A half-hour later, there were again lights outside the home, this time from flashlights carried by Shasta County sheriff's deputies who were responding to a cluster of 911 calls in the neighborhood - all reporting a startling sound.

"It was a big kaboom," said Leroy Bolls, the couple's next-door neighbor. "Like a sonic boom, but real close."

He and his wife, Suzie, said the sound was strong enough to shake their house, and they thought a propane tank might have exploded.

But the deputies soon found the likely source of the sound. The damage was limited to Lang's 1995 Isuzu Trooper, Orsot said. The SUV was parked in a driveway near the cottage, facing north.

Deputies called in Birondo, hoping he could determine what did the damage.

"Whatever it was hit with some force and had some heat to it," Birondo said.

Having recovered two pieces of a strange material - he can't tell if it's metal or rock, but it doesn't appear to be part of the car - Birondo said he sent one to the state Department of Justice crime laboratory. He hasn't heard back from scientists there on what the material might be.

The pieces are black and gray, and very light. The piece Birondo still has at his office weighs 0.07 of a gram.

He said he doesn't think the pieces are part of the car because they don't match material in the dash or the interior, where they were found.

If they are pieces of a meteorite, or other piece of space debris, it would be a rare find.

"Most of the stuff that falls from the sky burns up," said Joe Polen, an astronomy professor at Shasta College.

That includes the clouds of debris from a collision of a private U.S. satellite and a decommissioned Russian military communications satellite on Feb. 9.

When a meteor becomes a meteorite by making it all the way to the Earth's surface without vaporizing, it can fetch good money.

After reports of a big boom and a brilliant yellow streak in the skies of Rockland County, N.Y., early last month, a collector offered $10,000 for a piece of the space rock, according to The Associated Press.

Orsot, who said Lang's insurance won't cover the damage to the SUV, said he hopes they can find such a buyer if it turns out to be a meteorite. The couple recently moved from Tulelake. He's on Social Security, and Lang's search for a job has been crimped by having no car.

"I don't know how we are going to get this car fixed," Orsot said.

Source: Redding.com - Link