I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suppose somebody dropped something burning from the grill over there on the other side of the deck, and now he’s trying to come up with an excuse to get an insurance payout to repair/replace a rotten deck. If that’s possible.
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surprise! it didn’t fall from above, it was a demon escaping from BELOW. they need to be on the lookout for a rampaging demon!
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Or possibly his neighbor down the way firing off his civil war cannon while drunk.
Check it out, Cletus! The thing actually worked!
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We get that a lot; I’m on very casual consultancy (because of my meteorite collecting hobby) with the Institute for Astronomy here, and about once a year someone comes in with a ‘weird rock’ that they are sure is a meteorite. 9.9 times out of 10 it’s a volcanic bomb or other lava product; .08 of the rest are man-made debris. .2% might require further investigation.
eta: The flow chart is close, but not quite dead on.
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In addition to the numbering not making sense and the arrows being wonky (there’s apparently no “No” option for number 6?), they forgot:
Does it get smaller by the day, seeming to evaporate without leaving behind any residue?
Does it contain nodules which shine with a mysterious color outside of the known visible spectrum?
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We may never know… or it will be about a year.
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Yeah. A smoldering butt, on that old deck wood could start the wood smoldering like punk for quite a while before working up to a flame.
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I believe the implication here is: if one has gotten to question number 6 without getting to another terminus, then the only possible reason one might think the thing is a meteorite is because one saw it fall from the sky. In which case one is wrong. (There’s another version of this flowchart where there is a “no” exit from this node, which points to a snarky comment that points back to the same question.)
Also, you owe me a coke.
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Meteorites are loosely separated into ‘finds’ and ‘falls’. ‘Finds’ are meteorites that are discovered usually years after they hit the Earth, with no record of anyone having seen them during their flight. ‘Falls’ have been witnessed during their fiery plummet until they slow enough not to be luminous; often they have been tracked by sky surveys or radar sufficiently to figure out where the remains may end up. At that point, hunters/collectors go out within hours after a witnessed fall that has likely produced rocks from space and scour the area where they have probably landed. Saying meteorites are never seen falling is not correct.
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IIRC, meteorites are not hot when they land.
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That’s not what I expressed. My read was: if you make it through the rest of the flowchart and don’t end up at a terminus through another route, then what you saw falling from the sky isn’t a meteorite. Presumably if the thing you saw is really a “fall” then it should have been captured by another branch of the chart.
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puts on pedant hat
If you get some of the rarer meteorites, something from the HED (Howardite, Eucrite, Diogenite) family, or even more rarely a Lunar, the crust might be lighter colored, glassy and greenish or tan. They are rare enough that that leg of the flowchart might be excused for not considering rocks that are about the same weight as Earth rocks, don’t attract a magnet (much), and have a lighter crust (not black or dark brown).
doffs hat
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Now that’s a different line of criticism, and one where I’m out of my depth, so I am happy to defer to your expertise. There are definitely other, fancier versionis of this flowchart that might address some of those possibilities. (They do mostly have the snarky “did you see it fall” question towards the end, though.)
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Let’s revisit in a month and see how things are going.
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Perhaps a frozen meteroite collided with a still-burning mosquito candle, knocking it onto a pile of tinder that spread flames to the deck. Doubters the lot of ya.
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Agreed - really weird that they didn’t actually show the “meteorite” much at all, no close up shots of it. But what you could see looked nothing like a meteorite.
If it was there would be dozens upon dozens of reports of a bright fireball in the sky and dozens of doorbell and security camera videos of it coming down. But there’s none of that.
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