Sky Stones
As a quiet winter’s night in the Northeast was nearing its end, light blazed in the darkness. At half past six on the morning of Monday, December 14, 1807, a fiery mass traversed the sky north to south, rocketing into and out of sight in 30 seconds. In Wenham, Massachusetts, a woman named Gardner wondered “where the moon was going.” In Weston, Connecticut, Judge Nathan Wheeler was making his usual early morning survey of his farm when “a sudden flash…illuminated every object.” The jurist looked up to see “a globe of fire just then passing” followed soon after by three loud reports and lesser rumbles whose reverberations suggested a “cannonball rolling over a floor.”
A meteorite had exploded overhead, rattling residences in New Milford, Connecticut, 20 miles away. Fragments of space debris rained on then rural Weston in the state’s southwest corner. One stampeded a dairy herd. Another chunk buried itself a meter deep.
The Weston Fall, the first meteorite documented to have landed in the United States fascinated locals and their president, Thomas Jefferson. The meteorite strike deep in Connecticut also put American science on the world map.
of the early 1800s was a scientific backwater much condescended to by Europeans. “Among civilized nations… few have made less progress in the higher science…than. The young country boasted a few first-class scientific minds, like Benjamin Franklin. A founder of the American Philosophical Society, a center of scientific study, he theorized that meteorites might come from space—a crazy notion, according to many fellow citizens. The ancient, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Chinese had noted the phenomenon, sometimes regarding it as an ill omen.
