A Cosmic Visitor
ON THE EVENING OF THE FOURTH OF JULY in 1917, the small central Wisconsin community of Colby—best known for its eponymous cheese—was settling in for Independence Day observations. A carnival and baseball game had drawn a crowd into town that day, and as night approached, the staccato sound of firecrackers filled the air. Suddenly, an exceptionally loud blast rattled windows and alarmed residents. As the Taylor County Star-News of Medford later reported, “Much excitement was caused in this city and vicinity last Wednesday evening about 6:10 by a terrific explosion and rumbling noise.”1
According to the Star-News, some witnesses believed a car tire had exploded, while others speculated that the boom had been caused by overzealous merrymakers detonating dynamite; still others thought it might have been “an attempt of Nature to assist in celebrating the glorious Fourth.” Several pious people interpreted the thunderous sound as “a warning from Providence.” And some imagined a more sinister scenario: the Great War was raging in Europe, and the United States had declared war on Germany just three months earlier. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that German airships had arrived for an attack on rural Wisconsin. As the anonymous Star-News reporter wrote, “Many rushed out expecting to see a Zeppelin dropping bombs upon the city.”2
In fact, it was something even more improbable: a rock crashing in from space.
Three days later, the Marshfield Herald erroneously described the extraterrestrial object as a “big comet,” reporting that “many saw the illumination in the sky, while the hissing noise was heard many miles away.” The Taylor County Star-News provided a more detailed account the following week, under the slightly more accurate headline “It Was a Meteor.” The writer got it halfway right: meteorite refers to a physical rock while a meteor is the streak of light in the sky made by a meteorite. As the paper reported, “Reports came from some people who attended the ball game at Colby that a meteor did actually strike the earth just west of that city and some brought home fragments of it.” The Marshfield Herald reported, with questionable scientific authority, that “fragments broken from the comet… were gray in color and resembled lime stone.”3
According to a rather colorful letter submitted by one John Koep of Chippewa Falls to the August 1917 issue of , the sound of the meteorite fall was akin to a “boiler explosion,” and “the people of Colby thought the
