Fiery Passage

The sky of the southwestern U. S. grew suddenly, hellishly luminescent, just before dawn one day last week. A meteor had passed with the howling roar and ripping draft of a monster express train. The pilots of two mail planes were aloft close enough to the phenomenon to bring precious new information down to scientists.

Frank Williams, flying the Transcontinental & Western Air route 50 mi. west of Albuquerque. N. Mex., saw the whole sky suddenly illuminated "as if someone had turned on a great blue electric light." A core of blue brilliance seemed to rush toward him from a high altitude about 300 mi. away. The brilliance lasted eight or ten seconds, then broke into two clouds-- one brilliant blue, the other yellow and flame-colored. The clouds soon seemed to merge. The luminescence faded after a half-hour. Groundlings at Albuquerque noted the gaseous glow for half an hour. Colorado Springs saw it for three times as long. The few groundlings who saw the meteor itself called its color blue-white.

Most precious description was Flyer Orie William ("Bill") Coyle's. He had "a ringside seat 9,500 ft. above the earth" in a Transcontinental & Western Air mail plane traveling East. Flyer Coyle, 37, quiet, learned accurate observation under stress during War bombardments. His report of what he saw was quickly reported by the Associated Press when he landed at Kansas City: "It was the most spectacular sight I ever have witnessed. The meteor appeared out of the northeast, traveling west by southwest. It was 5:15 a. m. Mountain Time, and I was over Adrian, Tex., 45 miles west of Amarillo.

"It gave the appearance of a large floodlight being turned on in the sky. In a second or so it grew too bright for me. We were at about the same altitude. In a moment I caught sight of its tail and could tell that it was going north of me.

"Its line of flight was probably 40 or 50 miles distant. At any rate it was so close I could see fiery fragments of the meteor whirling away from it and dropping back into the tail.

"Before it struck or disintegrated the meteor had lost altitude and I was looking down on its long, horizontal flight.

"It appeared to be about the size of our Wichita hangar [102 ft. by 270 ft.] and shaped like a ball. It left a deep red trail with a bluish tint, which hung in the sky until obliterated by daylight.

"Besides the pieces which appeared to explode into the tail, others exploded from the main mass and dropped to the ground. So it was impossible to tell whether the meteor gradually disintegrated or struck the ground.*

"However, it faded from my view in what appeared to be the vicinity of Tucumcari, N. Mex.

"I noticed that an extremely bright, fiery thread extended backward from the main mass before it spread out into the gaseous brilliantly shaded tail, which may have been between 50 and 100 miles long." One million meteors enter the earth's atmosphere each hour, become incandescent from friction. But rarely are astronomers able to photograph the hot spots and analyze the spectra. Last week Harvard's Dr. Peter Mackenzie Millman proudly reported that he had spectral pictures of nine meteors. Six, possibly seven were mostly stone. All contained some iron (heated to vapors of between 2,600DEG and 4,600DEG F.). One or more contained calcium, manganese, aluminum, chromium. Three containing magnesium burned greenishly.

*At Stratford, Tex., Farmer Ed Hart found a 4-lb. metallic mass which seemed a fragment of the meteor. The material was cold and not embedded in the soil. But green wheat and grass around the lump were scorched.

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