Janus returned to the States and immediately posted a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the fossils. Janus enlisted Shapiro's help, and they followed up on the many leads the offer generated.
"A strange story with an offer of reward," Shapiro say" "is bound to attract, shall we say, imaginative people. There was one story about the bones hidden in a cabin high in the California hills. We had a countess living in New Jersey claiming she had seen the fossils. It was one damn thing after another."
In 1974, Shapiro published Peking Man, recounting the story of the fossils and their disappearance. Although so far all leads have turned up nothing, just recently new information about the fossils has surfaced. If the information is correct—and Shapiro believes it is—then he knows where in China the fossils might be buried. "I'm reluctant to talk about this now," he says, "because I'm still discussing it with the Chinese. It may well turn out to be nothing, like so many other leads. I can only investigate it with the complete knowledge and cooperation of the Chinese. After all, the fossils are theirs."
SEVENTEEN
Meteorites
In the basement of the Museum, in a dingy corridor between the metal shop and the carpentry shop, is a curious grouping of six thick steel pillars that pierce the ceiling above and are sunk into the floor below. One floor above, resting on these supports, is the massive Ahnighito meteorite, the largest recovered meteorite in the world—the meteorite that Peary salvaged with such difficulty. Its density and mass are so great that without these pillars anchored into the living rock under the Museum, the Ahnighito would drop right through the floor.
The Ahnighito sits in the middle of the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites in the Museum. Surrounding the brown, scarred form of this meteorite, like a crowd of lesser officials, are the dark shapes of irons, stones, tektites, and other extraterrestrial visitors.
Until recently the Museum could claim it owned pieces from over half of all known meteorites. (A group of scientists have recently discovered thousands of new meteorites on the glaciers of Antarctica, which in a few years doubled the number of known meteorites.) Meteorites on display in the hall include an iron studded with tiny diamonds,*51 a piece from the oldest documented fall, and the meteorite that, after it fell several centuries ago, convinced the scientific world of an extraterrestrial origin for these objects. Also in the hall are several other meteorites discovered by Admiral Peary, as well as a rare stony-iron that was used for years to hold down the cover of a rain barrel, and a meteorite that one enterprising farmer tried to chop in half with his ax (the broken ax blade remains embedded in it to this day).
Meteorites have always fascinated mankind. and their dramatic descents to earth have been reported since Roman times and documented since the fifteenth century.*52 A document in the town archives of Ensisheim, Germany, records the first fall for which we still have the meteorite (a four-ounce piece of which is in the hall):
On the sixteenth of November. 1492. a singular miracle happened: for between eleven and twelve in the forenoon, with a loud crash of thunder and a prolonged noise heard afar off. there fell in the town of Ensisheim a stone weighing 260 pounds. It was seen by a child to strike the ground in a field near the canton called Gisgaud. where it made a hole more than five feet deep. It was taken to the church as being a miraculous object. The noise was heard so distinctly at Lucerne. Villing. and many other places, that in each of them it was thought that some houses had fallen. King Maximilian, who was then at Ensisheim, had the stone carried to the castle; after breaking off two pieces, one for the Duke Sigismund of Austria and the other for himself, he forbade further damage, and ordered that the stone be suspended in the parish church.
A much later document, this one written by a farmer named J. K. Freed, reports the descent of another Museum meteorite, called the Modoc after the name of the Kansas town near which it fell:
The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire in the west September 12, 1905, at ten o'clock. in the evening, the sky being cloudless and the clear atmosphere of the plains being undisturbed by wind. From Scott City to Syracuse, seventy-five miles to the southwest, it was light enough to read common newspaper print on the street and the explosions rattled doors and windows. The mass exploded. and then the resulting fragments exploded several times in rapid successions. Then came the sounds of the explosions. the whistling like bullets or heavy hail of the smaller fragments and a most intense humming like that of a rapidly revolving cylinder of some heavy machine, evidently caused by the larger mass.*53 This was followed by fierce cannonading (echoes of the explosions?) like the discharge of a battery of artillery or a rapid-fire machine gun. gradually growing fainter and dying out like rolling thunder in the distance. I heard the largest one drop and hunted for it for over two years.
On May 6, 1908. I was breaking ground on the prairie with a gang plow and a five-horse team that was a little too high-spirited to be controlled easily. but having half-mile furrows as smooth as a lawn before me, I had set the plow a few notches deeper into the ground and let them go. thinking nothing of meteorites. While congratulating myself upon our speed we suddenly—very suddenly—struck something hard. It threw me out of my seat and piled my gang plow up in a promiscuous heap against the team. which was too badly surprised to do anything. I commenced stabbing with my jacknife and soon located the cause of the disturbance. It was the largest fragment of the Modoc meteorite and completely buried under the tough buffalo sod (virgin soil) and was pounded in so hard that the force of the blow of my gang plow had not loosened it. So completely was it buried, that I had hunted dozens of times all over that pasture without either finding the rock' or the hole in the ground which it had made.
Yet another account tells of the fall of a meteorite called the Rose City, as witnessed by a Mrs. George Hall of Rose City. Michigan:
[On October 17. 1921, at 11:00 P.M.] I saw it very light out of doors and heard a roaring sound and then three loud explosions. I thought it was an airship and it was dropping some bombs or something of that character. I jumped up and ran to the door, and the big light was disappearing in the south. The roaring itself was not so very loud. but the explosions were very loud indeed. and while I stood in the doorway watching the disappearing light. I distinctly heard a sound like fine singing.
Although these accounts are fascinating, nothing can quite compare with the amusing and outrageous story of the Museum's Willamette meteorite, the largest ever found in the United States. The Willamette (pronounced Wil-lam-ette) is certainly the oddest-looking meteorite in the Museum—or perhaps anywhere. Most meteorites are shapeless lumps, but this sixteen-ton chunk of nickel-iron is pitted with huge cavities; a famous photograph taken in 191 I shows two children sitting inside the meteorite. Contrary to popular belief, the pits were not caused by its fiery descent through the atmosphere, but by centuries of rusting away in a damp Oregonian forest.*54
In the fall of 1902, a Welsh immigrant named Ellis Hughes discovered an odd, partly buried rock about three-quarters of a mile from his property in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The next day, Hughes confided his discovery to a neighbor, William Dale, and showed him the rock. By chance, Dale struck it with a stone, and it gave off, to their astonishment, a ringing sound. Since both men were miners, they immediately recognized it for what it was—an iron meteorite. They hid it under a pile of fir boughs and started discussing how they could secure the meteorite for themselves. The problem was that the land it lay on was owned (ironically) by the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. They decided to keep the discovery secret and buy the land on which it lay. Dale went off to eastern Oregon to sell some property to raise the necessary capital.
For some reason, Dale never returned. After many months, Hughes' wife began nagging him about the meteorite, telling him to do something before someone else found it. Without the necessary money, Hughes' only other option quickly became obvious: he had to steal the meteorite.
Purloining a 32,000-pound chunk of iron is not an ea
sy task. In August 1903, Hughes began excavating the huge meteorite. Working in great secrecy with the crudest of tools, he was assisted only by his teenage son and an old horse. After digging around the sixteen-ton mass, they jacked and levered it out of the hole onto a primitive flatbed cart they had built entirely of logs, using tree-trunk sections for wheels. The resourceful Welshman then rigged up a capstan device for hauling the cart. The capstan consisted of a post sunken into the ground, attached to a steel cable. Hughes harnessed his horse to the capstan so that the horse, by walking around in endless circles, caused the cable to wind up around the post, inching the cart and meteorite forward. Since the ground was spongy, Hughes had to lay down a roadway of wooden planks. After every hundred feet of progress, the capstan had to be dug up and moved another hundred feet forward, a new clearing made for the horse, and the roadway dug up and relaid.
Hughes and his son labored for three backbreaking months to move the iron the three-quarters of a mile to his house. During this time his secrecy had been so effective that his neighbors later said they had no idea that anything out of the ordinary was going on. When it finally arrived, Hughes built a shack around it, announced he had found it—on his property, of course—and started charging twenty-five cents admission to view the heavenly visitor.
One of Hughes' early customers, unfortunately, was the attorney for the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. He had somehow deduced that the meteorite had been stolen from the company—probably by following the conspicuous trail back to the large pit on company property.*55 The attorney told Hughes he knew damn well the meteorite belonged to his client, but as a matter of courtesy and to avoid a lawsuit, he would graciously offer the miner fifty dollars for it. Hughes threw the man out. The lawyer then filed suit on behalf of the company to get the meteorite back, and the case went to court.
Hughes fought long and bitterly, and he seems to have genuinely believed that the meteorite was rightly his. The miner's lawyer chose a novel defense. First he put several elderly Indians on the witness stand who testified that long ago the meteorite had belonged to their tribe. They said it had fallen from the moon and was a sacred object to the tribe. To ensure success in battle, the Indians testified, they used to dip their arrows in the puddles of rainwater that collected in its cavities. In addition, young braves were sent to the sacred stone in the dead of night to undergo secret initiation rituals. Hughes' lawyer presented this as solid evidence that the Indians—not the company—had the prior claim of ownership.
Then the lawyer tried to cloud the issue of "ownership" of an object that had fallen from the sky. He argued that the meteorite might have fallen somewhere else and been carried to the company's land by the glaciers. Whose was it then? Or the Indians may have transported it from somewhere else. The lawyer concluded that the ownership issue was so tangled that the meteorite could only belong to the discoverer, Ellis Hughes.
The company, on the other hand, simply asserted that Hughes had deliberately and egregiously stolen the meteorite from them. They wanted it back.
The court found for the plaintiff. Immediately after the verdict, the victorious company sent a team of horses to Hughes' property and started hauling away the iron. Hughes frantically appealed the verdict to the state supreme court, and managed to get an injunction just as the meteorite was being hauled away. The company hired a twenty-four-hour guard who sat on top of the meteorite with a loaded gun while the case was being appealed.
Meanwhile, Hughes' next-door neighbor started another lawsuit, this one directed at both Hughes and the company. The neighbor contended that the meteorite had, in fact, been stolen from his land. To buttress his case he showed investigators a huge crater on his land, which he claimed had been caused by the meteorite's fall. The case was dismissed when the man's neighbors reported that they had heard a great deal. of blasting being done on his property only the week before.
On July 17, 1905, the state supreme court upheld the earlier ruling and awarded the meteorite to the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. The company carted it off to Portland, where it was unveiled with great fanfare at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in a ceremony attended by the governor. It was announced that this—the largest American meteorite—would forever remain in Oregon, its home state.
When the exposition closed, however, the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, unmoved by this patriotic rhetoric, sold it to Mrs. William Dodge for $20,600, who gave it to the American Museum of Natural History. It was the highest price paid up to that time for a single specimen in the Museum's collection. Visitors will find this massive iron on the first floor of the Museum's Hayden Planetarium, where children still climb into its holes.
Meteorites have quaint names; in the Hall we find the Wold Cottage, the Canyon Diablo, the Krasnojarsk, the Guffey, the L'Aigle, and many more. Meteorites are normally named after the place where they fell. One of these, named Allende, is perhaps the most important meteorite fragment in the collection. Ironically, it is by appearance among the least interesting, looking more as if it came from a vacant urban lot than from outer space. It is small, gray, and utterly common. But its lack of distinction hides at least one startling fact: it is the oldest thing on earth. Indeed, it is slightly older than the earth, the sun, and all the planets, older than the solar system itself. As a result, one scientist has described this meteorite as possibly being more important scientifically than all the collected moon rocks put together.
In the early morning hours of February 8, 1969, a brilliant bolide flashed across the sky and illuminated almost one million square miles of Mexico and the Southwestern United States. High above the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, the bolide exploded in a series of sonic booms, and thousands of dark gray rocks—just like the one in the hall—rained down on a one-hundred-square-mile area near the Rio del Valle de Allende.
Over the next few days, scientists, local peasants, private collectors, Commercial rock dealers, and museum curators all converged on the Allende Valley and began a mad search for the peculiar dark stones. Four tons of the fragments were eventually recovered, making it the largest stony meteorite known at that time. Bits and pieces were dispatched to laboratories and museums all over the world. Large chunks were sliced up like loaves of bread and studied under microscopes and electron microprobes,*56 and with X-ray diffraction machinery, mass spectrometers, and other equipment. Meteorite scientists had never had it so good.
As examination of the Allende progressed, it soon became apparent that it was no ordinary meteorite.
Scientists have known since the early 1950s that most meteorites formed at about the same time as the earth and other planets. While the earth has melted, cooled, eroded, and metamorphosed, erasing the evidence of its early history, meteorites have remained virtually unchanged for 4.5 billion years. Thus, by studying meteorites, scientists can gather information about the earliest history of the solar system. The Allende, at first, looked like any other meteorite seen under a microscope. Prominent in it were many white fragments and some spherical droplets (called inclusions and chondrules respectively) embedded in the meteorite's dark matrix. But when the composition of these inclusions was analyzed, they were found to contain unusual minerals. The scientists theorized that this was a particularly early meteorite—and that the inclusions had once actually been partly molten droplets floating in the primitive cloud that would eventually form the solar system. Thus, they had to be a little older than the solar system itself, which put their age at slightly more than 4.5 billion years.
In 1973 a University of Chicago scientist, Robert Clayton, made an even more startling discovery. In the frozen fragments he found some isotopes that had never been seen in nature. These once-radioactive elements could only have been formed by an exploding star—a supernova.
Clayton followed his discovery to its logical conclusion. He decided that the current theory about the formation of the solar system was inadequate. This theory hypothesized that a large cloud of gas and dust had slowly contracted, gradually forming
the sun and planets. Instead, Clayton theorized that the solar system began when a dying star suddenly exploded in a supernova. The expanding shock wave plowed into a nearby dust cloud, heating the cloud and reducing its size. Molten droplets and fragments condensed out of the cloud, gradually coalescing to form the planets. Meanwhile, under gravitational attraction, a large pool of hydrogen gas was forming at the center of the cloud. This cloud would, in time, contract to form the sun. Had it not been for the chance explosion of this nearby supernova (a very rare event), we would still—according to this theory—be a cloud of diffuse gas, floating in empty space.
The Allende, like most other meteorites, comes from the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. For some reason, the planet-forming process failed in this zone. Instead ofone planet, a number of tiny planetesimals came into being. Hundreds of these tiny planets melted and cooled, with heavier minerals like metallic iron sinking to the core and lighter compounds like silicates rising to the surface. Many small planets formed, and over millions of years they jostled and bumped into each other, eventually breaking up into thousands of jagged fragments. These fragments continue to orbit the sun as asteroids in the asteroid belt. This explains why some meteorites are iron (because they came from the core of the primitive planetesimals), some are stone (because they came from the surface), and some a mixture, called stony-iron. A few chunks of primitive solar system material never got incorporated into the planetesimals, and were thus entirely unchanged from the beginning. The Allende is such a meteorite.
Dinosaurs in the Attic Page 27
