I lived in Tulsa and was a member of the Astronomy Club of Tulsa at the time of that incident. The woman was invited to come to our next club meeting. She brought along the samples of what had hit her, and I talked to her, and got to see and touch the samples. As I recall, the woman (who was not THAT big, come on) saw the re-entry and shortly afterward was struck by something. I was suspicious because she saw the re-entry as a streak across the sky, not as a "point source" as you would expect if it were aimed at her. However, perhaps the debris that hit her took a separate trajectory? The "debris" itself was _very_ light and very fragile, a crispy half curled up black rind, about 5cm by 10cm. It looked like it had been some sort of plastic mesh before becoming carbonized. Club members found out from her exactly where she had been and checked the direction of the wind that day. They discovered that she had been directly downwind of a trash incinerator. We all agreed that it was more likely that she had simply been struck by a piece of incompletely incinerated trash, shortly after having seen the re-entry streak by overhead on it way to crashing near San Antonio. As long as we're verifying stories: A friend of mine at Stanford claimed to have gotten to see a piece of Skylab that "crashed in a drive way in Pennsylvania". According to the story, "the piece crashed in the drive way of an old woman, who was completely uninterested in it" and gave it to my friend's friend. "NASA folks came out and verified it, but the woman had waited too long to say anything so it was too late to win the contest and get the money." (There was some sort of contest for the first person who could produce a verifiable piece of skylab. Some place in Australia won.) "The piece that landed in Pennsylvania was small and aerodynamic and skipped, and that's why it landed so far from Australia." Any possible truth to this story? ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jan 17 2000 - 18:53:29 PST