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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
People get excited when strange objects fall from the sky. We seek portents and meanings, we venerate the object, and we horripilate at the uncanny scent of our beginnings, or end. Even wised up by science as we are, we tend to freak. Here in the state of New Jersey, there hadn't been much call for that kind of excitement since 1829, when a meteorite fell on the town of Deal, in Monmouth County. At about twelve-thirty in the morning on August 15th, a fireball was seen over
the town and multiple booms were heard. Several meteorite fragments may have been present, but only one was ever found--a stone meteorite about three inches long. In later years, the Deal Meteorite could be seen on display in Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Sciences, which sold it with other museum specimens to a consortium of mineral dealers last fall; it is possibly in Colorado now.
A hundred and seventy-seven years and some months after the Deal Meteorite, an object descending at a steep angle and a high rate of speed shot through the roof of a house in Freehold Township--coincidentally also in Monmouth County. On January 2, 2007, at about four-thirty in the afternoon, Mrs. Sundari Nageswaran was standing by the back door of her son's Canterbury-model house, in a development of many similar houses, when she heard a loud bang. Thinking it only a straggling firecracker from the holiday celebrations of the day before, she did not mention it to her husband, her seven-year-old grandson, just home from school, or her son, Srinivasan Nageswaran, who was at work in his office in the basement. Srinivasan, called Srini, is an information-technology consultant who does business both at clients' sites and from home.
Soon afterward, Srini's wife arrived from work, and the whole family had dinner. In the evening, while getting ready for bed, Srini went into the second-floor bathroom off the master bedroom to wash up. When he opened the door, he saw shreds of insulation, fragments of Sheetrock, and pulverized plaster dust all over the counter and the floor. In the bathroom ceiling above the sink was a hole about four inches long. The hole was clean and vaguely deltoid in shape on the side closer to the roof, and more ragged on the bathroom side, with a few pieces of Sheetrock held by liner paper dangling down. Climbing onto the counter and examining the hole more closely, he saw that it also seemed to go through the roof, just a foot or so above.
Srini called his wife, who observed the damage and then got a broom and began to sweep up the mess. When she lifted the green shag bathmat on the floor, she saw that a square of the porcelain tile beneath it had been shattered into many small pieces held in place by the mat. The broken tile lined up with the hole in the ceiling at an angle of about eighty degrees. In the bathroom wall, a foot or so above the broken tile, was a dent. While sweeping behind the toilet, Srini's wife noticed an object about three and a half inches long. It was a dull brownish-silver in color and shaped sort of like a small croissant. She picked it up and gave it to Srini, and said, "Look, this is what caused it." The object was about the same shape as the hole. Srini looked at the hole in the ceiling again and pushed a broomstick through to the outside. Whatever the object was, it apparently had struck with such force as to penetrate the shingle, three-quarter-inch plywood, eight inches of fibreglass insulation, and half-inch Sheetrock, with enough energy left over to shatter the tile and dent the wall. Anybody standing at the sink when it hit, he reflected, would probably have been killed.
At first, Srini and his wife thought the object might be a part from a satellite or an airplane. It had a lot of weight for its size, though, and somehow did not look like anything from this world. Srini's parents joined the discussion. The family held the object in their palms and passed it around. Srini's father was the first to suggest that it might be a meteorite.
In the morning, the Nageswarans called the Freehold Township police. At about nine-thirty, two officers came, looked at the hole in the ceiling and in the roof, wrote up a report on the damage, and took the mysterious object with them for identification. When the officers returned to the station, they left the object in the vehicle; Lieutenant Robert A. Brightman, a coordinator of the police investigation, wanted to keep the risk of spreading any radiation contamination to a minimum, should the object turn out to be radioactive. After a check with a Geiger counter proved that not to be the case, the object was brought into the station and put into a clear plastic cylinder used to hold pieces of evidence.
Two investigators from the office of the Federal Aviation Administration in Saddle River arrived at about noon. The F.A.A. gives out very little information. Jim Peters, a spokesman at the F.A.A. office in Queens, told me that F.A.A. investigators are not available to talk to the press, because they don't understand the complexities of dealing with the media. In any event, the investigators examined the object and photographed it at the police station for several hours. Then they told Lieutenant Brightman that the object showed no sign of having been manufactured or machined and was not a part of an aircraft. Arlene Murray, a higher-up at the F.A.A., informed the press of this finding later in the day.
Meanwhile, people who are paid to listen to police scanners for interesting developments heard that the Freeport Township police were investigating an object of unknown origin that had fallen from the sky. Those people told other people, with predictable results. By late afternoon, so many reporters and camera crews had shown up at the station that Lieutenant Brightman held a press conference to answer the questions in an organized way. He did not have much news to offer, besides the F.A.A.'s verdict and his...
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