Kenny describes what we're looking for. Much amusement is had by all.
Early evening, Monday, July 23, 2001
I was surprised by a loud “boom” and the feeling of my house shaking as I was waiting for dinner, sitting at my computer. Went downstairs and outside to find many of the neighbors doing the same thing. Pretty quickly decided it wasn’t a sonic boom. There’s an industrial park a few miles from my house. I considered the possibility that one of the chemical plants had exploded. Then we heard reports of a plane crash, everywhere from by Walmart in Mansfield, to Wellsboro, Muncy, and the Susquehanna river somewhere. Shortly after, we heard that it had been a meteorite. Again, reports were that it was anywhere from Rose Valley Lake, to Wellsboro, by some Baptist church in Quiggleville, and so on.
During dinner, I got a phone call from Kenny McDermott, asking if I wanted to go meteorite hunting. With all the reliable information we had, how could I not? (Jesse Brown said something on IRC about this time that I read much later that night, “Dude, never again in your life will you get to go see a fresh meteorite impact first-hand.” He’s right.) Two minutes later, I had my digital camera and I was on my way to his house. Got in the car with Kenny’s sister, her boyfriend, Kenny, and the Irish girl they have staying with them for the summer. We drove in the general direction of several of the “landing sites” we’d heard about on the radio and scanner. Basically what we found was lots of people doing exactly what we were doing, driving around lots of country roads, turning around, driving around other country roads.
We went back to Kenny’s house and sat around for a bit. On TV, we were hearing that the landing had been near Wellsboro. JP Morgan and Rob Judson showed up right about then. Since we were already north of Williamsport, Wellsboro would be well under an hour, and the JP, Rob, Kenny, and I decided to go. As we were getting in the car, Kenny’s mom and sister came out of the house and told us the latest reports were that it was somewhere on 973 west.
We hopped in the Civic and drove out 973. We came across a dirt road a few miles from Kenny’s house that had police tape across it, as well as some official-type cars blocking the way in.
The media, such as it is.
We stopped there, as did perhaps 8 or 10 other cars. One of the local TV networks was already there with a reporter and a camera dude. Rob talked to some people and found out that “it” was supposedly in a cornfield off of the dirt road. While he was doing that, Kenny found a rock and amused himself by videotaping a rock sitting in the grass beside the road. We continued maybe a half mile down 973 and found a place to turn into a cornfield on the correct side of the road, and found ourselves going up a “field road” onto a hill. (The distinction between “field road” and “dirt road” was not at that time apparent to any of the occupants of the car.) We got to the top of this hill. We could now see the road that had been blocked off, winding between cornfields ahead of us. Two people approached us, coming up the road on the other side of the hill. Turned out to be some guy and his son. (Not the owners of the farm, doing the exact same thing we were doing.) There wasn’t much to see from there.
There was one section of a field that was dark, but we were pretty sure it was a pile of dirt or something along those lines.
The man and his son disappeared into the cornfield, as did other people who came by. We drove on further down the far side of the hill until the road was blocked by some big piles of manure. We walked on and found Kenny’s sister and her boyfriend (they’d apparently come back out) and some other people, including a local newsman who’d misplaced his cameraman.
It was at roughly this point that Kenny interviewed a cow. The cow wasn’t talking.
There were by this point perhaps 25 people standing around. Most of them decided to walk in one direction, sort of down the hill, away from where we’d come in. Rob’s theory was “In all the movies like this, everyone goes on place, but then there’s a four cool guys that go somewhere else and they always find it.” So we went somewhere else, sort of along the hill rather than down it. Four other people about our age went the same way. We walked and talked for a bit. At one point we stopped and one of the other kids took some video of the cornfields below, while we talked about whether the dark area in one of the fields was what we were looking for. (We later found out that he gave this film to a local TV guy, and it ended up on CNN and on cnn.com the next day, which was kinda cool.)
At…about this point, the fire police below us got on a megaphone and started saying things like “The people in the fields must leave. This area may be contaminated.” We had a short huddle about what could possibly be on a piece of space rock, Andromeda Strain notwithstanding, we decided they were full of it and we’d keep going. But we mostly hit out in the cornfields. The kids we’d met up with had a girl with them, and she got pretty set about leaving, so they did. So down to our original group now, we sneaked around in the corn for quite a while, but it eventually it got dark we decided to leave.
As we were walking out, back up the hill towards my car on one of the roads, an ambulance spotted us with its little searchlight. They drove down and one of the paramedics said “You have to leave, now.” This was not a problem, since we were leaving at the time. From the looks of things, we managed to be some of the last civilians wandering around the field. (We found out later that people had gotten arrested for doing exactly what we were doing.) There were cars on several of the hills with searchlights panning them around the area. Anyway, we got back to the Civic, got it turned around, and were leaving. The headlights attracted the attention of two people riding two vehicles with exactly seven wheels between them. (That’s a three-wheeler and a four-wheeler.) The guy on the three-wheeler (afterwards referred to as “The Professor”) drove up to us, and I stopped the Civic.
“Who gave you permission to be up here?”
“Hey, we just drove up a dirt road.” (This was true, we’d turned off the highway onto a dirt road, no markings or anything. Sure, it was clear that it was just in someone’s farm. But there’s dirt, there’s a road…you wouldn’t expect an argument.)
“Bullshit! This is a field road”
“Well…what do you want me to do? I’m already leaving.”
There’s no immediate answer, we leave.
“Dirt road my ass!” (As we’re driving away)
We got back on 973, headed back to Kenny’s house. Decided to try to score some more information on our way, so we played it dumb when we came to official types where the original dirt road was blocked off. So we stopped and said (with an air of bewilderment) “What’s going on here?” The first guy we tried that on just waved us along, didn’t say a thing. But then we asked some lady, and we got the following out of her – “Well, you heard that big bang earlier, right? A meteorite landed, but I can’t tell you where. Now, you can’t park your car along the road here, either. There’s cops out, and they’ll arrest you.”
Shortly after, it was stated that it’s no wonder people have conspiracy theories. Anyway, I don’t think there’s been any hard (as in a piece of rock) evidence that anything at all landed after the badass meteor that night.
