Brief by Central Staff
Meteors – November 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, was a fairly open-minded fellow, but when a couple of New England college teachers said they had recovered a meteor, he was skeptical: “I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors could lie than that rocks would fall from the sky.”
Whatever the veracity of professors, rocks do fall from the sky. One is believed to have hit the ground last August near Saguache, after making a bright green streak through the atmosphere. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science (we still keep wanting to call it by its former name, the Museum of Natural History) has conducted workshops to teach people how to identify it, but no one has stumbled across it yet.
One such workshop was at the annual museum-opening festival, which always happens on the Sunday before Memorial Day in Saguache. It didn’t produce the 2001 meteorite, but it did help identify another rock from the sky.
That one was found two years ago in a dry streambed on private property near Cotopaxi. Richard and Sharon Walker of Colorado Springs had just paid $700 for a new metal detector, and they were out looking for gold.
They were only 45 minutes into their first search when the machine got excited. Sharon started digging, and came up with a rusted, jagged rock about the size of a child’s fist. It seemed heavy for its size.
Richard thought it was a “weird, funny-looking rock.” It weighed 8.5 ounces, and they took it to a rock shop in Colorado Springs, where the owner said it might be a meteorite, but they should get confirmation. After that, it got put on a shelf in their garage.
Then they read that Jack Murphy, the Denver museum’s curator of geology, would be in Saguache on Memorial Day weekend to teach people how to identify meteorites. So they went to Saguache and showed it to him.
Murphy said it was likely a meteorite, but he wanted another expert, John Wasson at UCLA, to examine it, too. Wasson concurred that it was an iron-type meteorite, one that probably hit the earth about a century ago.
Iron meteorites are rare finds, because they typically bury themselves. Of the 75 meteorites ever found in Colorado, only 14 are iron. (One was on Mt. Ouray in 1898, and another was near Guffey in 1907). And this one has an unusual assortment of trace elements like nickel, iridium, gallium, and arsenic.
It’s now officially known as the Cotopaxi Meteorite, and one small slice will be part of the permanent collection at the Denver Museum. The Walkers haven’t decided what they’ll do with the rest, although they’ve been offered $5,000 for it.
This autumn, falling rocks have continued to light up the night sky in the Rocky Mountains. At about 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 6, a fireball meteor was visible across a wide area, from Pueblo to Ogden, Utah. And at about 7:20 p.m. on Oct. 7, another fireball crossed the sky. One witness, Mary Michaelson of rural Westcliffe, said “It was green and blue and orange and yellow and had a huge tail. I was so scared, I thought it was the end of the world.”