Putnam: Falling rock is meteor-wrong DeWitt family told
“It came out of the sky. What is it?”
EAST LANSING - Just what the heck hit Daniel and Kathryn Seip’s garage on West Herbison in Clinton County Saturday?
A rock the size of a small orange slammed into the family’s garage about 2:30 p.m. as Kathryn Seip was unloading groceries from her car.
She heard a loud boom and saw the 7-ounce rock on the concrete in front the garage about 10 to 15 feet away.
Her first thought was that a kid — the Seips have 11 children between them — had lobbed the object. But Seip looked around. She was alone, standing under a blue sky.
She went in the house and told her family that she thought a meteorite had hit. Tommy, 6, ran out and picked it up. He noted the rock was cool to the touch while other rocks had been warmed by the sun.
Later, her husband, Daniel, found a dent and a tear in the metal garage door that may be connected.
Thinking it might be a space rock, the family took it to Abrams Planetarium Tuesday morning where Craig Whitford, meteorite collection coordinator, quickly ruled it out. In fact he has a tongue-in-cheek name for what he identified.
“We call that a meteor-wrong,” he told the Seips who brought along Tommy and Mary, 4.
If confirmed, it would have been a rare finding. And Whitford witnesses a lot of meteor-wrongs, including another one from DeWitt area Tuesday that turned out to be metal slag. He's looked at more than a dozen rocks from the area in the past year, he estimates.
Whitford said no meteorites have been found in Michigan since 1997, when one damaged a garage roof, ceiling and car in Worden. And there have only been 10 confirmed meteorites ever in the state.
“It’s really rare to have a confirmed one,” he said. He’s looked at more than a dozen rocks in the past year.
Whitford and Abrams Planetarium Director Shannon Schmoll suggested that the Seips’ rock might have fallen from an aircraft, perhaps somehow stuck to the plane's undercarriage.
Is that possible?
The Seips place is just four miles north and a little west of Capital Region International Airport. Planes fly over their home all the time, Kathryn said.
Clinton County Sheriff Office Sgt. Jeff Clarke said in his 21 years, he’s not heard of debris falling off a plane. There were no other complaints of falling rocks Saturday and there’s no dynamite blasting going on in the area, he said.
Calls to Capital Region International Airport were not returned.
Whitford said that the Seips’ rock had a dark interior with flecks of quartz. You don’t find quartz in meteorites and it had the wrong kind of exterior. There are three kinds of meteorites, stony, stony with a mixture of iron, and iron.
Washington University in St. Louis has a website of stories of what were thought to be meteorite reportings that actually turned out to be otherwise. In one, a rock was accidentally launched from a wood chipper two blocks away, a chunk of concrete fell off a plane over Great Britain in another and some had no explanation.
Kathryn Seip said she’d like to know.
“It came out of the sky. What is it?” she asked. “It really is odd.”
Judy Putnam is a columnist with the Lansing State Journal. Contact her at (517) 267-1304 or at jputnam@lsj.com. Write to her at300 S. Washington Square Suite #300 Lansing, MI, 48933. Follow her on Twitter @JudyPutnam.