Untitled Document

Volume 67 Issue 19

INDEX PAGE

SMALLVILLE RESIDENTS STILL JITTERY ABOUT METEORS
Memories Of Devastating 1989 Shower
Remain Fresh For Many

Video by: Glen Winter

Amateur photography of the 1989 meteor shower
By Jim Bradlee

News stories about a meteor shower that surprised many people in New England last Sunday, April 24, reopened some old wounds here in Smallville. Officials at the Federal Aviation Administration fielded hundreds of calls that night from worried residents ranging from Portland, Maine, to Long Island, New York, speculating about a possible crashing aircraft and, of course, making the usual UFO claims as well.

Reading the national papers at the Talon yesterday, 58-year-old Jason Dick took a decidedly sarcastic stance. "Freaked 'em out back East, huh? I feel bad for those folks. Must have been quite a scare seeing those little lights moving in the sky." Dick was 42 years old when the Smallville meteor shower rained huge flaming rocks on our town, leaving scars and traumatic memories that persist today. Returning from a big Crows victory at the school with his kids, he recalls the explosion that threw his pickup 25 feet into the air with no warning, destroying it and sending its three occupants to Smallville Medical Center with major lacerations and broken bones. "They call that a meteor shower? I got your meteor shower right here," he scoffs.

Indeed, even 16 years later, reminders of the 1989 event are everywhere on the streets of Smallville. While even those who didn't directly experience the incident will never forget it, scientists from the Kansas Emergency Management Association (KEMA) insist that there is no need to worry about another destructive shower hitting the area anytime soon.

"On a geological scale, sure, you might have small meteorites landing every couple of hundred years. But for a large-scale meteorite event to cause significant damage to the same place twice? The odds are absolutely infinitesimal," assures Dr. Drake Todd of KEMA. "That shower in New England was nothing more than the annual passing of the Earth through the Lyrids, which produces visible streaks in the sky during April. We can predict these things fairly accurately now."

Local historians remember that Ezra Small wrote of his own meteor shower experience. As Chris Beppo reported in a special Ledger issue a few years ago, Ezra witnessed the famous 1833 occurrence first hand:

In the cloudless sky above him,
hundreds of bright streaks slashed the night,
as if multitudes of stars had
escaped their moorings and were
fleeing west in a brilliant mass.

To us, this is known as the Great
Leonid Meteor Storm
of 1833, caused
by Comet Tempel-Tuttle crossing
Earth's path. To the eyewitnesses of
the day, who would tell the tale for the
rest of their lives, it was a rain of fire
that signified the coming of a great
being. To plainspoken
Ezra Small, it
was simply the most wondrous sight he
had ever seen in all his travels.

The shower increased in magnitude
until almost the entire sky was in
brilliant motion, shifting in great
waves of luminosity. Occasionally, one
fireball would shoot from the mass,
leaving a bluish trail of smoke before
exploding near the horizon. The
meteors varied in size, some appearing
as large as the full moon.

Although he is loath to admit the fallibility of his hero, Beppo acknowledges that an early Ezra "prophecy"--as Small's largely incoherent scribblings are sometimes called--may have been mistaken. Beppo says, "One of the poems I found referred to another, bigger celestial event occurring 172 years from the time of the Leonid shower Ezra lived through for eight hours in 1833. If you do the math, however, you only get 156 years between 1833 and 1989. I think we can give old Ezra a break on this one, though. Most of his predictions, particularly of tragic events, have proven eerily accurate."

The text of the Ezra Small poem is reproduced here:

Eight hours and 12 minutes brought me light.
Eight score and 12 years will now pass
Before another enlightenment brings a greater one.