Word: crater
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Scientists have known for over 50 years that the great, round pit near Canyon Diablo, Ariz, is a meteorite crater. In Scientific Monthly, Dr. H. H. Nininger offers proof that it was made not by one but by two great meteorites hitting close together...
Scattered for miles around the crater are fragments of meteoric material. The soil itself, in spots, is full of microscopic droplets of nickel-iron (many thousands of them in each cubic foot). The fragments differ in chemical composition; some have melted, vaporized or been altered by heat. By studying such clues for more than ten years, Nininger has reconstructed what the "cosmo-terrestrial encounter" was like...
...invader from space probably had a large central body of nickel-iron with a smaller body of slightly different composition revolving around it like the moon around the earth. Traveling with these two were many small meteorites that hit the earth separately far from the main crater...
...single blast the whole northern side of the peak had blown up. The black cloud, "full of streaks of red lightning," boiled up to 50,000 feet, mushroomed 100 miles wide. Not molten lava, but pumice dust and hot scoria (like clinkers from a furnace) flew out of the crater, making the earth for miles around too hot to live...
...Professor La Paz spoiled the whole yarn by announcing that he had found, close to the lip of the crater, a pit house of prehistoric, 1000 A.D. Indians who obviously did not fear the place too much to live there. He suspects that the legend was invented recently by white men. Geological evidence indicates that the meteor probably fell more than 50,000 years ago, when it is unlikely that humans were around to be frightened...