|
It was getting darker. At 23 h 25 m Boris Krylov, a driver, and his wife and daughter went out to the barn and came home. Suddenly everything was lit up, as if someone had turned on stadium lights. Krylov looked around and then looked up. There were some clouds in the sky, but where THE THING was flying, the sky was absolutely clear… Everything happened in a few seconds. IT fell to earth not far from a town, in a field where the last seeds had just been planted.
The fall was powerful. People felt it in all the villages around. Andryushenkova, a teacher, described the fall as if everything all around had risen and then fallen back into place. Gavrilov decided that his tractor had broken. The burglar alarm of the grocery store went off. A soldering iron jumped out of Yapryntsev's hands. Old people crossed themselves.
After the fall the Sterlitamak meteorite formed a crater of 10 m diameter. In the ground around the crater, small damaged fragments of meteorite iron have been found. The bigger fragments were found at a depth of 8 m. A year later the biggest fragment weighing 315 kg was found at a depth of 12 m in the crater.
|
