Sonic Blast From Meteor Rocks El Paso

El Paso (KVIA)

Shortly before 1:00 p.m.Thursday a series of sonic blasts rocked El Paso.

El Paso Police report that an acre of scorched earth twenty-seven miles east of El Paso and twenty miles north of Hueco Tanks confirms speculation that a meteor, or its remains, just missed the Sun City. The sonic boom which followed the meteor's crash was heard as far away as Anthony, NM and felt in El Paso.

One El Paso resident was startled to see what she described as "a streak of light, similar to a falling star, that ended in a ball of yellow and orange light and a brilliant explosion." Dr. Harold Slusher, Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at El Paso, said that description and a video recording of smoke that trailed off after the explosion were consistent with the destruction of a meteor: "I'd say off-hand...that it's the explosion of a daytime meteor or a swarm of meteoric objects, small objects made of rock and metal, that penetrate the atmosphere. They'd survive through the atmosphere and sometimes explode...[trailing] debris and what appears to be smoke like what you saw in the film you showed me."

According to Dr. Slusher, such highly visible traces of daytime meteoric activity are extremely rare. The glare of the sun usually blocks any evidence of a streak of debris trailing in the wake of meteoric collisions.

Lorie Hernandez was outside on the porch of her home in Socorro when an explosion overhead caused her to grab for a video camera. "It was like a flash and after maybe a minute..my cousin said, 'Look! Look up in the sky!'...That's when it popped. We heard a big 'pop.' It lasted for like a minute. The big pop lasted a long time, and then after that...all the smoke started coming out. That's when the little pops like firecrackers started to sound. That's when everyone was screaming and everyone was more scared...we expected something to fall out [of the cloud of smoke] like an airplane or something."

Frances McRimmon rushed out to record the event on video immediately after the blast shook her East El Paso home. McRimmon says she saw what looked like a military helicopter hovering over the site of the explosion. News 7 cameras also recorded several aircrafts flying through the remaining plumes of smoke shortly after impact.

More information will surely follow from this extraordinary opportunity for the study of meteoric activity.

Reported by Barry Carpenter and Elizabeth O'Hara