- NEW ORLEANS (AP) --
When Roy Fausset walked into his Uptown home after work last week, he knew
immediately that something was very, very wrong.
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- "The powder room door was open and it looked like
an artillery shell had hit the room," he said.
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- Last Tuesday, something had fallen with enough force
to punch a hole through the roof and two floors before coming to rest in
the crawl space beneath the house.
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- It was a sandy-colored rock that appeared to have been
burned around its edges. Preliminary tests by scientists at Tulane University
indicate the rock came from outer space.
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- If so, that makes it an exceedingly rare phenomenon.
Meteorites enter the Earth's gravitational field with some frequency; all
but a tiny percent of them burn up during their passage through the atmosphere
-- what are commonly called shooting stars.
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- "We found olivine, pyroxene, plagioclase and troilite,"
a combination of minerals often found in meteorites, said Stephen Nelson,
chairman of Tulane's earth and environmental sciences department.
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- Nelson used X-ray diffraction to double-check the type
of minerals that make up the rock. He had first identified the rock as
rhyolite, a form of volcanic rock found in Mexico and south Texas.
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- The minerals Nelson found do not automatically mean it's
a meteorite, he said, because they're also found in the Earth's mantle,
deep underneath the planet's crust.
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- "But we don't commonly see pieces of mantle falling
out of the sky," he said. "And the black crust, which I thought
was a weathering line at first, perhaps it's a fusion crust -- material
that melted as it passed through the atmosphere."
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- Nelson said the rock is known as a "stony meteorite,"
a type more common than the black, ironlike rocks that have become the
archetypal meteorites in the public imagination.
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- Fausset said neighbors told him they heard what sounded
like a car crash just after 4 p.m., but they didn't know it was his home
being hit.
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- "One of my neighbors on South Tonti Street had two
children in her back yard, eating Popsicles, and they heard a terrific
noise," he said. "And a lady next door to her heard it. She was
indoors and ran out into her back yard, but didn't see anything."
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- Finding the damage inside his home came as a shock, he
said: "We had just renovated the powder room and now there was plaster
everywhere. I looked up at the ceiling and saw this big hole."
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- A quick check in the adjoining utility room revealed
another hole in the ceiling and what looked like a broken ceiling joist.
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- "I went outside and looked up and about midway down
the front of the roof, there was a hole about the size of a basketball,"
he said.
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- Fausset immediately called his insurance agent, who suggested
he check upstairs to look for any more damage.
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- In his daughter's second-floor room, Fausset discovered
that something had smashed through the ceiling there, too, and it had demolished
an antique wicker desk before cutting a neat hole in the wall-to-wall carpet
and the flooring beneath it.
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- Back in the first-floor bathroom, Fausset found another
hole leading through the floor to the crawl space.
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- "That's when I called the police," he said.
When officers arrived, they found several chunks of rock beneath the hole
in the bottom floor that matched fragments found in Fausset's daughter's
room.
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- "I'm in shock," Fausset said after learning
the rock had been identified as a meteorite. "Oh, that's scary. I
will certainly go to church this Sunday, because the Lord was certainly
sending me a message."
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- And the meteorite?
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- "I guess I'll go put it in my safe-deposit box,
or just frame it," he said.
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