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- SPAIN - Ice balls the size
of melons have been bombarding southern Spain in a phenomenon that has
baffled scientists.
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- A national inquiry launched by a team of scientists
has been wrestling with conflicting theories: Are they pieces of a comet,
human excrement ejected from high-flying aircraft, or an elaborate hoax?
Enrique Martinez, head of a team at the Higher Council of Scientific
Investigation, said the excrement theory was rejected. The ice balls,
or aerolites, "lack the typical colouring and texture we find in those
cases," he said.
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- One man in southern Spain narrowly escaped injury last
week when an ice ball 20cm (eight inches) across, weighing 4kg (nine pounds),
smashed into his car. A total of 11 have landed so far. Local authorities
have been told to preserve any others in their freezers, so that they can
be examined by the team of astrophysicists, meteorologists and geologists
put together by Spain's leading centre for scientific research. "We're
looking at a highly dense, very white, very pure mass of what appear to
be tightly packed fragments of glass that we're going to have to analyse
very carefully," said Professor Jesus Martinez Frias, a scientist.
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- The most plausible explanation is that they are fragments
of a comet that broke up outside the earth's atmosphere. "It would
be made up of water frozen at temperatures between minus 50C and minus
60C that would melt extremely slowly. Nevertheless the balls could originally
have been up to 100 times bigger than their size when they landed,"
he said. But the scientists are puzzled that all the balls should have
descended on Spain. "We've checked with France and Portugal and there's
been nothing there," said Manuel Gonzalez, of the weather centre
in Valencia, where four of the balls were discovered.
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- One of the 10 biblical plagues brought down on Egypt
involved great hail from the heavens, but there are more recently documented
cases. In 1973, Wilmslow in Cheshire was hit by a lump of ice so big that
a weather researcher managed to get 22 ounces of it home and into the fridge.
In Derbyshire in 1811 chunks of ice one foot square were reported falling
from the skies. In 1950 a farm in Devon was showered with ice, one lump
of which sliced the neck of an unfortunate sheep. In 1974, an ice block
18 inches square crashed into a car in Pinner, Middlesex.
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- The possibility of a hoax has not been ruled out. "There
is no precedent of a natural phenomenon on this scale," said Javier
Armentia, director of the planetarium in Pamplona. "I'm convinced
we're dealing with a joker who decided to follow nature's example after
the first couple of balls fell."
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