Post
by Pooua » Sat Dec 18, 2004 1:52 am
From time-to-time, I have noticed similar streaks as those in the initial photo. I normally don't pay much attention to them, because there is nothing more one can learn about them than what one sees. However, several years ago, one of these streaks struck a finger of my hand. I wrote about the experience in my online autobiography. I will summarize here what happened:
I was standing outside, a few feet away from a small, rock-lined trash pit that my family used to burn our garbage on our property. It was a cold day, and I was waiting for the trash to burn. Suddenly, there was a streak that appeared for an instant in front of me. At the same moment, I felt a sting in my finger and a muffled "pop," like that of a glass jar breaking from heat, coming from the burn pit.
My initial impression was that some small object had zipped down from the sky in a straight line and hit my finger. The streak had come from above me, about a 20 degree elevation, past the limits of my peripheral vision. The stinging in my finger was strong, no less than if a bee had stung me. Yet, there was no visible sign of injury to my finger. I had expected blood, or, at least, a cut. The sore area may have reddened, but it did not look like an obvious wound.
I later considered that someone might be able to explain away my experience as simply some glass that had exploded in the burn pit. Such an explanation would be inconsistent with my observations, but I wanted to see if I could find a likely glass object in the burn pit, so, a few days after the encounter, I made a search for a possible object. I could not find any glass jar or anything else that should have made that sound. My theory at that point was that the sound I heard was that of a rock in the ground fracturing as it was hit, just as my finger had stung when my finger was hit.
Within a few days of the encounter, a callous began to form where I had been stung. The callous grew larger for several weeks. I don't remember when it eventually went away, but I think it lasted for a year or two.
in saying the Darwin event was 39 hours after the Manning meteor. I knew the pictures were around 6pm and Dec 7 [Pearl Harbor] but that was the day they went up as APOD. Looking at the camera data they were shot on 22Nov2004, two weeks 
