* Astronomy

Statesville Landmark Tuesday, July 11, 1933

A meteorite weighing over 13 pounds and about four by four by six inches in size came out of interstellar space, burned a path through the foliage of trees and sank into the ground over two feet, within 40 feet of Cherokee Springs Methodist church, six miles north of Spartanburg, Saturday morning at 9:42 o'clock. It was dug out of the ground by J. A. Swofford and Mr. Mayfield, proprietor of the general store of the village, but was too hot to handle for hours afterward. It cut off small limbs of trees where it fell and carried them into the earth with it, and below the surface cut off cleanly a tree root an inch in diameter. The arrival of the visitor from the ether was heard by everybody in that section, and all described it as the sound of an airplane about to land.
A good description of the landing of the meteorite is that of Robert Johnson who was cleaning off the graveyard at the church. The meteorite missed hitting him about 300 feet, and he had a box seat to view it. "I heard the noise and thought it was an airplane speeding down to land," he said. "I looked skyward and saw it about 200 feet in the air. A faint stream of blue smoke streamed behind it. In the twinkling of an eye it passed from my vision and in a second - it seemed - I heard it in the trees at the rear of the church." C. B. Whitesides, tenant on the Will Morris farm in the Flatwoods section, was on his way to the Mayfield store to market chickens, when the meteorite struck. "I heard it - there were four cracks, which sounded like a blast, then I heard the swish - I thought it was an airplane coming down - I looked up and all around, but could see no airplane. I was about one and one-half mils from the store at the time," he recounted. Mr. Mayfield and Mr. Swofford, who were close to the spot where the meteorite struck when it landed, said they heard the whirr of what they thought was a plane. They looked skyward, then there was a crash in the church grove a shot distance away.
"I heard the thump as it hit the ground,' said Mr. Hayfield.
"We went at once to the spot where it landed, the leaves from the fluttering down showed us the spot," said Mr. Swofford. "We found the rock in the ground and saw the hole," recounted Mr. Mayfield.
Since meteors generally travel in swarms, others fell in different parts of Spartanburg county at the same time. One, reported over the week-end, hit the earth in the corner of the barn-yard of Fletcher Cash, near the Buck Creek church, about four miles from Cherokee Springs, at the same time that one fell in the Cherokee Springs churchyard. This one was about half as large as the Cherokee Springs one, weighs about six pounds and is about three by three by six inches in size, and of similar appearance and composition to the first one reported. Cash says the meteorite passed through the atmosphere with a hissing and crackling noise and went only 15 feet over the head of Mrs. Cash who thought it was an airplane. It hit the earth at a small angle and ploughed a furrow in the ground a foot deep, them seeming to bounce out, rolling several feet more, before it stopped on the surface.

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