HALIFAX – A South Shore man made a surprising discovery on Wednesday morning when he found what is believed to be a meteorite in the bottom of his sock drawer. Experts believe it to be a fragment of a much larger meteorite that was found in the area after it crashed down from the sky years before.

Alan Thorndike, a retired postal worker from Bridgewater, said as soon as he recovered from the shock of finding the piece, he called the authorities immediately. Thorndike, who lives alone and has never been married, says he doesn’t know how the small space rock came to be among his foot garb, thirty years after it struck the earth.

The earlier event, which happened in 1987, was much talked about at the time because of the blinding streak across the night sky, the sonic boom, the subsequent explosion and bus-sized crater that it yielded. Roger Arneson, a scientist from Ottawa who headed up the investigation of the site back then, said that his team of meteoriticists removed a thirty-six pound meteorite from the crater.

“There was one large chunk of mesosiderite there, and a few small bits of it around the edges” he said. “And we’re sure we got them all before we packed up and left. Also, no one could have gotten in and out of the site at the time because we had it sealed off as tight as a jar of dill pickles.”

Alan Thorndike said he recalled the 1987 event vividly.

“Oh sure, I remember it like yesterday. The thing blasted a big hole down there between Lunenburg and Mahone Bay. At first people around here thought it was a UFO. We even had the guys from NORAD snooping around.”

He also had a possible explanation for the strange find in his house this week.

“Well I remember now, having to replace a pane of glass in the bedroom window back then,” he said. And I get a dozen or so pairs of socks from my brother’s family every Christmas. I haven’t seen the bottom of that sock drawer since Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister.”   Source: FNT Staff

Photo credit: Original images at The Meteorite Exchange and Bravo Life Coaching