OT: Photographs Raining From the Sky After Tornadoes

Dear Friends,

After the tornadoes in Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Kansas,
and elsewhere, meteorites were not the only things that people
found falling from the sky. Literally, 100s of miles from where
the tornadoes devastated entire towns, people have found the
personal photographs and documents of people raining from the
sky. One person is attempting to reunite these photographs and
documents with their owners as discussed in the below web 
pages. 

Mom reuniting tornado survivors with precious artifacts, WSFA 12 News
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=14723637

Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes
Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/PicturesandDocumentsfoundafterAprilTornadoes

Portraits From a Storm
http://patty-portraitsfromastorm.blogspot.com/

Patty Bullion, Catastrophic memories
La Lettre, May 28, 2011
http://www.lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/patty-bullion-catastrophic-memories

Memories Lost to a Whirlwind Alight on Facebook to Be Claimed
New York Times, Amy Harmon, April 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/us/30reunite.html

Maybe it is not too late for meteorite hunters downwind of
the effected areas to help out in her efforts.

Yours,

Paul H.

Meteorite Men Comment

Paul Heinrich oxytropidoceras at cox.net
Sat Feb 27 00:48:02 EST 2010

Dear Friends,

Meteorite Men is a great show. personally, I feel
that it has a nice mix of science, humor, entertainment,
and droll, low-key "adventure" that many shows needs
to have.

From my job, I can tell that bit definitely has generated
a lot of interest in Louisiana, with a very definite increase
in inquiries, about meteorites and meteorite hunting
received by other geologists and I. There have been a
bunch of rocks, some of which have been lying in people's
closets for decades. Unfortunately, they have so far
been meteorwrongs and even one craterwrong. However,
a person never knows when that meteorite that has been
either sitting in someone''s porch as doorstop or in their
garage for the past few years will finally make it way
into my or some other geologist's office possibly because
of the interest generated by "Meteorite Men".

One of the more strange meteorwrongs was a gneiss
boulder about 1.5 to 2 meters in diameter that got pulled
up in a fishing net off Grand Island, Lafourche Parish.
The most frustrating meteorwrongs in Louisiana are
"bog iron ores", which form in permanently saturated
coastal plain soils and often are associated with springs.
Pieces of this material have an unfortunate tendency of
being dense, pitch black, and even magnetic. Certain
pieces are troublesome because neither I nor any other
geologist feel comfortable, despite what intuition says,
about judging them as definite meteorwrongs without
being able to inspect them in person.

I have been tempted to suggest to to a soil scientist, whom
I worked with, that looking at the genesis of these "bog
iron ores" would be a worthwhile project for a Masters
thesis for some student. I and another geologist can at least
now point out a number of places where they can be
studied. They have a strange, although quite terrestrial,
mineralogy.

Yours,

Paul H.
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
http://www.scribd.com/etchplain