At the American Museum 
Heaven’s Habitues 
“On the sixteenth of November, 
1492, a singular miracle happened: 
for between eleven and twelve in the 
forenoon, with a loud crash of thunder 
and a prolonged noise heard afar off, 
there fell in the town of Ensisheim 
a stone weighing 260 pounds. It was 
seen by a child to strike the ground 
in a field near the canton called 
Gisguad, where it made a hole more 
than five feet deep. It was taken to 
the church as being a miraculous ob- 
ject. The noise was heard so distinctly 
at Lucerne, Villing, and many other 
places, that in each of them it was 
thought that some houses had fallen. 
King Maximilian, who was then at 
Ensisheim, had the stone carried to 
the castle; after breaking off two 
pieces, one for the Duke Sigismund 
of Austria and the other for himself, 
he . . . ordered that the stone be sus- 
pended in the parish church.” 
From a document in the town 
archives, Ensisheim, Germany 
“The meteorite appeared as a ball 
of fire in the west September 2, 1905, 
at ten o’clock in the evening, the sky 
being cloudless and the clear atmos- 
phere of the plains being undisturbed 
by wind. From Scott City to Syracuse, 
75 miles southwest, it was light enough 
to read corpmon newspaper print on 
the street and the explosions rattled 
doors and windows. The mass ex- 
ploded, and then the resulting frag- 
ments exploded several times in rapid 
succession. Then came the sounds of 
the explosions, the whistling like bul- 
lets or heavy hail of the smaller frag- 
ments and a most intense humming 
like that of a rapidly revolving cylinder 
of some heavy machine, evidently 
caused by the larger mass. This was 
followed by fierce cannonading (ech- 
oes of the explosions?) like the dis- 
charge of a battery of artillery or a 
rapid-fire machine gun, gradually 
growing fainter and dying out like roll- 
ing thunder in the distance. I heard 
the largest one drop and hunted for 
it for over two years. 
“On May 6, 1908, I was breaking 
new ground on the prairie with a gang 
plow and a five-horse team that was 
a little too high-spirited to be con- 
trolled easily, but having half-mile fur- 
rows as smooth as a lawn before me, 
I had set the plow a few notches deeper 
into the ground and let them go, think- 
ing nothing of meteorites. While con- 
gratulating myself upon our speed we 
suddenly — very suddenly — struck 
something hard. It threw me out of 
my seat and piled my gang plow up 
in a promiscuous heap against the 
team, which was too badly surprised 
to do anything. I commenced stabbing 
with my jackknife and soon located 
the cause of the disturbance. It was 
the largest fragment of the Modoc 
meteorite and completely buried un- 
der the tough buffalo sod (virgin soil) 
and was pounded in so hard that the 
force of the blow of my gang plow 
had not loosened it. So completely 
was it buried, that I had hunted dozens 
of times all over that pasture without 
either finding the rock or the hole 
in the ground which it had made.” 
J.K. Freed, Modoc, Kansas 
“[On October 17, 1921, at 11:00 
p.m.] I saw it very light out of doors 
and heard a roaring sound and then 
A one-hundred-ton crane was needed to lift Ahnighito. 
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