Thursday morning NASA released some data. Bill Cooke interpreted it, and Marc Fries (pronounced ‘freeze’) applied his darkflight model on it. But there are some problems, the flight path does not corroborate with ground truth.  There are several witnesses south of Lake Tawakani that see the fireball pass SOUTH of them.

On the flip side, the sonic boom witnesses described it as ‘faint’.  So on Thursday, we decided to withdraw from the field to go back to Austin and try to sort out facts with models. Something does not compute and we want to know why.   I predict based on the shallow angle and lessons learned in Wisconsin by fellow hunters, that the strewnfield will be very long and very low density. Perhaps 15 hours of walking per fragment found.  At this point, it will be the public that finds the fragments.  I also believe that the trajectory solution should be shifted over 50-100 km east.

Today was a good day, we chose to head east of Hwy 19 and get reports.  We found several folks reporting hearing the sonic boom but were not outside to see it.

We then found a couple with a few hundred acres who let us search there property, he also had a vineyard and was kind enough to offer up several bottles of wine as a expedition sponsor of sorts. (Score!)

He also secured for us 1,000 acres of his neighbor’s land who had seen me on Channel 7 news in Tyler. The predicted strewnfield should traverse this property. The ground is flat and eaten down by cattle. Wonderful terrain for hunting.

Discussing the Doppler data with David Gonzales, we postulated that the meteorite event occurred between sweeps and the material was on the ground when the current image was taken. Our theory is that the return is off the dust and that it is blown south for several seconds when imaged.  That throws the strewnfield northerly.

We saw a wild boar that had been captured. It wanted to bite my foot. These critters are quite smart and considered land sharks as they eat flesh and also bone.

This was Stephen’s last day in the expedition. Our gracious patron invited us into his home and offered him some homemade wine from his vineyard and a chance to trade tales from our long and colorful past. The evening was quite a blast and not for mixed company.

So far we’ve not run into the fabled black panther, aka a dark mountain lion. But is is known to visit this property and the landowner lost all his chickens to it during the winter. I did see likely lion tracks in the mud down by the swamp. As to the Z problem, we had our first sightings tonight deep in the swamp so we think we are closing in on the strewnfield. Stay posted!

New fireball today likely dropped some material. Early reports talk of explosive sonic bangs. Steve Arnold of Meteorite Men predicts 20 miles SW of Dallas.  We really need Dr. Fries with Doppler data to give us better info.

http://www.wfaa.com/news/technology/Fireball-in-Texas-sky-was-meteor-FAA-says-138535509.html