SPACE ICE: THE CRATER IN THEIR YARD FILLED WITH LARGE CHUNKS OF ICE FROM THE SKY

Heisel and Alice Amos were watching television with their grandson when their
Wood Count, West Virginia, house began to shake. Their son Donald Amos, a
chemist at the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Chattanooga, was in his truck right
outside their front door when something fell from the sky. "I was about fifteen
feet away from the spot where it hit," he says. "It made this tremendous thud."

The ground near the television disk in their yard was now a crater,
one-and-a-half feet in diameter, about six inches deep, filled with large chunks
of ice. Smaller pieces, the size of marbles and baseballs, were strewn in a
30-foot radius around the hole.

No one thought for a moment that the ice had come from a faulty ice machine
aboard a flying saucer, but many did think it was extraterrestrial. Heisel Amos
thought it might actually be a piece of a comet. So did Gail Hartshorn, the
director of Emergency Services for Wood Count. Acting on this hunch, Hartshorn
contacted Louis A. Frank, the University of Iowa physicist who claims the Earth
is being bombarded by small comets at the rate of 20 per minute. Frank says
these comets, which measure about 30 feet in diameter and weigh about 100 tons
apiece, vaporize in the atmosphere and are the source of the Earth's waters.
But he is also willing to consider the possibility that, on occasion, some of
them fall to the ground as ice.

Hartshorn already knew what this ice fall was not. The National Weather Service
had said the ice could not be weather related: There was not a cloud in the sky
on that fateful June day, and the midday temperature reached 88 degrees.

The Federal Aviation Administration, for its part, had never heard of a 50-pound
chunk of ice falling from a plane. Besides, when ice does fall from aircraft,
it is normally blue due to the chemicals used in aircraft toilets.,

The story would have ended here had Heisel Amos not had the foresight to collect
about six pounds of the transparent ice, wrap it in plastic, and put it in his
freezer. To have the ice analyzed, Hartshorn then contacted Michael Frizzell,
lab coordinator for the department of chemical engineering and biotechnology at
the University of Maryland's Baltimore County campus and research director for
the Enigma Project, a Maryland group that documents unexplained phenomena. Ice
in hand, Frizzell sent samples to two scientists.

One of the scientists, Victor Fulda, an environmental chemist in Maryland, found
that the "ice bomb" contained peculiarly large quantities of silicon, strontium,
and barium--all of which are not normally present in drinking water. "I'm
willing to safely say that it's not water from an airplane," Fulda agreed.

The other sample went to Robert Seal, a geologist at the United States
Geological Survey office in Reston, Virginia, who found that the ice was
isotopically identical to atmospheric precipitation, strongly suggesting a
terrestrial origin.

But these results do not totally eliminate an extra-terrestrial origin for the
ice. "If the oceans did come from comets," says Frank, "then you would expect
this ice--if it was from a comet--to be much like ordinary precipitation and
ocean water."

Frizzell intends to continue his investigation and still hopes to pin down an
origin--terrestrial or extra-terrestrial--for West Virginia's mystery ice bomb.