Lot 124
Glatton
The Robert Elliott Meteorite Collection
Auction: 18 August 2009 at 15:00 BST
Description
Polished fragment
Dimensions
0.9g
Footnote
Glatton (Cambridgeshire, England) L6 (stone) - fell 5th May 1991
At around 11:30am on 5th May 1991, Mr Arthur Pettifor was busy gardening at his Glatton village home in Cambridgeshire, England, about 70 miles North of London. Suddenly he heard a loud whining noise and saw something crash through his conifer hedge, just a few feet away from where he stood. Below the conifers, he found a black rock sitting in a shallow depression and assumed that local "hooligans had thrown the stone" into his garden. Within a few seconds of its fall he picked it up, noticing that the stone felt warm to the touch, and then quickly guessed that this black crusted rock was something much more extraordinary. The stone was soon confirmed as meteoritic by visiting meteoriticists.
Despite a thorough search of the surrounding area, no more meteorites were recovered, and if Mr Pettifor hadn't been out in his garden at the time, the Glatton meteorite would not have been recognised at all.
Mr Pettifor kept the meteorite for a few months, carefully wrapped in cling film, and displayed it at his local Summer fete, charging a small fee (donated to the church fund) to view the meteorite. Later, the little space rock was sold to the Natural History Museum, where the main mass remains today.
Provenance: Natural History Museum, London