TUCSON - As rare as it would be, lightning and a meteorite may have struck the same place at about the same time, a meteorite expert says.
"I'm kind of short-circuiting here," said Tucson's Robert Haag, who has bought, sold and collected meteorites from all over the world.
Haag had been called to the Beaudry RV Resort on Wednesday to examine a strange situation.
Neville Proud, the resort's director of operations, pointed out a 2-gallon hole in the gravel lot, a football-sized rock Proud thought might be a meteorite and five nearby electrical hookups that had been burned out.
Proud also told Haag about something having lit up the sky Monday or Tuesday night.
"Seeing the way it was electrically burned, I was thinking it had to be a big lightning impact," he said. "But then, they handed me some of these little pieces.
"The big rock that everybody was talking about is definitely not a meteorite, but this little piece is looking and acting like one, and this whole thing is getting weirder and weirder," Haag said, referring to an almond-sized rock he held.
"Here you've got a totally flash-fried little melted rock that sticks to a magnet, so as far as the preliminary tests, it passes them," he said, shaking his head.
Jim Strope, a collector from West Virginia in town to trade Martian meteorites with Haag, said it really looks like a meteorite. He and Michael Farmer of Tucson had gone to Morocco last month after a meteorite sighting.
"We'd have bought that in Morocco in a minute, we'd have bought a whole pile of them," Strope said of the rock which so intrigued Haag.
"If it does turn out to be a meteorite, we'll all be down there (at the Beaudry park) tomorrow," Farmer added.
Haag said he'll take the sample to the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, where geologist David Kring will conduct a series of tests that will prove whether the rock is a meteorite.
Haag said it and about a dozen smaller pieces may be meteorites or may be sand and rock that was melted by lightning, known as fulgurites.
"Kring said it's possible the lightning bolt was so big that it actually magnetized the rocks from 10 million volts or something," Haag said. "But fulgurites don't usually look like this."
As for the fried electrical hooks that spanned about 250 feet, he added, "I'm pretty sure" that was lightning.
Global Atmospherics, a local firm that tracks lightning all over the world, recorded two lightning strikes in the area during a midday storm on Tuesday, said marketing supervisor Nancy Roth.
"There was definitely lightning in that area between 12 and 1 p.m., and there were a couple of strikes within about 100 yards of there," she said.
But the big rock is just earthly slag, Haag said, which "may have just fallen out of somebody's truck last week and nobody noticed it."
