20 years after falling to Earth, Park Forest meteorites still draw attention, big price tags – Chicago Tribune

As an asteroid caught the world’s attention this week, approaching Earth on a trajectory to pass within the moon’s orbit, a senior research scientist who specializes in studying rocks from space was preparing to give a presentation on a meteorite strike that happened 20 years ago Sunday.

Steven Simon lived just blocks away when chunks from an ancient asteroid began raining down in Park Forest March 26, 2003, but he didn’t connect a prolonged flash of light just before midnight with his chosen field of study right away, in part because of actual rain.

He’d just returned from a village-sponsored trip to a Bulls game when the sky lit up. He figured it was lightning diffused by the cloud cover, and went to bed. A newscast the following morning indicated a meteorite had fallen and it was at the police station. His wife urged him to head over to investigate.

“I thought I’d go down there and there will be a policeman holding a rock scratching his head and it won’t be meteorite,” Simon recalled.

He talked his way into the police station, where they had a growing collection of rocks, each placed in an evidence bag.

“What do you do when you hear noises in the middle of the night? You call the police,” Simon said. “These things hit peoples homes and police came and took custody of them until they could figure out if it was kids throwing rocks or an actual meteorite. And sure enough, it was an actual meteorite.”

By that time, word had spread and people were coming from far and wide — some to check out the scene of an astronomical event and others on an impromptu treasure hunt.

Among those who sprinted over was amateur astronomer Art Maurer, of Crete, who for years has shared his love of lights in the sky by bringing telescopes to library and forest preserve programs. He also worked for a while at the planetarium at Joliet Junior College.

“There were people all over the place that day looking for meteorites,” he said. “I thought, good luck, have fun. The bank parking lot, especially, was jammed with people. I never got out of the car to see if I could find any, like a fool.”

Maurer’s regret is fueled by the ongoing fame of the Park Forest meteorites. One purported 130-gram example is listed for sale on eBay at $9,500.

Back at the police station in 2003, Simon had been charged by his boss to bring in some samples for further investigation. There were two kinds — one lighter in color and a darker variety, and Simon had only secured an owner’s permission for one of them after assuring them the analysis would be nondestructive and they would get their artifact back. Nobody would let him borrow the other type, though.

Fortunately, police had collected some of the fragments themselves.

“After waiting around for a while, I wanted to get my piece to Chicago to get it photographed and then sent to the lab in Washington state,” Simon said. “I went to shake the hand of the officer; he stuck out his hand and in it was a little piece of meteorite — the one I wanted. ‘In the interest of science,’ he said.

“That was one of my favorite Chicago moments.”

The sky rock scavenger hunt in Park Forest continued unabated for days. Simon recalled picking up his kids from a piano lesson at a home on Indiana Street and seeing a sign from a collector wanting to purchase finds from area residents.

“These people had already had their yards searched,” he said. “I thought, I can play that game too, and I know where to put the sign. So I went home, made a sign and took it to the police station — people were still calling there. Sure enough, before I even got home I was getting phone calls.”

Continuing in the interest of science, Simon started making house calls.

“Usually when people say they have a meteorite, they don’t have a meteorite,” he said. “But I thought, these people are going to have meteorites. The first person I visited had a piece of the sidewalk. They were pretty embarrassed. But several people did have meteorites.”

One chunk crashed through a different house on Indiana Street and has taken its place in the ranks of famous space rocks as the “Garza Stone,” named for the family whose house it damaged.

Another piece was found over a year later after an investigation into a persistent roof leak at a car wash along Western Avenue.

And another meteorite was lodged in the roof at the Park Forest Fire Department, making it village property, Simon said. He brokered a deal between Park Forest and the Field Museum, and that chunk became the “reference specimen,” he said.

“I did a write-up and got it officially named the Park Forest Meteorite,” Simon said.

As it turned out, the Park Forest meteorites are a more common variety that probably broke off from a much larger asteroid millions of years ago. It likely originated in the solar system’s asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Mars and may have traveled as far from the Sun as Jupiter before crashing into the south suburbs.

Still, Simon said, the Park Forest event is important.

“It’s not often you get a fresh sample like that, picked up within the first few minutes of falling” he said, noting very few meteorites come down in heavily populated areas. “Some pieces fell into people’s houses and were hardly exposed to elements. There was enough video of it that its pre-fall orbit was calculated, and that’s somewhat rare.”

As prized as the Park Forest meteorites are by collectors, ones that are deemed to have originated on the moon or even Mars are far more valuable. It’s a good thing one of those didn’t fall into Park Forest, Simon said, “because there would have been fighting in the streets.”

Simon’s main professional focus is on even older meteorites, ones that contain evidence of the birth of our solar system. But he’s proud of his role in recovering and classifying the Park Forest Meteorite, “adding some very fresh material to the meteorite collection.”

He still gives presentations about the Park Forest event, including one on Thursday for the Albuquerque Astronomical Society, which called him “out of the blue” to learn more about the event 20 years ago in Park Forest.

In 2019, he was asked to present a program about the Park Forest Meteorite as part of a wider exhibit on meteorites that were in the news at the Tellus Science Museum in Georgia.

It was there he learned there were casualties involved when the Park Forest Meteorite struck.

“Mr. Garza had termites in his attic, and some were killed by the impact of the meteorite,” Simon said. “They had an example of one. Those were the only known fatalities related to the meteorite.”

In addition to learning about the bugs, it killed, he said the exhibit removed “any doubts about how fanatic meteorite collectors are.”

Anything touched by the meteorite as it landed was fair game, and the exhibit included several examples from Park Forest, including a section of floorboard with a meteorite-sized hole in it. There were meteorite-damaged items from other events as well, including a window shattered by a shock wave from the Chelyabinsk meteor that crashed into Russia in 2013. He sat in a car that a meteorite crashed through in 2012 in Peekskill, New York.

For Maurer, the astronomy enthusiast, the Park Forest event was a missed opportunity to collect a piece of the sky.

But he’s glad he got to be a part of the action nonetheless.

“They’re not that common,” he said. “Most of the time when they fall, nobody knows. This one just happened to pick a populated area.”

And it’s still putting Park Forest on the meteorite map.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.