Johnstown celebrates 100 years since famous meteorite landed in the city

JOHNSTOWN, Colo. (KDVR) — It was a birthday party 100 years in the making in Johnstown. Residents celebrated the day a meteorite crashed into town a century ago.

On July 6, 1924, a funeral at the Johnstown Cemetery was interrupted by that meteorite, landing nearby where the procession had just passed.

“This meteorite and Johnstown are very famous in the science world,” said Richard Binzel, a planetary science professor at MIT.

Typically, the Johnstown Meteorite is on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, but on Saturday it was back in town for the first time since it crashed to earth.

Binzel said the residents at the time didn’t know what to make of it.

“There was a little bit of a warning because they heard what sounded like cannon shots or rifle shots,” he said.

That loud sound was the meteorite passing through the atmosphere, causing a sonic boom. Binzel said the people who heard it were conveniently prepared to retrieve the mysterious rock.

“Because it was a funeral, they happened to have shovels and it was very straightforward to run over to the spot, dig it up and find that meteorite,” he said.

Colorado’s State Geologist, Matt Morgan, owns a small piece of the meteorite.

“I traded out of the British Museum of Natural History back in the late 1990s,” said Morgan.

He said there are 90 meteorites on record and collected in the state and Johnstown’s is one of the rarest. A volcanic rock that scientists tracked to Vesta, an asteroid millions of miles away, but with similarities to our own state.

“There’s rocks that are called gabbros on Pike’s Peak and they look almost identical to this meteorite when they’re looked at with a microscope,” said Morgan.

And it’s not the only piece of Vesta in Colorado, either. Almost impossible to believe, another meteorite from the same asteroid landed in Berthoud in 2004.

“Comes millions of millions of miles and it’s 12 miles apart,” said Morgan.

Now, 100 years after impact, Morgan said it could be a while before another birthday like this comes around.

“It’s something that we may not see for another 50, 100 years here in Colorado,” he said.

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