DISCOVERY AND ASSUMED FALL OF THE MONTFERRE, FRANCE, STONY METEORITE

Name: MONTFERRE

Place of find: Montferre, near Castelnaudary, in Treville, Department of Aude, France.

43^° 23'26"N, 1^° 57'45"E.

Date of fall: Presumed to have been a night in the summer of 1923.

Class and type: Stone. Olivine-hypersthene chondrite.

Number of individual specimens: 1

Total weight: 149 kg

Circumstances of find: During a night in the summer of 1923, M. de Bataille, chatting with some friends in the enclosure of his property of Grouaulet, saw at a slight altitude a very bright, greenish object, accompanied by a whistling sound and traveling in a south-north direction. This object left in the sky, up to the instant of the presumed fall, a strong light perceptable for some time. One of his companions, running astonished, rushed forward in the direction of the impact but found nothing. The incident was not forgotten by the witnesses. After a number of years, the plowshare of the plow of M. Krivobokow, working the farm of Gravette, got hung up on a hard,-embedded mass. In 1966, he decided to extricate it. The appearance of the "rock", abnormal in the clay-like soil of the region, brought to mind the story of his neighbor. In June 1971, during a prospecting mission of the Commission on Atomic Energy, a geologist instituted the previous deduction and confirmed that the object was a meteorite. It was recovered with a thin crust of iron hydroxides of a thickness of 1 to 2 mm, and exhibited the very characteristic cup-like structures and shatter cones.

Source: Yves Gillet, Commissariat^, a L'Energie Atomique, Servie de Mineralogie, Direction des Productions - B.P. no. 4 - 92 Chatillion-sous-Bagneux, France.