A meteorite piece weighing about 3 ounces sold for $16,250 to the museum, which does not yet want to be identified, said Darryl Pitt, the seller. A smashed taillight bulb from the car, a 1980 Chevy Malibu, and the car's original title went for $5,312. Read more
It was a bad day at the auction house for two of the most famous rocks ever to fall from space, but the legend of the Peekskill meteorite continued this weekend after a buyer pocketed a slice of the rock that crashed through Michelle Knapp's car in 1992. The chip off the meteorite, famous not only for its great aim but for the fact that its fiery streak across the Northeast sky was captured on 16 camcorders, went to an anonymous buyer for a few hundred dollars less than the pre-auction bid minimum of $2,000 Sunday at Bonhams in Manhattan. A 23-gram (0.8 ounce) slice, along with videos and three pieces of the smashed taillight that a collector picked up off Knapp's driveway 15 years ago was sold for $1,673, according to Bonhams.
The Thing From Space That Destroyed the Car Luckily for astronomers, it was a Friday night in the autumn. That meant that hundreds of thousands of people were at high school football games, many with camcorders at the ready to preserve any gridiron heroics. What they preserved as well, from at least 16 different locations from Kentucky to New York, was the path of a fireball across the sky as it streaked northeastward at better than ten miles a second.
The events surrounding the fall of the Peekskill meteorite on October 9th, 1992 are quite remarkable. Not only did the meteorite announce its arrival by hitting a parked car in suburban Peekskill, New York, but also the fireball that proceeded the fall of the meteorite was videotaped by at least 16 independent people.