Naturally he knew nothing of emergency orders sending all planes
aloft. He wasn't informed about something reported in space and
apparently headed for an impact point at Boulder Lake. As the computed
impact time arrived, Lockley obliviously dumped coffee into his tin
coffeepot and put it back on the flames.
At 8:13 instead of 8:14--this information is from the tape
records--there was an extremely small earth shock recorded by the
Berkeley, California, seismograph. It was a very minor shock, about
the intensity of the explosion of a hundred tons of high explosive a
very long distance away and barely strong enough to record its
location, which was Boulder Lake. The cause of that explosion or shock
was not observed visually. There'd been no time to alert observers,
and in any case the object should have been out of atmosphere until
the last few seconds of its fall, and where it was reported to fall
the cloud cover was unbroken. So nobody reported seeing it. Not at
once, anyhow, and then only one man.
Lockley did not feel the impact. He was drinking a cup of coffee and
thinking about his own problems. But a delicately balanced rock a
hundred yards below his camp site toppled over and slid downhill.
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