Without warning, a large and very bright fireball streaked across the clear sky from southwest to northeast. Ominous-looking white smoke-clouds mushroomed up from points in the fireball’s path. Shortly after the fireball disappeared, loud explosions and rumbling sounds drove thousands of people out into the open. The whole astonishing luminous display was over in a few seconds, but the strange clouds and the frightening sounds that followed the fireball’s passage continued much longer. Although startled by the brilliant fireball and the strange thundering noises, the young girl, whose face had been turned skyward as she hung up the clothes, noted very carefully where she had seen the fireball disappear behind the tallest building in her home town. (Her sighting was later of great value to field parties from the Institute of Meteoritics of the University of New Mexico.) The woman and her son were amazed to see an angry, boiling white cloud tinged with red developing overhead in the blue sky and to hear strange whizzing noises in the air around them. The boy playing basketball heard a peculiar whistling or hissing noise just as he was ready to shoot a basket and, on looking up, saw the ball of fire slanting earthward. (This boy’s report was of particular interest, since it related to an unusual type of “sound” that travels at the speed of light rather than at the velocity of ordinary soundwaves.) As a cannonading louder than any the veteran had heard on the battlefields of Europe echoed over the rolling countryside, he went temporarily into a state of shock. The farmer stacking hay heard several explosions, felt a violent air blast, and finally heard a solid object strike the ground “with a smack,” as he put it, “like a clod hitting the earth.” (Later, field searchers found that this man lived only about two and a half miles south of the point where the largest fragment of the meteorite fell.) Shortly after the passage of the fireball, the filling station attendant felt the legs of his trousers flap as if he were standing in a high wind, although he was more than 11 miles distant from the actual path along which the fireball moved on its way to the earth. As in the case of the Ussuri fall, which had occurred about a year earlier, farm animals, chickens, and dogs were terrified by the strange and noisy event. Cattle tried to run through a fence to escape the deafening racket. A fine pair of horses panicked and ran headlong into a narrow gully, the walls of which collapsed on them during their struggles. Chickens dashed for the henhouse, screeching and cackling all the way. A dog that feared lightning jumped behind a haystack and finally ran to his master in alarm.