Meteoriticists at once recognized the characteristic pattern of an exploding meteor and determined to find the remains. From newspaper reports and personal interviews with the witnesses, H. H. Nininger of the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona plotted the path and determined that the probable point of explosion was thirteen miles west and three miles north of Norton, Kansas[V-16]. From similar investigations, Lincoln La Paz of the Institute of Meteoritics in New Mexico determined the probable place of impact as an area eight miles long and four miles wide, about thirty-two square miles, on the Kansas-Nebraska line. During the Easter vacation a field-survey party from New Mexico drove north into Kansas to hunt for the meteorite, but blizzards and snow-blocked roads stopped the work. A second search, begun on April 27, suggested that the main mass of the meteorite must have fallen somewhere in Furnas County, Nebraska. When persistent hunting failed to reveal it, the searchers moved south into Kansas, where a farmer had found a strange stone that smelled of sulphur and contained metallic specks. Although many stony meteorites of various weights turned up in this area, the main mass remained hidden until July 3 when a farmer located it, by accident, in a field that the official party had already examined and abandoned some three months earlier. This meteorite, although it weighed more than a ton and had dug out a six-foot crater in the ground, had eluded the hunters because “at the time of the fall the only dwelling close to the point of impact was unoccupied and ... the impact occurred in a field so overgrown with weeds and stubble that even the large crater made by the record-breaking main mass of the fall was finally located only when by chance a caterpillar tractor started to fall into it.”[V-17] To find these meteorites, several highly trained searchers had spent days of effort, made a number of field surveys, driven more than 10,000 miles, and interviewed hundreds of persons who observed the flight of the fireball. Even so, they counted themselves lucky because many “meteorites of such composition and structure, although large enough to produce spectacular light and sound effects in the intermediate layers of the atmosphere, might disintegrate so completely during transit through the denser lower atmosphere that only dust would survive to reach the earth.” The green fireballs of New Mexico were silent; they were probably icy structures and hence produced no meteorites. Even if they had, locating the place of fall would have been nearly impossible because the meteors appeared at night in a sparsely populated area. To summarize: Many meteors do not leave fragments. Even when they do, finding the meteorite requires luck as well as hard work. _Unusual Fireballs_