ULRICH MAGIN rounds up the weird news from Europe’s forests, lakes, streets and skies...
COSMIC DEBRIS
When a couple from Elmshorn in northern Germany heard a loud bang on 25 April, they knew not what to make of it. Then they found their roof smashed and a strange stone on their lawn. They assumed it was a meteorite and alerted the fire service, who checked for radiation but could detect none (“all meteorites are radioactive”, adds my source). Then, six further stones were found in the driveway of a neighbour. Experts from the German Centre for Air and Space navigation (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) were called in, searched for a whole weekend, and found 13 additional fragments, one weighing 3.5kg (7.7lb), one flat and one as large as a tennis ball. All fragments collected resulted in 6kg (13lb) of cosmic debris, which will be analysed in a lab in Dresden. Well-known German meteorite expert Dieter Heinlein spoke of “a sensation”. It was suggested the stone had originally weighed one ton before it entered the atmosphere. www.ndr.de, 2 May 2023.
STRANGE NATURAL PHENOMENA
Storms and unusually severe atmospheric conditions were reported from several German cities. In Cologne on 12 April at about 11.15pm, a lightning bolt hit the ground near the port at Niehl and was measured at 212,000 amperes – an amount of electric current that only one per cent of lightning strikes attain. There has only once ever been a higher current in Germany: 685,000 amperes, registered in Baden-Württemberg in 2018. The loud bang when the flash hit the ground was heard all over northern Cologne, as a friend of mine can testify. www.ksta.de, 13 April 2023.
On 29 April 2023, a thunderstorm hit Mainz, southern Germany, causing much damage: 25 buildings were hit by high winds and large hailstones up to 3cm (1in) in diameter. web.de, 29 April 2023.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Duisburg in Germany were in panic because the walls of their homes had been shaking “for weeks” without any solution being found. www.waz.de, 8 Mar 2023.
Then, on 20 April on the North Sea island of Baltrum, a hiker came across “an unidentified substance… a “sticky black mass” while out in the dunes at the east end of the island and close to a footpath. He alerted firefighters, who went out to investigate and excavated some three square metres of sand to expose the mass. As Alexander Gutbier-Wach, the community fire chief, explained, the material could not be identified. He could only say for sure that the sticky stuff posed no danger for the population and could well be a form of bitumen, as used in road c
