Meteorite hunters descend on Wisconsin

LIVINGSTON, Wis., April 16 (UPI) -- Meteorite hunters descended on southwestern Wisconsin after a fireball flashed and a sonic boom sounded over the Midwest, officials say.

"When things like this happen, it is kind of like the alarm going off in the volunteer fire department," Steve Arnold of the reality-TV show "Meteorite Men" told the Chicago Tribune. "If you can pull your boots on and go, you go, but if not, you wait to hear what happens."

Paul Sipiera, adjunct curator of the Field Museum's Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies in Chicago, planned to lead investigators to an area near Livingston, Wis., to search for meteorite fragments.

The fireball blazed across the sky Wednesday night.

"What we will try to do is coordinate eyewitnesses who saw the fireball and pinpoint its trajectory, then get word out to farmers to get them to be on the lookout for strange rocks," said Sipiera, whose Illinois foundation buys meteorites for the Field Museum collection.

If the search yields any fragments, many more meteorite hunters are expected to descend on the area.

Calls about the meteorite have come to Sipiera's Planetary Studies Foundation from as far away as England.

"I would guess there are meteorite hunters and dealers boarding airplanes all over the country this morning, heading for Wisconsin," said Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.