Arthur Pettifor
The Cambridgeshire man who heard a meteorite crash through his garden hedge in 1991 and found it still warm.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Field
- Retired, of Glatton
Arthur Pettifor was a retired man living in the village of Glatton, about 15 kilometres south-west of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. On 15 May 1991 he heard something crash through a hedge in his garden.
Looking in the soil beneath the hedge, he found a small stone sitting in a shallow pit, only about two centimetres deep. It was still warm to the touch. The stone weighed 767 grams and was covered in a thin black fusion crust.
It turned out to be an L6 ordinary chondrite. It was the first meteorite recovered from a fall in Britain for more than twenty years, and it was acquired by the Natural History Museum in London, where it joined the national collection.
Glatton remained the most recent British fall with a recovered meteorite for almost 30 years, until the Winchcombe fall in February 2021. Mr Pettifor's story shows the classic signs of a fresh fall: a sudden noise, a small pit, a warm stone and a crust that looks newly made. Anyone who finds a stone like this should note exactly where it lay and contact a museum, without washing or cutting it.
On the timeline
- 15 May 1991Glatton lands in a garden