Submit a Picture

Where is My Picture?!

The Queue

Met Name

Met Type

Thin Sections

  Lunar (feldsp. breccia)

TKW 783 grams. Fall not observed. Purchased July 2017 from a dealer in Zagora, Morocco.

 

Steve writes:

Given the recent release of the United States Government's UFO report, this post seems especially apropos. Many of us see familiar objects in random natural shapes – a tendency known by the scientific name pareidolia – and no doubt some purported UFO sightings might be explained by this (though not any of those in the U.S report). To wit, consider the slice of NWA 11428 shown in Photo 1. But more on that in a moment.

NWA 11428 is a lunar feldspathic breccia. The original 783 gram stone produced several slices, with four near the center exhibiting a large translucent inclusion (likely pigeonite and anorthite – the latter being not particularly common on Earth but abundant on the moon). I was fortunate to be able to acquire one of those four (Photo 2 displays both sides of the slice, Photo 3 is backlit, and Photo 4 is a blowup of just the backlit inclusion enhanced to show more of its detail).

Three years later, I was offered a second slice because it contained an inclusion that, if not looked at too closely, appeared to feature an "alien face" (Photo 5 displays both sides of that slice along with a 1 cm cube for reference). But like most cases of pareidolia, looking too closely destroys the illusion; as seen in Photo 6, enlarging the feature ruins the effect – except that at this higher magnification, the "eye" on the right of the image seems to show yet another small face in its "reflection"!

Pareidolia aside, there is one more interesting "down-to-Earth" feature of this slice. Under long wave UV, the "alien" fluoresces a yellowish-white. But once the UV illumination is removed, the "face" continues to phosphoresce, as seen on Photo 7's two-second exposure taken just after the UV light was turned off. While some terrestrial anorthite fluoresces and a few even phosphoresce, I personally haven't observed fluorescence in any of my other lunar meteorites. Consequently, I would guess the phosphorescence in NWA 11428 is more likely a consequence of terrestrial modification, as evidenced by the phosphorescent cracks where presumably terrestrial minerals leached in to modify the original lunar ones.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this whimsical look at a lunar meteorite. And keep your eyes to the sky – besides bolides, who knows what we’ll see someday!