Neil Degrass Tyson put me in a headlock one time, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

We'll get to Neil in a minute.

I haven't even told you about the meteor impact yet, have I?

Specifically, the first documented meteorite in United States history.

At 6.30 a.m. on December 14, 1807, a big-ass fireball streaked across the Yankee sky, scaring the piss out of horses, farmers, and

milkmaids all the way from Albany to Fairfield, Connecticut, and from Vermont to Massachusetts.

Eyewitnesses said it was about two-thirds the size of a full moon, but also much louder than the moon tends to be.

People heard three booms and most ominously a deep growling sound like a

cannonball running along a wooden floor. After about 30 seconds maybe a

minute that glittering sky trail winked out and the spectacle

concluded with some cool whizzing sounds as chunks of space rock plummeted to Earth. A judge named Nathan Wheeler was on his daily walk at the time and

despite the early hour saw his property lit up by the heavenly projectile.

A doctor, Isaac Bronson, perked up inside of his stage coach when all of a sudden the interior unexpectedly illuminated and he heard rocks clatter on the roof. That cosmic debris would scatter across a 10 mile stretch of farmland,

mostly concentrated in Trumbull County, Connecticut,

which insofar as I can tell was the last time anything interesting ever happened in Trumbull County, Connecticut.

And mostly, that debris fell on a sleepy little town called Weston,

which is now called Easton.

I don't know why, maybe it drifted.

And those plucky trumbolites over there in Weston

got right to work on that lawn debris.

They promptly found the meteorites, carved them up,

started hocking them as paperweights to sell to board travelers.

...