vrijdagmiddag 16 februari 2001 zijn ijshockey-junioren van de club Zug, in
Zwitserland, bijna getroffen door een stuk ijs van een vliegtuig. Het sloeg neer
nabij het groepje van 10 personen, ze waren op weg naar de spelersbus. De klomp
bevatte menselijke uitwerpselen. origineel
bericht , zie ook Neu
Zuricher Zeitung.
Een
woordvoerder van de politie meldde dat er sprake was van stank. Het ijs was
bruin van kleur. De ijshockeyclub omschreef het ijs als "schelp-ijs".
Volgens hen was de brok 200 kilo. Volgens de politie was het vele malen kleiner.
Helaas zijn er amper foto's en is er ook geen ijs bewaard. Na het versmelten van
het ijs was er een oppervlak van circa 160 bij 180
centimeter verkleurd, dit tengevolge van de "onsmakelijke"
bestanddelen in het ijs.
Zug ligt ten Zuiden van Zurich en ligt op een aanvlieg-route. De politie poogt het vliegtuig op te traceren.Een vertegenwoordiger van Swisscontrol AG heeft verklaart dat rond het tijdstip van de val twee vliegtuigen van Zurich vertrokken zijn.
De vondst in Zug is wellicht de sleutel tot de ijsklomp van Almere. Immers deze kenmerkte zich door urine-sporen.
Bruno Mancusi
The fall of a block of ice was observed in Rue, Switzerland, on July 26, 1998. The author went to the scene to write the account of the witnesses and to take a few measurements. The nature and origin of the block have not been elucidated.
1. Description of the event
On Sunday July 26, 1998, at around 9h45m Central European Daylight-Saving Time (7h45m UT), a Rue farming couple were in front of their house when they heard a whistling sound“like a big rocket on August1” (Swiss national holiday). They just had time to see a block of ice the size of a “football” pass in front of their field of vision and crash onto the tarred path near to their farm. The block broke up into thousands of pieces and the witness recuperated the largest, which was “the size of a skittle”. The ice was “very hard” and “snow-coloured.”
The witness estimated the weight of the ice block at 7-8 kg and the piece that he was able to recuperate at 6-7 kg. Unfortunately, he did not think of conserving the block in the freezer, and let it melt near his house after having shown it to his neighbor, who had also heard the noise. Thinking that it must have fallen from an aeroplane, the witness telephoned the Geneva-Cointrin airport where he was advised to write to the Federal Office for Civil Aviation (FOCA) and send a copy of his letter to the airport. A few days later, the witness received the reply: the FOCA declared that it was incapable of identifying the device responsible because of incertitude over the time of the incident.
The witness also telephoned a journalist from the Fribourg daily newspaper La Liberté and a short article appeared on July 28.
I only learned about this incident on August 18, when a column mentioning it appeared in Le Démocrate de Payerne. After having found out the name of the witness, I was able to go to the scene on September 18. The witnesses, who were aged around sixty, seemed credible to me and were very cooperative.
The trajectory of the block had an azimuth of 38° (northeast to southwest) and an elevation of 50 to 70° relative to the horizontal. There was no abnormal radio-activity at the point of impact or where the witness had let the block melt, but a month and a half had gone by, and, in the meantime, it had rained. The layout of the place would have made a practical joke at the witnesses' expense difficult. On the other hand, a complete hoax played by the witnesses is possible (the block had disappeared), but in my opinion, unlikely.
2. Some data
Crash site
The block of ice fell in the town of Rue, in the Swiss Canton of Fribourg, = 6°49'25" E, = 46°37'06" N, h = 636 m.
Meteorological conditions [1]
The weather was sunny, with a temperature of 20°C and light winds, 5 km/h, from southwest to northeast
Altitude winds (Payerne): at 1000 m, at 23h UT of the preceding night, northeast, 30 km/h; at 11h UT southwest, 10 km/h; at 2000 m, at 23h of the preceding night, northeast, 10 km/h; at 11h UT, southwest, 40 km/h.
Generally, there was a very leveled distribution of pressure over Switzerland.
Verification of the values estimated by the witness: Are the size of the block and its mass as estimated by the witness compatible with ice (density of 0.9168 g/cm3)? To find out, we calculated the radius of a perfect ball of ice for different masses (Table 1).
Table 1 – Radius of a perfect ball of ice for different masses
| Mass | Volume | Radius |
| 5 kg | 5454 cm3 | 10.9 cm |
| 6 kg | 6545 cm3 | 11.6 cm |
| 8 kg | 8726 cm3 | 12.8 cm |
| 10 kg | 10 908 cm3 | 13.8 cm |
| 15 kg | 16 361 cm3 | 15.7 cm |
| 20 kg | 21 815 cm3 | 17.3 cm |
3. Origin of the block
As the block no longer exists, it is unfortunately impossible to determine its origin. It is very unlikely that it came from the toilets of an aeroplane as, in that case, it would have been blue or green-coloured. Was it a hailstone? That does not correspond with the weather conditions. There remains the hypothesis of an ice meteorite. Falling blocks of ice have been reported for centuries [2], long before the invention of aviation. Ice is commonly found in space, it is one of the constituents of comets and the rings of Saturn. It is therefore not impossible for a piece to arrive on the Earth's surface.
Falling blocks of ice are relatively frequent. In Switzerland, the other cases that appear in my archives are the following: Yverdon-les-Bains (1978), Oftringen (1982), Lützelflüh (1982), and Renens (1986). The latter probably fell from the toilets of an aeroplane as it was blue in colour.
It seems that the best documented fall of an ice block took place on April 2, 1973, in West Didsbury, Manchester, England. The block weighed around 2 kg, and consisted of 51 layers of ice but, even in this case, the origin was not determined [3]. A more recent investigated fall occurred on March 23, 1995, at Yaodou, in the Zhejiang Province, China. According to the Xinhua News Agency, the three chunks of ice were sent to Purple Mountain Observatory for analysis [4]. Unfortunately, the results are unknown and my efforts to obtain a response from this observatory are, so far, unsuccessful.
References [1] Swiss Meteorological Institute, personal communications, 1 October 1998.
[2] W.R. Corliss, “Tornados, Dark Days, Anomalous Precipitation, and Related Weather Phenomena”, The Sourcebook Project, Glen Arm, USA, 1983, pp. 40-44.
[3] S. Welfare and J. Fairley, “Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World”, Collins, London, 1980, pp. 42-43.
[4] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/s19/news56.html and https://www.knowledge.co.uk/frontiers/sf102/sf102g15.htm.
From: WGN, the journal of the IMO, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 1999, pp. 133-134.
Met dank aan Ivo Westerlaken
