Meteorite Crashes into Virginia Doctors' Office

The staff at a Lorton, VA family physician practice thought they were dealing with a malfunctioning heating duct when they heard what sounded like a small explosion in a vacant examination room Monday night.

"We didn't know what it was. We left the room as it was and went home. We thought we would deal with it in the morning," says Kathy Ciampi, RN, with Williamsburg Square Family Practice. "We just had the heating system tweaked, and I thought something probably blew up in the system. We'll call the repairman in the morning."

As it happens, the explosion was caused by a grapefruit-sized meteorite that punched through the shingled dormer roof, insulation, and ceiling tiles on the one-story building, and came to rest in three large pieces on the concrete floor.

"It looked like it was fired out of something. It did a lot of devastation to the room. Everything was scattered everywhere," Ciampi says. "It was about 300 grams, the size of a grapefruit, a light gray concrete color on the inside, but the outside was dark and streaked and shiny. Our office manager's husband is a geologist. She described it to him. He drove an hour to get here and said 'you've got a meteorite.' We didn't believe him."

Ciampi thought the mysterious object more likely fell off an airplane or a helicopter from nearby Ft. Belvoir.

"We're doctors and nurses. Nobody's thinking meteorite. So we went on the Internet to look up meteorite, got a magnet to see if it was magnetized. It was magnetized," she says. "In the meantime, we called the Fairfax County police because we weren't sure if it came out of an airplane. The policeman was rolling his eyes when we told him. 'Yeah sure it's a meteorite.' And when it magnetized, his eyes got really big and then all the TV stations started calling."

The extraterrestrial rock was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, which has named it Meteorite Lorton.

"We have had a lot of people coming out of the woodwork. It's been a circus here," Ciampi says. "Yesterday was very difficult for the doctors because we had people with cameras in the waiting rooms, and we were trying to maintain patient privacy. They hung in there, but we had a tough day."

The happy ending for Ciampi is that nobody was hurt by the one-in-a-billion shot.

"We were very fortunate nobody was in the room. Our two physicians were about eight to 10 feet away. One doctor had a patient scheduled for that room who had cancelled."

After the last few days of media attention, Ciampi says everyone at the two-physician practice is ready for a return to normal. "We are just a doctors' office," she says. "We need to take care of our patients."