Two Cuban specialists questioned yesterday, Saturday, and today, Sunday, whether the object found on Saturday in the municipality of Pilón, Granma province, is a meteorite, suggesting completely terrestrial explanations for the mysterious fragment that sparked a wave of speculation on social media.
The commotion began on the morning of Saturday, August 22, when a group of young people discovered a dark, rough, and smoking object approximately 50 meters from the Purgatorio River bridge. According to collected testimonies, the fragment—described as the size of an almond—bounced about three times upon falling, emitted gases with a strong odor, and even burned the surrounding vegetation. Local authorities placed it under the custody of MININT and it was preserved and transported to Bayamo for analysis, while the head of the National Seismological Service, Enrique Diego Arango Arias, referred to it as a “likely meteorite fall” and requested that the site be preserved without touching anything.
On Saturday afternoon, Dr. C. Manuel Iturralde Vinent, a geologist and Senior Researcher at the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, declared to Juventud Técnica that the material "seems to be perhaps technological debris circum terrestrial originating from the atmosphere."
Iturralde Vinent listed four technical reasons to dismiss the object's extraterrestrial origin: "It does not have a fusion crust [...] It is very porous [...] The structure of spheres with voids between them is not characteristic of space [...] There is no crater that could have a diameter and depth of just a few centimeters in fragments of that size."
The fusion crust is a very thin layer, generally dark and sometimes glassy in appearance, that forms on the surface of many meteorites due to the intense heating and ablation they experience during their entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Its presence is one of the most distinctive indicators for identifying a meteorite, but its absence does not definitively rule out an extraterrestrial origin, as the crust can be lost entirely or partially due to fragmentation, erosion, or weathering after the fall.
In parallel, the expert Yasmani Ceballos Izquierdo published a detailed clarification on his Facebook profile in which he pointed out that "the visible characteristics of the object are not consistent with those typically presented by a meteorite," and that the structure of fragments clustered by a dark and bright phase "is much more compatible with material of terrestrial origin, such as industrial slag, bituminous/asphalt material, or other residues subjected to high temperatures."
Ceballos also dismantled one of the arguments that heavily fueled the meteorite hypothesis among the witnesses: the fact that the object appeared red and smoky. "It is a myth that meteorites are hot," he wrote. "During their entry into the atmosphere, the surface heats up and undergoes ablation, but afterwards the object decelerates and ceases to be incandescent before reaching the ground." Consequently, the testimonies about the penetrating smell, the smoke, and the burned vegetation "weaken, rather than reinforce, the meteorite interpretation."
The expert also dismissed the hypothesis that it might be re-entering space debris, pointing out that "re-entries of space debris are very well monitored, even online, and on those platforms, no orbital object is observed whose terminal trajectory would have crossed Pilón." As a more likely alternative, he suggested that the fragment could be asphalt or bituminous material that, when heated, can produce smoke, a strong odor, and burn vegetation.
If confirmed as a meteorite, it would have been the sixth scientifically recorded in Cuba. The five recognized cases to date are: Las Canas (1844), Bacuranao (1974), Santa Isabel de las Lajas (1994), Viñales (2019), and Ramón de las Yaguas, in Santiago de Cuba (2021). A more recent event, a possible fall in Matanzas in November 2024, also did not get confirmed as no fragments were found on the ground.
Ceballos summarized the current state of knowledge about the case with a conclusion that calls for caution: "What we know so far is: much evidence that there was a real object on the ground; no public instrumental evidence located so far of a fireball, atmospheric trajectory, or impact from space."
The specialists from CITMA, along with geologists and experts from CENAIS, continue to analyze the sample transported to Bayamo.
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