Two Cuban specialists have raised doubts about whether the object found on Saturday in the municipality of Pilón, Granma province, is a meteorite, and they suggest entirely terrestrial explanations for the mysterious fragment that sparked a wave of speculation on social media.
The commotion began on the morning of August 22, when a group of young people discovered a dark, rough, and smoky object about 50 meters from the Purgatorio River bridge. According to the collected testimonies, the fragment—described as the size of an almond—bounced three times upon falling, released gases with a penetrating odor, and even burned the surrounding vegetation.
Local authorities placed it under the custody of the MININT and it was preserved and transported to Bayamo for analysis, while the head of the National Seismological Service, Enrique Diego Arango Arias, described it as a "probable 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, stated to the magazine 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 doesn't have a fusion crust [...] It is highly porous [...] The structure of spheres with voids between each one is not typical of space [...] There is no crater that could have fragments of that size, which can measure only a few centimeters in diameter and depth."
The fusion crust is a very thin layer, usually 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 characteristic signs for identifying a meteorite, but its absence does not definitively rule out an extraterrestrial origin, as the crust can be lost completely 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, stating that "the visible characteristics of the object are not consistent with those typically presented by a meteorite," and that the structure of agglomerated fragments with 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 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 slows down and stops glowing 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 is space debris re-entering, noting that "space debris re-entries are well monitored, even online, and on those platforms, no orbital object with a terminal trajectory crossing Pilón has been observed." As a more likely alternative, he proposed that the fragment could be asphalt or bituminous material which, when heated, can smoke, produce 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 incident, 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 on the case with a conclusion that encourages caution: “What we know so far is: much evidence that there was a real object on the ground; no publicly located instrumental evidence so far of a fireball, atmospheric trajectory, or impact from space.”
CITMA specialists, along with geologists and experts from CENAIS, continue to analyze the sample transferred to Bayamo.
Filed under: