H6Peekskill, New York

The signature light gray to caramel matrix is transected by the webbing of shock melt, which attests to a violent impact on its parent asteroid. Metal-flake is dispersed throughout. A sought-after artifact, a strip of red paint, which attests to its impact with a red Chevy Malibu, appears on the curved section of the meteorite’s fusion crust.
74 x 52 x 4 mm. (3 x 2 x ⅛ in.) and 66.62 g.

This is a quintessential specimen of the historic Peekskill meteorite. Early in the evening on Friday, 9 October 1992, a bright blazing fragmenting intruder tore across the evening sky of the North-eastern United States. Video cameras trained on Friday night high-school football games turned skyward to capture the rocketing fireball before it drilled through a 1980 Chevy Malibu parked in a driveway in Peekskill, NY — just 35 miles outside of New York City. Only a handful of meteorite falls have been caught on film — and none have been captured from as many angles as Peekskill. Additionally, there are few collisions involving meteorites and cars on record, and this is the first meteorite with such a dual pedigree, and by far the most famous. Millions of years before smashing the Malibu, the parent asteroid of the Peekskill meteorite experienced its own significant collision. As a result of the force of impacts on its parent asteroid, many grains were fractured and crushed; some were melted. A large portion of this meteorite, along with the car it hit, have been on an international museum tour — the car was recently on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and is now at the Tellus Museum in Atlanta. Specimens of the Peekskill meteorite are difficult to obtain, and one with paint from the meteorite/automobile collision are rarer still.

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalog note.