Before we go on, you know you’re asking, “where is Basking Ridge?” It’s in New Jersey. Nasty-ass New Jersey. Apparently they have nothing better to do than ponder the origins of a hole in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
A Basking Ridge homeowner would really like to know why there’s a crater in her front yard.
That’s the best lead they could come up with, really? A crater in a woman’s yard screams for a humorous lead of some sort, because IT’S NOT NEWS. For the love of all things holy, at least make light of it. I’m already pissed off.
“To me it looked like something blew out of the ground because the grass was folded back, the rocks and dirt were all spewn out into the cul-de-sac and across the driveway,” Sue, who asked not to be identified out of concern that the hole may draw unwanted onlookers and crowds, said.
So, we have one vote for something blowing out of the ground. Perhaps the upper mantle (the next layer down under the crust, for those of you non-science peeps – and yes, I had to look it up to make sure I used the right name) realized it was under New Jersey and it just said, “the hell with this, I want out.”
Honestly, she didn’t want to be identified because she feared gawkers – but yet she went to the media about it? Or, at least someone tipped the media off (slow news day, apparently), and she spoke to them. But come on, it’s a freakin’ hole – who cares? Are they that bored in Basking Ridge, New Jersey that they’d congregate around a hole? For the record, Basking Ridge only consists of 21.66 square miles and just over 21,000 residents (give or take) – I’m sure if someone wanted to find your hole, even without your last name, they’d be able to find it.
Her son, Jeff, believes something fell from the heavens.
Oh, so we have a vote for a heavenly free-fall. Someone call Joe Dirt, he probably took it and is eating hamburgers with it.
“Something clearly came out of the sky and just hit it from an angle and then it all shot up the other way,” he said.
Obviously it’s not “clearly” much of anything, there Jeff, because your mom doesn’t think that’s what happened at all. I’m not saying she knows, I’m just saying this is clearly not the right adverb to be using.
Officials and experts are also scratching their heads. For now, it appears the small crater that splayed debris across a 100-foot area wasn’t caused by a meteorite. Beyond that, it’s a mystery.
Does anyone else find that paragraph the slightest bit redundant? After all, scratching their heads does imply either a mystery or a horrible case of head lice.
But wait, I thought Jeff said it had to be something from the sky, which would mean it would have to be a meteorite. Clearly Jeff was wrong.
“It’s just really, really weird,” said Jerry Vinski, director of nearby Raritan Valley Community College’s planetarium, who conducted tests on the site. “We dug around and couldn’t find anything. We used metal detectors because all meteors have metal in them, and we couldn’t find anything, large or small.”
The director of the community college’s planetarium can’t come up with a better quote that, “It’s just really, really weird.” How about “anomaly” or some other fun word? Quandary, perhaps? Not just, “really, really weird.”
Hey, dude, since you’ve got a metal detector, I happen to know a field that contains a set of keys – I guarantee you’ll find something there, if you want something to do while you’re still scratching your head over this hole.
Bernards Township Police Capt. Edward Byrnes said whatever hit the front yard left a crater about 18 inches deep and roughly the size of a coffee table.
Roughly the size of a coffee table, that’s the best description they could come up with? (Or a 30-gallon trash can, as witnessed by the picture.) I’ve seen plenty of different sized coffee tables. That seems a very vague description.
Please tell me how a cop responds to this call.
Dispatch: We need an officer to “blah blah blah” street to investigate a hole, over.
Officer: A what?
Dispatch: A hole.
Officer: Are you freakin’ serious?
Dispatch: Yes.
Enter a subsequent game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" between different cops to figure out who has to handle this idiot call.
A State Police bomb squad ruled out explosives, Byrnes said.
And then someone had to convince the bomb squad to come out? Your tax dollars at work.
According to Byrnes, no one in the neighborhood heard or saw anything at the time of the May 6 incident. The homeowner called police upon arriving home.
Of course not. Because had someone saw or heard something, it wouldn’t be such a great mystery.
So she came home, she noticed a hole in her yard, so she called the cops. Yeah, that’s first on my list when I see a hole in my yard. No, first on my list is getting right back in the car to go to Lowe’s to get a shovel and some grass seed so I can fill it in and seed it so my yard doesn’t look like I just dug a new grave in it.
Actually, no, I’d have a little bit of fun first. Stick a flag in it, put a footprint in it, and declare “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind.”
“The weather was clear, there were no reports of lightning strikes; nobody reported seeing anything,” Byrnes said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in 23 years.”
It’s. A. Freaking. Hole.
I’m sure you’ve seen holes before. Surely you have.
Vinski said that the hole could have been caused by an object falling from a plane. He said if the object was a meteorite, the impact would have been significant and would have been felt nearby.
He also said earlier it couldn’t be a meteorite due to lack of metal, so why are we back to the meteor theory? Perhaps we should have edited this story a bit better, no?
“When you see meteor showers in the upper atmosphere, they’re traveling 50 miles a second,” he said. “Even if it’s slowing down through the atmosphere, you’re still going to have a sonic boom. And it would have left something behind, it wouldn’t have completely disintegrated.”
Look, we learned something as a result of this idiotic story. Woohoo. All is not lost. Even if it is horribly misplaced.
Let’s think this through … it’s not a meteorite, I doubt it was the Earth upchucking in her front yard … perhaps it was a bunch of kids who thought she was a bitch and decided to tear up her yard? Maybe one of those kids stole a backhoe from a construction site and they were playing with it a little bit in her yard before moving on. Perhaps God is playing a horrible trick on her (and the cops and the media because they have to deal with her). Perhaps it’s a sign of the upcoming rapture.
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