After leaving the area on Tuesday tormented and totally puzzled by the 'unusual' happening on Dawes Pond, approximately 20 km northwest of Badger, it now seems to have an all-natural explanation, according to Jim Gillard of the Twillingate Astronomical Observatory.
As much as he was hoping for some sort of sign, no evidence could be found to prove any sort of object fell from the sky.
Though at the time, there didn't seem to be any other explanation.
After searching the 180 by 200 foot area of Dawes Pond that had been previously flooded, he could not find a puncture point in the excess of eight inches of ice on Tuesday.
"We couldn't prove anything," Gillard said.
However, after reports of two additional bodies of water in the vicinity of Dawes Pond having the same disruption, Gillard was back in the area on Thursday.
After this news came in Wednesday night from other sources that there were two other similar situations as Dawes Pond, Gillard said he mapped out the locations one on Powderhorn Lake and the other on the middle of Badger Lake.
"Once we plotted that on the map, it lined up perfectly in a straight line, separated by eight or nine kilometres," Gillard told the Advertiser on Thursday.
"It was pretty exciting. That's the way that it would be if there was a stream of meteorites falling and coming towards the earth, they sort of spread out over a straight path."
He thought it was too coincidental for those disruptions in the ice to be lined up so well.
He left at 3 a.m. Thursday morning and was at Dawes Pond before daylight.
"At first when I got out to Dawes Pond, which the first place we hit, I became very quickly disappointed," Gillard said. "As much as I would hope that it was a meteorite that had come down there...there was never any evidence to point that way, it was just wishful thinking. But the problem was, the first trip out there, we couldn't explain the water and we couldn't' find the hole that had been punctured by an impact, so how did it get there?
Once there, it was noticed there had been melting over the past 24 to 36 hours.
"This morning...because of the melting, we were able to see that the hole that was there was naturally created," Gillard said.
"All this shale and slush and slob that were obscuring our view of the bottom of the basin where the water had been, this was mostly melted and drained away. We were able to see the basin. Now we could see this site very clearly as all this had melted away."
All the other ridges still remained off on the south sides of disruption, but no hole that couldn't be explained, he said.
"There were three fairly large cracks that sort of came together at a point and then there was a 12 inch hole that you would naturally see, I've seen it hundreds of times, where water probably pushed up through there and went back again - all naturally explained," Gillard said.
"As far as the ridges on the southern edges of these disruptions, which are all identical...they could be very easily explained by the northeast wind that we had at the time."
When it was flooded, it washed the little bits of ice and slob to one side, stuck to the ice and froze in concentric arcs, a little bit indicative of a splash...but it can all be explained by this northeast wind, Gillard explained.
Along with a visit to Dawes Pond, Gillard also checked out the other two sites on Thursday. He said the situation was the same in all three cases, the wind was in the same direction, and all could be explained by natural occurrences.
"Each disrupted area was laid out perfectly symmetrical like each other and pointing in the same directions," he said. "All explained by this wind.
"It was very unusual, I had not seen it before, neither had the people up in that area that had been living on that lake for 15 to 30 years."
He believes it was a combination of a number of natural elements, including less ice than normal in the bodies of water, temperature, and wind direction. There had probably been a bit of water on the ice at certain places, and the wind blew it to a certain place, he said. Water then came up through the cracks that had occurred, and as it did, it started to spread out. The extra weight most likely caused the ice to buckle down a little bit, creating more of a basin and a place for water to gather. The top of this water then froze, causing slush and shale.
He believes it then quickly drained away back down through the hole again leaving the ice...and these frozen ridges all pointing in the same direction with each disruption on the different lakes.
"Without any doubt, there was no meteorite impact there," he said. "I would be very, very uncommon for there to be an impact on three lakes without leaving fragments somewhere."
With meteorites, there are large pieces and smaller pieces, and the smaller pieces can't puncture the ice, he said.
"Given that, there couldn't possibly have been an impact," Gillard said. "We searched the lake all around there in that area, out away from the disrupted area, and there was absolutely nothing.
"I didn't want to come away from there still puzzled as to how this happened. You can't concentrate on anything else. This was really bothering me last night because I couldn't solve this thing. Now I'm happy about that part of it."
