Some years ago, while investigating asteroid diversion, I ran across a reference to a meteorite that struck just west of the city limits of Pittsburgh on June 24, 1938. The source claimed that it was estimated to be a 500 ton object and that the explosion cracked windows in the department stores downtown. I have searched the web and found a couple of similar references.

Does anyone have further information or corroboration about this event? Does anyone know where the impact site was? Is this something that people from Pittsburgh all know about?

The articles I have found claim that if the trajectory of the object had been more vertical, it would have hit Pittsburgh and wiped out a large amount of the population.

???

A 500 ton meteorite striking just west of the city limits of Pittsburgh would result in:
A) Pittsburgh probably not being there any more
B) A very deep hole somewhere real close to the Ohio River, which would become
C) a viable candidate for the sixth Great Lake, and
D) be considered the new source of the Ohio River.

Trust me on this one...didn't happen...

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I was hatched in Pittsburgh in 1951 and I've never heard of this event. I'm sure people would still have been talking about something that big while I was growing up.

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I can see perhaps 500 ounce, but not 500 ton... and even 31.25lbs would cause some serious damage.

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A Google search shows some sites regarding this. I'm not saying they're correct, just that the info is out there:

http://www.brainyhistory.com/events/...938_96538.html

http://www.carnegiemnh.org/minerals/.../Pennmets.html

This one says a cow was struck and injured. Serious site:
http://imca.repetti.net/metinfo/metstruck.html

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I just did the same, you beat me to it

I think the first link says the most likely:
"The original meteor, before partially disintegrating, may have weighed 510 tons!"
Although; how much of that weight could have been stripped without some Tunguska type event? Maybe some roche breakup first?

The search had lots of single line entries and most said it was 500 tons, but I think this one is the winner.
"Had it fallen at a slightly different angle, it would have destroyed much of the city and killed at least half a million people!"

Reading the links from Melusine and others, it appears that the meteorite is fairly well documented to have fallen in Chicora, PA, which seems to be 30 - 40 miles north of Pittsburgh.

Interesting I found this thread while trying to confirm any information about the Chicora event. Like Kevin, I ran across this while studying events in 1938 and I find something very, very unusual about this event.
There is no real publicity surrounding it. Why is this odd? Consider what year this was.
All americans were on a razors edge with what Hitler was doing overseas, and with the Recently enacted Un-American committee looking for Communists inside our boarders. Don't you think an explosion of the magnatidue from a 500 ton missle hitting our soil would have caused a big stir? If your not sure, let me refresh your memory. Later that year on October 31st, there was a Radio broadcast by Orson Wells which cause such panic, people were loading their guns and heading for shelters.

Just seems like and odd set of coinsidences to me. And I generally don't believe in coinsedences.

edit: Upon further research I found this more complete tidbit:

An iron nickel cube, (d = 7.7 gm/cm³) would only have to be 3.9 meters on a side to weigh 500 tons. That's likely not big enough to destroy Pittsburgh.

Ran the figures for 3.9 m iron meteorite through the link Squink provided and came up with about 1/5 of a Hiroshima bomb even when the speed was the minimum 11.2 km/s. This seems enough to have given Pittsburgh a bit of a going over.

Presumably the "weight before disintegrating" was quite a lot higher than what reached the ground. Don't forget a lot would have been burned up in the atmosphere, especially since it seems to have been a chondridic meteor.