Lou Frank has been attacked for twenty years on this subject.
The German physicist, Ernst Florens Chladni, was the first to publish the then audacious idea that that meteorites were actually rocks from space.[35] He published his booklet, "On the Origin of the Pallas Iron and Others Similar to it, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena", in 1794. In this he compiled all available data on several meteorite finds and falls concluded that they must have their origins in outer space. The scientific community of the time responded with resistance and mockery.[36] It took nearly 10 years before a general acceptance of the origin of meteorites was achieved through the work of the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot and the British chemist, Edward Howard. Biot's study, initiated by the French Academy of Sciences, was compelled by a meteorite fall of thousands of meteorites on April 26, 1803 from the skies of L'Aigle, France.[37][38]I have a feeling that this "community" is a lot more resistant now to new ideas than it was then. Of course, that very public fall of thousands of meteorites in France helped a lot. Too bad we couldn't luck out on this one with something like that over, say, Washington, D.C..