From Bill Courtney, Altrincham, Cheshire, UK
After reading Alex Wilkins’s article on the mystery of the missing meteorite, I asked Google’s AI assistant whether you can make a pigment for painting rocks using iron meteorites, and whether iron objects look shinier in low morning or midday light. Its answer to both questions was yes. If accurate, this may indicate that Gaston Ripert was honest when he claimed that, after travelling all night, he had seen a large metallic rock in the desert that local people referred to as the “iron of God”. But, far from being metallic, the rock was only coated with iron-based paint. This would explain the lack of success by later investigators, who attempted to find the rock using magnetometers (3 January, p 32).
