8:13
Naturally he knew nothing of emergency orders sending all planes aloft . He was n't informed about something reported in space and apparently headed for an impact point at Boulder Lake . As the computed impact time arrived , Lockley obliviously dumped coffee into his tin coffeepot and put it back on the flames . At 8:13 instead of 8:14 -- this information is from the tape records -- there was an extremely small earth shock recorded by the Berkeley , California , seismograph . It was a very minor shock , about the intensity of the explosion of a hundred tons of high explosive a very long distance away and barely strong enough to record its location , which was Boulder Lake . The cause of that explosion or shock was not observed visually . There 'd been no time to alert observers , and in any case the object should have been out of atmosphere until the last few seconds of its fall , and where it was reported to fall the cloud cover was unbroken .