The bulk of the comments I made at the colloquium are to be found in two recent papers (McCrosky and Ceplecha, 1970; McCrosky et al., 1971). The following summary is offered in place of a full text.

Most interpretations of all meteor data rely on knowledge of the relationship (luminous efficiency) between mass and luminosity. Discussions of recent experiments made to determine the luminous efficiency are found in papers by Ayers et al. (1970) and Becker and Friichtenicht (1971). Faint meteor phenomena can be understood if the meteoroids are weak, low-density (pm ≈ 0.25 g/cm3) “fluff balls” such as can be expected on the basis of Whipple's comet model (Jacchia, 1955; Jacchia et al., 1967). Alternative explanations, not requiring low densities, have been offered. Jones and Kaiser (1966) propose thermal shock of strong, high-density material as a fragmentation mechanism. Allen and Baldwin (1967) and Baldwin and Allen (1968) have reanalyzed Jacchia's data in terms of phenomena observed in the laboratory in simulated reentry experiments. Here, a high-density meteoroid froths and thereafter behaves as a low-density body. They also revise the luminosity law to account for blackbody radiation of refractory material. McCrosky and Ceplecha (1970) show that neither of these alternative explanations can apply to large bodies and, using photographic observations of bright fireballs, they defend Jacchia's original proposal for all meteors.