The video, which he has provided to this publication, shows the Glockenspiel's seconds display over the specified interval. Per Mr. Kreitz's own annotation, which he has also provided, the second hand is, at multiple points in the video, "approximately 2.3 to 2.7 degrees ahead" of the position a properly calibrated 60-second second hand should occupy at the video's time stamps.

The video itself has, to a non-horologist eye, no obvious anomaly. The hand moves smoothly. It appears to tick at one-second intervals. It does not, to my eye, exhibit "harmonic pull."

Mr. Kreitz insists that it does.

The theory

Mr. Kreitz's theory, which he stated to me at length Wednesday afternoon at his shop, is that "a sufficiently concentrated angular momentum in the near-Earth environment" — by which he means a sufficiently fast-rotating asteroid — "exerts a harmonic field observable in the sensitive regulators of sensitive clocks." The Glockenspiel's escapement mechanism is, per Mr. Kreitz, "among the most sensitive in the Helen metropolitan area." The Glockenspiel therefore, per Mr. Kreitz, detected the asteroid's rotation the day before the Rubin Observatory's announcement.

I asked Mr. Kreitz, as tactfully as I could, whether any peer-reviewed horological or physics literature supported this mechanism. Mr. Kreitz said that it did not.

I asked whether he believed the effect was, nevertheless, real.

Mr. Kreitz said he believed it was.

The verification

I have, as this publication's cultural-affairs correspondent and as a man of reasonable skepticism, attempted to verify Mr. Kreitz's claim independently. I have, since Wednesday evening, stood for approximately two hours at the same sidewalk corner, at various times, and watched the Glockenspiel's second hand. I have also, as a control, stood at the base of the Helen Welcome Center's wall clock (a standard battery-operated Lux quartz model) and watched that clock's second hand.

The Glockenspiel's second hand does, to my practiced eye, appear to occasionally "hitch" — to advance, during certain seconds, by an amount that appears slightly greater than one full second-division on the dial. The Welcome Center's quartz clock does not.

This is not proof of anything. It may be an artifact of the Glockenspiel's age, its 1977 brass escapement, the Tuesday-afternoon north wind, or my own astigmatism.

It is, nevertheless, what I observed.

Disposition

The Rubin Observatory's announcement, I should note, specified that 2025 MN45 does not pose an Earth impact risk. Its closest approach to Earth, per the Minor Planet Center, is projected for April 2027 at a distance of approximately 12 million kilometers.

At that distance, per any orthodox physical model I have been able to locate, the asteroid should exert no measurable mechanical effect on a brass escapement 44 feet across a sidewalk in Helen, Georgia.

Mr. Kreitz, informed of this, said: "We will see."