Rains of Ice

Anecdotes of large masses of ice falling from the sky have a long history. Consider the following reports:

• Masses of ice seven inches wide fell with hail in Iowa in June of 1881 (Fort 1919).
• Lumps of ice weighing ‘one pound’ fell during a tornado near Victoria Australia on November 14, 1901 (Fort 1919).
• During clear weather, pieces of ice fell on Long Beech California on June 4 of 1953. About ‘50’ ice-masses fell, some were said to weigh up to 75 kg (Corless 1983).
• Ice chunks reportedly fell over a few day period near Tocina Spain. The fall started on January 10 of 2000. One was ‘football-sized’. They seem to have fallen in clear weather (Bosch 2002).

Starting with the aforesaid 2000 event, the planetary geologist, Jesús Martínez-Frías, began investigating ‘ice-falls’. He became convinced that a portion of the reports were an authentic phenomenon. Of course, there were also often hoaxes following after the well publicized ‘ice-fall’. But many of the ice chunks when analyzed were chemically almost the same as rainwater. Furthermore a good portion of the ice chunks had the same distinctive structure. Basically they were composed of fused-together hailstones. Martínez-Frías’ most controversial claim was that sometimes these super-hailstones can form in clear weather. He suggested that they start in jet contrails.

Several observations support the fused-hailstone hypothesis. Many of the megacryometeors seem to be composed of smaller hailstones congealed together. These bodies have the same composition as ordinary rainwater. Most have reportedly fallen during thunderstorms. Several of the older anecdotes link the ‘ice falls’ with concurrent tornadoes. Hypothetically ice conglomeration could occur as heavier-hail falls through lighter-hail in a powerful updraft. This hypothesis is far from proven, but there does seem to be observational evidence in its favour.

A portion of megacryometeors do in fact come from aircraft. When these are sanitary wastes they are quite obvious. But there are other ways airplanes can drop ice. Leaky water tanks could cause ice to buildup on the outside of fuselage. Also slushy ice/snow has been known to get trapped in the landing gear of airplanes. Sometimes ice does build up on aircraft after takeoff. Air tends to be below freezing at high altitudes, this keeps the ice intact. The terminal velocity of the ice depends on the size and shape of the ice-mass. Generally a torso-sized ice chunk would fall though the air at about 200 km/hr. From an airliner's height it could take several minutes for the ice to reach the ground. By the time the ice hits the ground, the airliner could be quite far on its way – and no longer overhead.

Icy meteoroids exist – after a fashion. But in a vacuum exposed ice sublimates into gas. Ice which does survive cruises near the Sun tends to be buried in less volatile minerals. Furthermore ice is a soft mineral. It should rapidly disintegrate upon impact with the upper atmosphere. In addition, most ice-falls do not accompany reports of bolides or aerial bursts. Martin Beech has pointed out that any cometary ice large enough to hit the ground must have started out quite massive. It would be so massive that it would produce a tremendous, thunderous and obvious bolide.

It must also be admitted that sometimes hailstones fuse together after they have fallen. Runoff water can carry and pile the hail into ditches and other depressions. Hailstones in such piles can freeze together into congealed masses. If seen after-the-fact, it may seem as if super-large chunks of ice have just fallen from the sky.

It would be wise not to immediately conclude that all ice-falls are based on mistaken observations or aircraft-ice. One should keep an open mind.

Rains of Odd Things

Throughout history there have been reports of strange things falling from the sky. The list includes: big chunks of ice, plant materials, insects, fish, frogs, small stones and pieces of coal (Corliss 1983). Do such rains of odd things really happen?

Examples:

• A large number of 'worms' were found on top of the snow near Sangerfield New York on November 18, 1850. It seemed as if they had fallen from the sky (Fort 1919).
• Ice-coated pieces of coal and grit fell over a wide area near Poole and Bournemouth, U.K., on June 5, 1983. The objects fell during a severe storm. Many people witnessed the fall, and many more found the debris afterward (Meaden 1995).
• Clumps of hay fell from the sky over South Molton, U.K., on July 23, 1997. Several people witnessed this fall (Rogers 1997).

Rational Explanations?

There are several rational explanations for such rains of anomalous materials. It is well known that whirlwinds and tornadoes can lift debris from the ground. Less well know is the fact that these materials do not fall together. Rather, objects that fall out of the sky are usually sorted out by terminal velocity. Terminal velocity is the maximum velocity of objects falling through a fluid medium. This terminal velocity is a complex function of mass, density and shape. This is why snow falls slower than rain. The same applies for objects lifted by a tornado. Straw, for example, would fall out of a tornado very slowly. Stones would fall back much sooner than straw. Thus, stones may fall out of the sky in one place, in another place further along clumps of straw would drift slowly down.

Another factor to consider is that not all things said to have been sky-fallen really were. Sometimes people just assume that something must have fallen from the sky. Sometimes insects seen on the snow, or on lawns in great numbers appear so suddenly that it is presumed that they 'fell from the sky'.

Cutworms sometimes appear on the ground in large numbers, sometimes even on top of snow. Cutworms are the caterpillars of several species of moths in the genera Agrotis and Noctua. Cutworms are unusual in that they overwinter in the larva stage. Most other moths overwinter in the pupa stage. Cutworms feed on the stem bases and roots of plants. They can become active during warm spells in the winter. Sometimes they are driven out of the soil by excessive ground water. This can cause them to crawl out on top of the snow!

References

Beech, Martin. 2006. The Problem of Ice Meteorites. Meteorite Quarterly. 12(4): 17-19.

Bosch, Xavier. 2002. Great Balls of Ice! Science. 297: 765.

Corliss, William R. 1983. Hand Book of Unusual Natural Phenomena. Anchor Press. Garden City New York. 259-263.

Fort, Charles. 1941 (1919). The Book of the Damned. Ace Publishing Corporation, New York. 98-99.

Fort, Charles. 1974 (1923). New Lands.Sphere Books Ltd., London.

Meaden, G.T. 1995. The fall ofice-coated coke, clinker, coal, grit and dust from the hailstorm-cumulonimbus of 5 June 1983 over Poole, Bournemouth and neighbouring regions. Journal of Meteorology, U.K. Vol. 20, No. 204, 368-380.

Rogers, Alan. 1997. Report on an unusual fall of hay in South Molton at 15-30 BST on Tuesday 22 July 1997. Journal of Meteorology, UK. Vol. 22, No. 221, 251-254.

Ball Lightning

There are events in nature that are rather mysterious. Long have there been sightings of bizarre balls-of-light, luminous things without known cause. Perhaps we have all, or nearly all, heard such stories from our kin and friends. Fire balls the size of base balls flirting between trees in a deep forest glen, luminous things that dart across one's path on a sultry summer night, balls of light that pop up out of the waves and dart into the sky, or even flocks of glowing bubbles that drift along over a tropic river in the still of the night. Or the story of a pale ball of light that enters an airliner without a boarding pass.

Typical anecdotes:

• During the summer of 1945, or there about, Kate White was in the kitchen of her farm house in Elgin County Ontario with her grandson David. The sky was overcast, but it was not rainy. Suddenly, startled by a strange sight, she exclaimed: "Land of Goshen look at that!" David looked and saw a ball of white light about as big as a muskmelon coming from the screen window to the west. The fire ball wobbled as it moved across the south side of the room only a few metres from the witnesses. Kate maintained that the fire ball exited out a window, but David seemed to recall that it vanished in thin-air over the sink just under that window. In all the ball of light lasted about two seconds or so (White 1994a). Apparently Kate, nee Barber, White, my great-grandmother, recognised the ball of light as a "ball lightning".
• One afternoon, in 1963, a climatologist, Dr. Simon Nieuwolt, was walking across a field in Singapore. He noticed before him a bluish-white fire ball hovering in the air. It was about 20 centimetres wide, 10 metres away, 1.2 metres off the ground, and it was "vibrating a little bit". After about a second the fire ball vanished. Within a minute, or so, it began to rain (White 1994).

After some hesitation mainstream meteorology has come to accept that “ball lightning” really does exist. The vast majority of these fireballs are seen during full-scale thunderstorms. Most last a few seconds to minutes, they occur mostly near ground level, they are fiery but not dazzling (~60W), and seldom are they much larger than footballs (~25cm). A few seemingly authentic photographs of these fireballs have been made. Meteorologists have been slower to accept that some similar phenomenon can occur during fair weather. The mechanism that creates ball lightning is still largely unknown. It is an officially admitted puzzle.

It might not be obvious at first why ball lightning should be considered an enigma. After all, lightning can superheat air – duh. But a ball of hot air is about as structurally unstable a material as one can find. As hot air rises, cool air rushes in, and convection currents destroy the fireball in less than one second. The disintegration rate would be about one second per hundred centimetres of radius, in normal air. An important physical principle, the "virial theorem", stipulates that an 'object' should not be stable if the internal pressure exceeds the forces that hold it together.

One way of keeping an air-plasma re-energised is with powerful microwaves. But such strong microwaves have not been detected coming from normal thunderstorms. One of the older hypotheses was that the plasmas are re-energised by the ambient electric field of a thunderstorm. This theory does not quite explain how the discharge fireball can hover. One would expect the discharge to be attracted to grounded objects and not to be free-floating (Barry 1980). ‘Slower’ lightning leaders can be mistaken for ball lightning. ‘Electric meteors’ are fairly slow moving lightning leaders that are not commonly reported. These electric meteors may often be cloud-to-cloud lightning leaders as seen with their path aligned with the observer. In such cases one can actually see the leader move like a dart (White 1994b).

1. St. Elmo's Fire: During the late 1980s B.V. Voitsekhovskii and M.B. Voitsekhovskii, in the U.S.S.R., discovered that high humidity (95-97%) enhances the formation of St. Elmo's fire discharges. Furthermore they confirmed the fact that free flying objects can glow via St. Elmo's halos as they move through strong electric fields (~3000 V/cm). Live insects, moist leaves, or even charred carbon flakes can all develop corona discharge halos. Probably some ball lightning is caused by St. Elmo's fire on flying objects (Voitsehkovskii & Voitsehkovskii 1987).
2. Fractal Clusters: B.M. Smirnov, in Russia, suggested that ball lightning may actually be composed of semi-solid matter. It was suggested that ablated material at a lightning strike could be turned into vapour. Upon cooling the materials could condense into a fluffy ‘fractal cluster’. The fluff-ball could then combust slowly as it cools. Small (~2cm) analogues have been made in the laboratory (Smirnov 1993). Kenneth Corum and James Corum, in the USA, were able to produce cluster fireballs (~1cm,~2s) of metal and carbon (Corum & Corum 1989). John Abrahamson and James Dinniss, in New Zealand, have found experimentally that lightning can vaporise silica from dirt. Silicon, from the silica, would then condense into a burning cluster ball (Abrahamson & Dinniss 2000). Antônio Pavão and Gerson Paiva in Brazil were reportedly able to create long-lasting fireballs (~1-3cm, ~1-8s). They were made by vapourising silicon with 140 amp electric arcs. These were the closest analogues to ball lightning produced so far (Muir 2007).
3. Water Plasma: At the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Gerd Fussmann’s team has produced analogues of ball lightning. They found that water can be ionised by 60amp electric discharges. The plasma continues to glow for up to 0.3 seconds, after the voltage is cut and the plasma has cooled substantially. The plasma balls are about 20 cm wide, and they are relatively cool. The exact physics of the long-lasting glows is still being investigated (Swarup 2006).

Humid air apparently favours the development of corona discharges. Furthermore fireballs composed of nano-particles can form from ablated material. Therefore, just possibly St. Elmo’s discharges could develop off of a burning fluff-ball of nano-particles. (Just a suggestion.) The main ball lightning models may someday be resolved into a unified theory. But for now the exact mechanism of ball lightning is still an unknown. And some anecdotes do not co-operate with the currently favoured hypotheses. Ball lightning is gee-whiz science at its best.

Electric Meteors

There is a rarely reported form of lightning that looks like a shooting star or fiery dart. These fireballs are called ‘electric meteors’. Electric meteors travel far too fast to be discrete balls of air or plasma. Being close to air in density a plasma ball should lose its momentum to the ambient air almost immediately. Such a ball thrust through the air would certainly be torn apart by air resistance. This would not be an issue if the electric meteor was an electric discharge front. Such discharge fronts, like lightning leaders, would not actually consist of the same hot air from moment to moment.

• On the night of March 21-22, 1877, M. Ed. Blanc saw several fire balls dart out of a cloud near Vence France. These yellow and reddish balls of fire dashed out of the thundercloud in all directions at a little less than two degrees per second. After travelling six to eight degrees these balls turned white and "broke" silently with "effulgent" brightness. Every two or three minutes a new batch of three, or so, fire balls would issue from the cloud and explode. The thunderstorm was at least "eleven miles" away (Nature 1877).
• There have been reports of balls of fire transforming into lightning bolts, and vice versa. A British Doctor., J.W. Tripe, in 1874 witnessed several upward moving fire balls that accelerated from "cricket ball" velocity to into lightning, including the zig-zag channel (Nature 1887).

Electric meteors are a fairly well documented phenomenon. In Sarpy County Nebraska, on August 21, 1996, D. Morss and P. McCrone video taped a fire ball that popped out of the top of a thundercloud. The ball was only 1/10th of a second in view, but the high-speed video managed to capture six frames of the rapid fire ball. The fire ball's estimated speed was "1,800 miles per second". Some investigators doubted this velocity estimate. On May 25, 1997, near Loco Oklahoma, L. Lamphere video taped an "object" flying into a tornado storm cloud and out the other side. It "dipped and bobbled" as it travelled under a ceiling of cloud. Its estimated speed was in the range of 4 to 10 kilometres per second - much slower than a normal lightning leader. In both cases the "objects" were only noticeable on the video replay (Sourcebook Project 1997).

Since these fiery darts move under cloudy ceilings it is doubtful that they were ordinary meteors. However, the fire balls' velocities were within the known parameters of lightning leaders. Ordinary lightning leaders are actually short darts, which are manifest as such when viewed in freeze frame photography. It is mostly cloud-to-ground discharges that are close to light speed. Lower amperage cloud-to-cloud leaders are much slower, ‘merely’ a few hundred kilometres per second. Probably the racing fire balls were in fact lightning leaders on the slower end of the velocity scale (White 1994b).

References

Abrahamson, John and Dinniss, James. 2000. Ball lightning caused by oxidation of nanoparticle networks from normal lightning strikes on soil. Nature. Vol. 403. 3 February. 519-521.

Barry, James Dale. 1980. Ball lightning and bead lightning: extreme forms of atmospheric electricity. Plenum Press. New York.

Corum, K. and Corum, J. 1989. Tesla's production of electric fireballs. Tesla Coil Builder's Association Newsletter. Vol. 8, No. 3. 13-18.

Muir, Hazel. 2007. Lightning balls created in the lab. New Scientist, 2586, 10 January : 12.

Nature, Editors. 1877. Ball lightning. Nature. 15, April 19. 539.

Nature, Editors. 1887. Notes: Royal Meteorological Society. Nature. 36, June 30. 214-215.

Sourcebook Project. 1997. Ball of light clocked at 1,800 miles / second! Science Frontiers. 113, September-October. 3.

Smirnov, B.M. 1993. Physics of ball lightning. Physics Reports (Review Section of Physics Letters). Vol. 224, No. 4. 151-236.

Smirnov, B.M. 1994. Long-lived light phenomena in the atmosphere. Physics "Uspekhi". Vol. 37, No. 5. 517-520.

Swarup, Amarendra. 2006. Physicists create great balls of fire. NewScientist.com news service. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9293-physicists-create-great-balls-of-fire.html .

Voitsekhovskii, B.V. and Voitsehkovskii, M.B. 1987. Isolated St. Elmo's fire on a flying concentrator and ball lightning. Soviet Physics "Doklady". Vol. 295. July. 587- 589

White, D. Andrew. 1994a. Ball lightning anecdotes. Journal of Meteorology, U.K.. Vol. 19, No. 187, March. 96.

White, D. Andrew. 1994b. Ball lightning and rocket lightning. Journal of Meteorology, U.K.. Vol. 19, No. 185, January. 15-16.

Will-O' -The-Wisp

There was a strange class of luminous apparitions that seems to have been more common in the past century than now. Consider the following anecdote:

On the night of October 5, 1872, Howard Fox was walking with a friend near Ruan Major in England. A light appeared from the centre of a "swampy field", this small light "bounded upward" into the air. After climbing to thirty feet, or so, above the ground it disappeared. Four or five times a similar sequence of bounding lights were observed (Fox 1873).

Spook Lights

Mysterious luminous objects have been reported throughout the world. Some are a recurring local phenomenon, others are sporadic. These lights are known variously as: ‘spook lights’, ‘earth lights’ or ‘nocturnal lights’. They are not always easy to explain.

On July 11, 1992, at 21:53hr in the Diamantina-Georgina watershed in Queensland Australia, John D. Pettigrew and others were conducting an ornithological field study. A pale light appeared near the horizon which seemed to be fairly close. Their vehicle could not gain on the light, which seemed to maintain its position but fluctuate in brightness. This was a classic example of the local “Min Min” spook lights (Pettigrew 2003).

John D. Pettigrew’s crew decided to drive and do some triangulation measures on the Min Min light. It definitely originated so far away as to be actually beyond the curve of the horizon. Subsequent observations showed that these lights were definitely mirages. Temperature inversions created conditions wherein light rays were refracted off-course. This caused objects otherwise hidden beyond the horizon to become visible. In the same region, during the daytime, the mirage made distant hills look like distorted ‘castles’. Such oddly shaped mirages are known as Fata Morgana.

Some spook lights certainly are mirages. Others are possibly will-o’-the-wisp or other such things. It is possible that some are an as-yet unexplained atmospheric phenomenon. But it is best to consider mundane explanations first, before jumping the more exotic hypotheses.

References

Pettigrew, John D. 2003. The Min Min light and the Fata Morgana. An optical account of a mysterious Australian phenomenon. Clinical and Experimental Optometry. 82(2): 109-120.

Storm Lights

Since ancient times there have been reports of aurora-like ‘storm lights’ or ‘weather lights’. These pulses of light that were said to presage the coming of thunderstorms. They were certainly weird and ‘Fortean’. The glows were once dismissed as mere ‘heat lightning’, i.e. lightning flashes reflected off clouds. Cloud-to-sky ‘rocket lightning’ was also confused with these storm lights. Or, they were thought of as some sort of auroral glows. No doubt some were in fact aurorae.

On the evening of February 4, 1893, J. Ewen Davidson was watching a distant thunderstorm in Queensland Australia. Twenty to twenty-five times he saw "a patch of rosy light" mount upward from the stormclouds and vanish. In addition to these patches he also saw a few pale streamers beam upward from the clouds (Davidson 1893).

In the nineteenth century the polar aurorae were thought to be some kind of atmospheric phenomenon. So naturally the assumption was made that auroral glows over thunderclouds were proof of this conjecture. Eventually aurorae were found to originate from solar flares. Hence storm lights were dismissed as aurorae by chance in line-of-sight with distant thunderstorms. In fact, for most of the twentieth century meteorologists, for the most part, simply ignored storm light anecdotes.

In 1990 John R. Winckler, of the University of Minnesota, recorded bizarre aurora-like flashes above a distant thunderstorm using a video camera. It was presumed that they must be related to thunderstorm generated electric fields. By 1992 meteorologists had fully documented the existence of these 'high-altitude flashes'. These glows may extend sky-ward tens of kilometres. Near the storm cloud summit these glows are blue and beam-like, they are now called ‘jets’. Jets are the slowest and most visible manifestation of these discharges. They may take up to a quarter second to mount up from the cloud into the sky. In the ionosphere high-altitude flashes are pink-orange and globular, they are now called ‘sprites’. Sprites are extremely brief, rather dim and seldom visible to the human eye. By 1996 the basic physical mechanism of these electrical discharges had been worked out (Fishman et al 1994).

References

Davidson, J. Ewen. 1893. Thunderstorm and auroral phenomena. Nature. Vol. 47, April 20. 582.

Fishman, G.L., Bhat, P.N., Mallozzi, R., Horack, J.M., Koshut, T., Kouveliotou, C., Pendleton, G.N., Meegan, C.A., Wilson, R.B., Paciesas, W.S., Goodman, S.J. and Christian, H.J. 1994. Discovery of intense gamma-ray flashes of atmospheric origin. Science. Vol. 264, 27 May. 1313-1316.

White, D. Andrew. 1997. High-altitude flashes, an anecdote from 1893. Journal of Meteorology, U.K.. Vol. 22, No. 221. September. 257-258.

Earthquake Lights

Descriptions of strange light-forms seen around the time of earthquakes have a long history. Sometimes these were like clear-sky lightning, St. Elmo’s fire like sparkles, ball lightning like orbs, or even aurora glows . ‘Earthquake lights’ were recorded by Classical Greeks and by the medieval Japanese. During the early 1800s these light-forms were mentioned occasionally by scholars. Often these luminosities were explained away as meteors that had occurred by chance when an earthquake was in process.

During November of 1988 there were a series of tremors near Chicoutimi Quebec Canada. The biggest earthquake occurred on November 25 at 6:46 a.m., it was 6.5 on the Richter scale. At least 52 people reported strange luminous forms in the air during several of the larger tremors. Most reports described the lights as being large pale blue flames, not unlike St. Elmo's fire in colour. In Jonquiere, during the big quake, several residents saw balls of fire. These metre wide reddish fire balls popped up out of the ground, rose into the air, where they hovered. Luminescent droplets were seen ‘dripping’ from several of these fire balls. The globes lasted but a few seconds (Ouellet 1990, St.-Laurent 1991).

Earthquake lights were long assumed to be electrical in some manner. Mechanical stress across piezoelectric quartz crystals can generate significant voltage potentials (100-1000 V/cm). However, piezoelectric rocks have extremely low conductivity. It is unlikely that the mere generation of voltage surges would necessarily produce significant electric currents in the ground.

A more plausible theory of earthquake light generation was developed in the 1990s. Friedemann T. Freund, of San Jose University in California, proposed a mechanism that has some experimental verification. It was suggested that peroxy bonds in igneous minerals can break under extreme pressure. The breaking of the bonds between oxygen atoms causes the formation of 'positive ion holes'. These holes can migrate like the more familiar electronic charges. They move by electrons filling their place, resulting in a cascade of displaced positive holes. It is possible that these charges could migrate to the surface. Like normal electric charges, these would tend to concentrate on hilltops and other peaks and points. There the charges could be transferred to the air. Then lightning, in its various forms, could thus be generated by powerful tremours.

References

Derr, J.S. and Persinger, M.A. 1986. Luminous phenomena and earthquakes in Southern Washington. Experientia. 42. 991-999.

Devereux, Paul. 1990. Earth Lights Revelation. Blandford Press. London.

Freud, Friedmann T. 2003. Rocks That Crackle and Sparkle and Glow: Strange Pre-Earthquake Phenomena. Journal of Scientific Exploration. 17 (17): 37-71.

Ouellet, Marcel. 1990. Earthquake lights and seismicity. Nature. Vol. 348, December 6. 492.

St.-Laurent, France. 1991. 1991. Effet couronne et décharges electro-atmosphériques: manifestation lumineuse possible lors de tremblement terre. Journal of Meteorology, U.K.. Vol. 16, No. 161, September. 238-241.

UFOs

D. Andrew White - 16/06/2007 ©

The modern era of UFO reports began on June 24, 1947, in Washington State. On that day Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and businessman, reported nine seemingly metallic objects travelling at tremendous velocity. These objects seemed to come in from the north, low near the horizon, and then to fly swiftly between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams.

One cannot claim to fully solve a particular UFO case that is over sixty years old. What one can do is offer up a plausible hypothesis or two. The favourite explanation of mainline ufologists, of course, long has been that the objects were extraterrestrial spacecraft. The latest twist is that the UFOs were ‘earth lights’ or ‘geometeors’ (Devereux 1990). It has been suggested that the objects were mirages of distant mountain tops. But it would be expected that the mirages would have had an apparent motion opposite to that which was described. Others suggested that blowing snow could cause the apparitions. But mountain snow tends to be rather crusty during the summertime. Kenneth Arnold at first thought that the objects might have been experimental aircraft. This old idea resurfaces from time to time. A sceptical investigator, James Easton, suggested that the objects were high flying white pelicans (Easton 2000). The putative trajectories of the birds and airplane together do not quite fit the description. The idea that the objects were a meteor train has been advanced from time to time over the years. Indeed the meteor hypothesis was the original solution suggested by the U.S. Air Force. If it was a meteor it must have been well east of the mountains with a velocity of many kilometres per second so as not to visibly arc towards the ground (Hynek 1977, Klass 1997, Maccabee 2002).

What has sometimes been overlooked is that there seem to have been six separate sightings at roughly the same time! There was seventh set of witnesses who may have seen the last vestiges of the event. The fact that these sightings roughly line-up has largely been ignored by mainstream ufologists.

Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting: On Tuesday June 24, 1947, a private pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying toward Yakima in his CollAir at 9,200 feet. At about 2:58 pm PST (MST?) he was near Mineral, 23 miles from Mount Rainier in Washington State. He was flying east when a flash of light caught his attention to the north. About nine bright metallic-looking objects came in from the north from Mount Baker, and flew southward towards Mount Rainier. They appeared to be slightly higher than Arnold’s altitude. They were above the horizon level and seemed to pass behind one sub-peak of Mount Rainier, and then they seemed to pass in front of the snowy outline of the mountain. At this point Arnold looked at his clock to time the objects. The objects continued travelling in the direction of Mount Adams, where soon after they were out of sight. The row of objects appeared to be five miles long - assuming it was as same distance as the mountain range. The objects flew in a reversed echelon formation, and they fluctuated greatly in brightness. Each object appeared to be flat and roughly triangular in outline. The whole sighting allegedly lasted more than two minute.

Fred Johnson’s Sighting: On Tuesday June 24, 1947, at about ‘3:00 pm’ a prospector named Fred Johnson was on Mount Adams. He was at 5000 feet elevation, when he saw a group of six-to-seven moving objects. They were said to be heading southeast, at one degree elevation, seemingly ‘1,000 feet’ higher than himself, and possibly about ‘10 miles’ away, according to his estimates. Each object was only 0.3 degrees in width. The tapered ‘objects’ were in view long enough for Johnson to observe them through a pocket telescope. They had sharp tails like meteors. Reportedly the fireballs were simultaneous with his compass needle fluctuating wildly.

Johnson’s objects were not ‘overhead’, as too many ufologists have repeatedly misquoted. Rather, objects were east of Mount Adams. Did anybody else see anything odd east of Mount Rainier? They did indeed. Newspaper reports in Oregon, Washington and Idaho reported similar ‘flying discs’. Only about six of these contained useful details. Though, the records of the time of the sightings were not very detailed. The sightings roughly line up in space and time: Mineral: Near Mineral Washington a Sidney B. Gallagher claimed to have seen nine shiny flashy ‘discs’ travelling south - from the ‘northerly’ direction. The event occurred at ‘about’ 3:00 pm PST on June 24, 1947 (Sparks 2003).

Diamond Gap: Just south of Mt. Rainer a forest ranger Robert W. Hubach reportedly saw ‘high up’ flashing objects travelling very fast. They were seen far to the east in the ‘daytime’ on June 24, 1947 (Sparks 2003).

Richland: In Richland Washington a Mr. Leo Bernier reported several silvery discs heading west-southwest. The time was around “2:00 or 2:30” pm on June 24, 1947. They appeared to be faster than airplanes (Aldrich 2006).

Yakima: In Yakima Washington a Mrs. Ethel Wheelhouse reported a string of moving objects on Tuesday afternoon on June 24, 1947. They moved so rapidly that she could not count them (Aldrich 2006).

Boise: Lt. Gov. Donald S. Whitehead near the court house, in Boise Idaho, saw a comet-like object. Mr. J.M. Lambert, a Justice of the Peace, also saw the same ‘object’. It had a bright head and a wispy tail. It was low in the western sky at around 3:30 pm MST (2:30 pm PST) on June 24, 1947. It seemed slow moving, and seemed to set as the earth turned. (Aldrich 2006).

The Boise report of a vapour trail should be considered tentatively as evidence for anything. The smoky cloud may have had a cause separate from the other events to the west. Maybe it arose from another meteor, or perhaps it was left by a jet aircraft. People were not as familiar with jet contrails in 1947 as they are nowadays. Nevertheless, the timing of this apparition was highly suggestive. At 3:30 pm local MST time (2:30 pm PST), it roughly corresponded to the other sightings.

Some uncertainty surrounds the time of the Arnold sighting. Almost certainly Arnold’s observations were the most accurate of all the sightings. Though, there is doubt about whether Arnold’s eight day clock was set at Mountain Standard Time (MST) or Pacific Standard Time (PST). Arnold was from Boise Idaho, which went, and still goes, by Mountain Time. Several years after the event, in The Coming of the Saucers, Kenneth Arnold stated the following:

“It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and the giant bulks of both Mount Rainier and Mount Adams made perfect markers. Now, clocking speeds by only your sweep second hand cannot be entirely accurate because several seconds could be lost in breaking your gaze to observe your clock. I recall that when the first craft of this formation jetted to the southward from the snow-based cleft of Mount Rainier my second hand was approaching the top of my hour dial and the time was within a few seconds to one minute of three. I can't distinctly remember whether the eight day clock on my instrument panel was set on Pacific time, Mountain time, daylight saving time, or slow time. I never thought of checking this with my wristwatch. I believe my eight day clock was on Mountain time. -- ” (Arnold & Palmer 1952).

In other words, the whole event may have taken place at 3:00 pm MST which corresponds to 2:00 pm PST. In which case, the times of the other semi-accurate sightings would fall into place. The Richland sighting could really have been at 2:00 pm PST. The sighting in Boise could have been at 2:30 pm PST, or a half hour after the others. That is, the lateness of the Boise sighting might be a clue. In summary, in the early afternoon of June 24, in 1947 there were six UFO reports that seemed to be generally meteor like. They also lined up, more or less, in time and space. There was one extra report which could possibly be the smoky last remnants of an exploded meteor (Sparks 2003, Aldrich 2006). Suggesting that the fireballs were on the east side of Mount Rainier would introduce but one conundrum. The objects were said to have darted behind one sub-peak, and also in front of the snowy main flank of Mount Rainier. Unfortunately for common sense, the only sub-peak possible was on the opposite side from the main flank of Rainier. So something in Arnold’s distance estimates must have been amiss (Easton 2000). At the velocity that Arnold estimated, this would entail extraordinarily rapid twists and turns. This could mean that the report of the fireballs passing in front of Mount Rainier might have been an illusion of some sort. What then could have caused the impression that the objects passed between Arnold’s airplane and the snows of Mount Rainier?

Arnold’s saucers were described as being very bright. Bolides are often bright enough to cause retinal afterimages. During the night such afterimages seem dimly lit, in the daylight they are more like dark splotches (Kronk 2007). Possibly the ‘dark lines’ crossing in front of Mount Rainier were really just afterimages. Arnold was obviously staring at the bright ‘saucers’ as they approached Mount Rainier. The afterimages would have been well ‘burned-in’ by the time the saucers passed behind the mountain. Since the afterimages would be darkish spots they would seem to be dark things crossing the snows of Rainier. This could explain how the saucers went ‘behind’ a faraway peak and then managed somehow to pass ‘in front’ of the closer peak.

In 1947 the June ‘daylight’ meteors were first detected by their radar echoes. Hitherto it was suspected that there should be daylight meteor showers. But before 1947, there was no means of detecting these meteors through the glare of daylight. Nowadays it is well known that there is an increased frequency of meteors during daylight hours of late June and early July. Though the trend is not statistically robust, this maximum corresponds to an increase in sightings of bright daylight bolides. Phillip J. Klass used this fact, and others, to argue that this first ‘flying saucer’ wave was instigated by a series of bright daylight bolides (Klass 1997). Indeed Project Blue Book identified many of the early UFOs as ‘daytime meteors’. The meteor explanation was specifically applied to both Arnold’s and Johnson’s report by Blue Book investigators (Sparks 2003).

June and July are the best time to see daylight meteors. Though, daylight fireballs are rather rare at the best of times. Strangely, there is a slightly elevated incidence of actual meteorite falls in June and July (Lewis 1996, Klass 1997). The June-July meteor peak is usually attributed to the relatively large size range of the fragments of good old comet Encke. It is believed that this short period comet has been in the inner solar system for a fairly long time. Encke has managed to scatter loads of debris along its orbit over the centuries. One of the several meteor showers attributed to Encke is the Beta Taurid shower of late June and early July. Some of Encke’s pieces are bigger than is typical of comet debris. Indeed, the Tunguska airburst in June of 1908 could well have been due to a house-sized fragment of this very same comet.

But one need not insist that Arnold’s meteors must have been a Beta Taurid. In June and July there are actually three different daylight meteor showers to choose from.

Beta Taurids: The Beta Taurid meteor shower would have a radiant west of the sun at about 3:00 pm three days after the summer solstice. The radiant would be in Taurus, at about twelve degrees from the position of the Sun. That is, if the event occurred at 3:00 pm, the radiant would be roughly where the Sun would be at 4:00 pm. Washington State did not observe Daylight Saving Time in 1947. So the radiant's position would correspond closer to the 5:00 pm solar position during Daylight Saving Time.

Arietids: In June the Arietids hail from a radiant in Aries that is thirty degrees west of the Sun. These are much lower, and further to the north-west, at 3:00 pm, in late June. In fact, the radiant would correspond to where the Sun would be at about 5:00 pm, or 6:00 pm on Daylight Saving Time. The Arietids do produce a few bright bolides, though as a whole they tend to be small but rapid meteors.

June Boötids: From June 26 to July 2 one of the most sporadically impressive meteor showers occurs. It is a stream of debris from comet Pons-Winnecke. The shower has a radiant in the constellation Boötes to the north. Usually only a small portion of these are bright bolides, most are smallish slow meteors. On June 24, at 3:00 pm they would seem to radiate from the north-east. This trajectory does not quite correspond to the path suggested by the various sightings.

Any meteor that could account for the Arnold sighting would have to have been at a fairly small angle relative to the horizon. Of the periodic meteors hitherto mentioned only the Arietids would have been very ‘low slung’ at around 3:00 pm in late June. The Beta Taurids would be the second best fit. But they would have had a steeper angle to the horizon. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that Arnold’s meteor was not part of a periodic meteor shower anyway. Perhaps it was just a sporadic meteor that happened to fall during the Beta Taurid maximum. Kenneth Arnold originally estimated that the objects crossed a span of fifty miles (83 km) in 102 seconds (Devereux 1990, Maccabee 2002). But what if the ‘saucers’ were three times farther away than he thought? That is, the meteor chain could have been travelling roughly 2.4 miles per second (4.1 km/s). Normally once decelerated to below about 2.5 miles per second (4.2 km/s) a meteoroid can no longer remain incandescent. But Arnold’s method of ‘clocking’ the saucers was of ballpark-accuracy at best. The saucers could have been a meteor chain in its final phases of deceleration. Three or four miles per second would be expected. But in very rough terms Arnold’s velocity estimate was close to what one might expect of a meteor’s final fanfare.

Assuming all seven sightings refer to the same event. Then the meteor’s path would have begun northeast of Mount Rainier, it then passed roughly over Yakima, south of Richland, and then on to just west of Boise Idaho – where it disintegrated. The total path could have been over two hundred miles long. This would suggest a trajectory heading southeast. Leo Bernier’s report suggested a more southwest heading. It is difficult at this date to know which, if any, of the sightings really were of the same event. As hitherto suggested, the Boise incident may have been a contrail. Either way, the sightings are broadly compatible with a meteor coming roughly out of the northwest and heading southeast.

It cannot be firmly proven at this late date that the Arnold’s sighting was caused by a meteor. Furthermore, its identity with any particular meteoroid stream is even more speculative. Nevertheless, the events as described were very similar to other bolides that had been mistaken for flying saucers. It is suggestive that meteor-like ‘flying saucers’ were reported in Oregon, Idaho, Oklahoma and Kansas during the following week (Peebles 1995). It would seem to be too coincidental that the very first ‘official’ flying saucer reports looked like meteors, lined up like meteors, and they occurred during a period when several daylight meteor showers were in progress. One cannot conclusively say that the Kenneth Arnold case has been ‘solved’. Nevertheless, the meteor hypothesis does seem to be a plausible explanation. Indeed the Arnold event was not a spectacular example of a UFO in the ‘good unknown’ category. Furthermore, the reports of the other witnesses were all very much like meteor sightings. On the balance of it, one can induce that the Kenneth Arnold event was probably a meteor. Together the sundry sightings suggest that a very large meteor came in from the northwest at around 2:00 or 3:00 pm on that summer day back in 1947. After a minute or-so, a puff of smoke was all that remained of that very first of the flying saucers.

References

Aldrich, Jan. 2006. Project 1947. http://www.project1947.com.

Arnold, Kenneth and Palmer, Raymond A. 1952. The coming of the saucers. Privately published by the authors, Boise, ID; Amherst, WI. {Several on-line copies exist.}

Chatfield, C.R. 1994. Meteor of 18 August 1783. Journal of Meteorology, U.K.. 19, 189, May / June. 170.

Devereux, Paul. 1990. Earth Lights Revelation. Blandford Press. London.

Easton, James. 2000. Voyager Newsletter no. 10: voyager@ukonline.co.uk; received April 13.

Hynek, J. Allen. 1977. The Hynek UFO Report. Dell Publishing Co. Inc. New York.

Klass, Phillip J. 1997. Were Kenneth Arnold's UFOs Actually Meteor-Fireballs? The Skeptics UFO Newsletter (SUN) #46, July.

Kronk, Gary W. 2007. Meteor Showers Online: http://cometography.com/kronk_observatory/about.html.

Lewis, John S. 1996. Rain of Iron and Ice - the very real threat of comet and asteroid bombardment. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc. New York.

Maccabee, Bruce. 2002. JUNE 24, 1947: HOW IT ALL BEGAN. The Story of the Arnold Sighting: http://brumac.8k.com/karnold/karnold.hmtl.

Peebles, Curtis. 1995. Watch the Skys - A chronicle of the flying saucer myth. Berkley Books, New York.

Sparks, Brad. 2003. Comprehensive Catalog of 1,500 Project BLUE BOOK Unknowns: Work in Progress (Version 1.6, June 18, 2003). http://www.cufos.org/BB_Unknowns_1_7.pdf

When the Sky Fell

Tektites

At the beginning of the atomic era, after 1945, an interesting observation was made. At the atomic bomb testing grounds there were globs of sand that had been fused into glass by the heat of the atomic explosions. Now this would not normally be news. Many minerals can be turned into glass by extreme heat. However, similar glass rocks had long been noted by archaeologists and geologists. These natural versions are the ‘tektites’ and ‘desert glasses’.

Wild hypotheses for tektites were soon in coming. Perhaps the desert glasses and tektites really were atomic explosion artefacts! Ancient astronauts were seriously suggested as a cause. Perhaps the peoples of Atlantis had nuclear weapons. The Vedas and the Mahabharata were creatively interpreted as referring to the ‘long lost’ civilisations. (Not that any one has ever found any real evidence of this alleged high-tech society.) The more conventional explanation was that tektites came from lunar volcanoes. But in the Apollo era, no really large volcanoes were found on the Moon. Now it is a scientific rule of thumb that one should not jump to an implausible hypothesis when a more mundane alternative exists.

Tektites vary from microscopic in size to a few grams. ‘Tektites’ are named from the Greek word for molten (tektos) because they appear to have been first melted and then flash frozen. Tektites seem to have been sculpted by motion through a fluid medium - probably air. They are often shaped like flanged discs, dumbbells or spindles. They contain more water than Moon rocks, but far less water than terrestrial basalts. This probably indicates that most of their water was boiled out of them. Like obsidian, tektites are definitely composed of glass. Glass is basically any mineral that cools so rapidly that it fails to form crystals.

There is plenty of fossil evidence of tektites going back deep into the Archaean Eon. Tektites tend to be distributed across specific, but broad, geographic regions. Furthermore they appear to have been laid down during very brief periods of time. Hence many are found in the same stratum as other matching tektites. It is as if the tektites had fallen from the skies. There are therefore tektite ‘strewnfields’ of diverse ages here-and-there. The more recent tektites have been found in four main strewnfields:

• North America: Black to dark-greenish tektites are scattered around the Chesapeake Bay impact crater. The tektites are found mostly in eastern North America. But they do occur in off-shore sediments also. The crater is about 35 million years old. Today it is largely covered by sediments in the bay mouth. The crater is about 38 kilometres wide.
• West Africa: In Ghana the Lake Bosumtwi-Crater seems to be the centre of a strewnfield. The tektites are generally dark coloured. The crater is about 1.07 million years old. Today it forms a neat round lake over 10 kilometres wide.
• Europe: The Nördlinger Ries crater in Germany is roughly the centre of a strewnfield. The green tektites known as Moldavites are sold as gemstones. This crater is circa 14.7 million years old and 24 kilometres wide. A partial ring of hills surround a vast circular depression.
• Australasia: The largest strewn-field is the Australasian Strewnfield which is circa 0.77 million years of age. The field apparently extends into Antarctica and also into the undersea stratum of the region. The craters are not neatly defined, but the main one is perhaps somewhere in the Mekong Valley in Indochina. Fused sand-glass proves that there was at least one powerful aerial explosion.

Tektites almost certainly originated as the molten splatter from stupendous meteorite, or comet, impacts. In other words, tektites are probably impact ejecta. There are also examples of sand that has somehow been fused in situ into glass. These ‘desert glasses’ are found in divserse places - and not always in deserts. Desert glasses probably formed via the heat of aerial bursts. Which is why these stones are also called ‘impact glasses’. They are very similar to the glass found at atomic bomb test sites. Impact glasses are composed mostly of local minerals. Whereas tektite composition often mismatches the local stratum in which they are found. Traces of the original meteorites seem to be present in some tektites. But for the most part, tektites are composed of Earthly soil. In other words tektites, and their kin, are probably dirt from the Earth that was blasted, melted and splattered about by the meteoric impacts and/or their aerial bursts.

References

Barnes-Svarney, Patricia. 1996. Asteroid - Earth Destroyer or New Frontier? Basic Books. Cambridge, MA.

Childress, David Hatcher. 2000. Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients. Adventures Unlimited Press. Kempton, Illinois.

Glass, B. P.; Chapman, D. R. and Pradad, M. 1996. Ablated tektite from the central Indian Ocean. Meteoritics and Planetary Science 31, 365-369.

Goldberg, R. A. and Aikin, A. C. 1972. Comet Encke Meteor metallic ion identification by mass spectrometer. NASA Center: Goddard Space Flight Center. Accession Number: 73N11855; Document ID: 19730003128; Report Number: NASA-TM-X-66084, X-625-72-402.

Lewis, John S. 1996. Rain of Iron and Ice - the very real threat of comet and asteroid bombardment. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc. New York.

Moore, Patrick. 2001. On the Moon. Cassell & Co. London.

Morgan, Alan. 2006. Tekties and Strewnfields. http://www.earth.uwaterloo.ca/services/whaton/waton/f9922.html.

Paine, Michael. 2001. Source of the Australasian Tektites? Meteorite, February. 2001 http://www.meteor.co.nz .

Schmidt, G. and Wasson, J. T. 1993. Masses of the Impactor, the Australasian Tektites, and Size Estimates of the Main Source Crater. Meteoritics. 28 (3): 430.

Schnetzler, C. C.; Walter, L.S. and Marsh, J. G. 1988. Source of the Australasian tektite strewn field: A possible off-shore impact site GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS. 15(4): 357–360.