Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Things In The Night Sky
If you have no interest in science, (which I would find horrifying), you may have no interest in this post.
I have been plowing through this book, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, that I just received from a very generous individual, (see below). As I was reading about the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, two memories popped into my head and have refused to depart for now until I write about them. So here goes:
Besides looking into the night sky for "UFO's" with my dad in addition to seeing rockets' "smoke trails" decorate the sky in a vertical inspiration to a 5 year old while living in the desert, my earliest memories of seeing something, "odd" in the night sky begin at about the age of 12 or 13.
I was at a friend's house for a slumber-birthday party and we had decided to take our sleeping bags outside on the front lawn. It was a clear night and since we lived in a small town, we could see many, many stars. We were, all 8 of us, lying on our backs, telling stories when I noticed something moving across the sky. The object was moving from the right of my field of vision. I pointed this out to the other girls and suddenly another girl noticed another object moving from the left of our field of vision. We pondered what they might be. Space junk? Satellites? Stars? What we did know is that they were not planes or helicopters...they were not in our atmosphere. We laid there and watched these two objects moving towards each other. They were moving at a high rate of speed and we nervously joked about them crashing into each other as they appeared to be on the same flight path. Even at 12, we understood perception and figured we were safe in our mock scientific assumptions.
Suddenly, we weren't laughing anymore. The objects did indeed "crash" into each other and we saw a flash of bright white light and then nothing. The objects had disappeared.
As we were only 12, we freaked out and ran into the house faster than Carl Lewis in a 100 meter sprint. We stayed inside, peeking through the curtains, scared to death. After awhile, we started to ease our tension by laughing at each other over who was the most scared. We felt foolish....sort of.
I never did find out what those two objects were and to this day, it still makes me wonder.
Second story on extended entry:
This one isn't quite as interesting but it happened the year Halley's Comet was flying over when I was about 16 years old. I remember I so badly wanted to see Halley's comet that I had bribed the neighbors into letting me borrow their binoculars and was planning on waking up at 3am and climbing this huge mountain behind our town so I would hopefully be able to see it better. Well, when the alarm clock went off at 3am, not only was I incredibly tired, I was also a little wiser. I realized that climbing this mountain at three in the morning with only a pair of binoculars was an extremely dumb thing to do. There were wild animals out there and if anything had happened to me, not one soul would know where I was. So I aborted the mission.
However, the next night, a friend rang me up and asked me to come over to hang out and watch movies. It was about 9pm when I walked out the door on the way to her house. I walked about 300 feet and was coming around the bend in the road that corresponded with a bend in the river and was looking at the sky, towards that mountain I had thought I was going to climb.
All of a sudden, a comet or meteor or something, came flying across the sky...so close I could see the tail and it was bright orange, red and yellow. This thing was huge too. In fact, it looked as if it would crash into the next town over it was so big and close. Needless to say, that did nothing for my nerves and I ran back to the house to announce what I just saw. No one believed me. You would think I just told them I saw a UFO. Well, it wasn't a UFO, I've never seen a UFO, (using the term to describe an alien), and I know what I saw.
And again, I never found out what it was either. I do know, it wasn't Halley's comet. In fact, I confirmed that knowledge when Halley's a comet came around again back in the early 90's. I got to see it that time and this was NOTHING like Halley's that comet. Halley's That comet appeared way up in the sky, appeared as a dull white, moving object with a dull, white tail. Again, what I saw was MUCH closer and was very orange, red and yellow.
No idea what it was. Maybe it was meteor.
Anyway-those are my two experiences besides looking out at the night sky with my kick ass telescope and scouring the surface of the moon, looking at the planets when they were aligned and recently, looking at Mars.
I'm hoping I'll find the answer in this book that I'm reading but part of me almost doesn't want to because I kind of want to hold onto a piece of childlike wonder. A bigger part of me really wants to know though so, I'm off to continue reading. If any of you have a clue as to what these were, especially the first one, let me know.
I'm off...a book is calling me.
<--- Here Endeth The Lesson
