■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
■ PLANETS
ROUEN INCIDENT, 1916
The General Ignorance of Astronomy.
Venus, Jupiter, and the Zeppelins.
NOTE. The following item translated by Dr. Clifford C. Crump from a paper by Camille Flammarion in L' Astronomie for March 1916 shows the lack of astronomical knowledge, lamented in the preceding paper by E. F. Bigelow, to be more or less general. [EDITORS].
Since I published in the New York Herald a chart on which I marked with circles from west to east, the positions of the planets visible in our beautiful winter sky so handsomely starred, I have received the following letter:
We are here at Rouen, three zealous readers of the New York Herald, and also members of the "Societé Astronomique de France," we meet almost every day at the "Place Boieldieu" and we love to talk about astronomy. Not long since while looking at your celestial chart we saw at once that your numbers 1 and 2, at the side of the chart, and to the west, represented Venus and Jupiter, which were very near each other on the night of the thirteenth and fourteenth. They also represented, without doubt, the lights of the Zeppelin which alarmed our beautiful city of Rouen Saturday evening.
In fact, the rumor was current here that this aeriel apparition had been seen to arrive from Harve, brilliant from the south west, without any one being able to distinguish its form or hear its motor. Many eyes followed this double lighted flyer down to the horizon: two lights, forward and aft, until it disappeared at eight fifteen in the western haze without having caused any damage, or having thrown a single bomb.
The most amusing part of the story is that at Rouen the alarm was complete As soon as the "enemy's fires" had been noticed, a shot from the cannon was fired as a warning, the fireman patroled the streets shouting "On guard!", and an hour later "Back to your quarters." All the danger had passed: Venus and Jupiter had set before the eyes of the citizens of Rouen.
Since the beginning of the war, there has passed scarcely a month without our Bulletin having discovered analogous confusion, and notably for four months, thousands of ignorant people have taken Jupiter for a dirigible. The position of the double luminary on the southwest horizon, the time of its appearance and disappearance, the apparent path of this aerial ship with head-light (Venus) and aft-light (Jupiter), all contribute to show us that many people are living on our earth in utter ignorance of astronomy, without knowing where they are, and without surmising the marvels of the universe.
They had at Rouen exactly the same talk as at Paris in the "Place de l'Etoile," "Place de la Concorde," at Montmartre, and in other places in France as we have already mentioned.
Among a hundred citizens there is scarcely one who ever forms an idea of astronomic realities. The multitude have eyes which do not see. The Chaldean shepherds and the contemporaries of Homer lived better, in truth, than we, and in closer touch with nature. Where is progress?
- Flammarion, Popular Astronomy, Vol. 24, 1916, p.335
Ruppelt, 1960:
"Few people I ever talked to, once they had decided they were looking at a UFO, stopped to calmly say to themselves, 'Now couldn't this be a balloon, star, planet, or something else explainable?'
In one instance I traveled halfway across the United States to investigate a report made by a high ranking man in the State Department. An experienced observer. It was evening by the time I got to talk to him and after he'd excitedly told me all the pertinent facts, how this bright light had 'jumped across the sky,' he said, 'Want to see it? It's still there but it's not jumping now.'
We went outside and there was Jupiter."
- Ruppelt, Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1960 Edition
Condon Report, 1969:
Unfettered imaginations, triggered into action by the view of an ordinary object under conditions which made it appear to be extraordinary, caused reports of UFOs having such impressive features that our field teams investigated. Such a case was [Project Blue Book case number] 15 [South Mountain, AZ, 1967], in which the observer reported evening observations of a green light as large as a two-story building, sometimes round and sometimes oblong, which landed several times per week 5-20 mi. to the west of his house. He reported having seen through binoculars two rows of windows on a dome-shaped object that seemed to have jets firing from the bottom and that lit up a very large surrounding area. The motion was always a very gradual descent to the western horizon, where the object would "land" and shortly thereafter "cut off its lights." Our investigators found this gentleman watching the planet Venus, then about 15 degrees above the western horizon. He agreed that the light now looked like a planet...
Light diffusion and scintillation effects (see Section VI, Chapter 4) were also responsible for early morning UFO observations, and Venus was again most frequently the unknowing culprit. Case 37 [Portage County, Ohio, 1966], as initialy reported to us, was a particularly exciting event, for not only had numerous law enforcement officers in neighboring communities observed, chased, and been chased by an UFO of impressive description, but, according to the report, the pilot of a smal aircraft sent aloft to chase the UFO had watched it rise from the swamp and fly directly away from him at such speed that he was unable to gain on it in the chase. Both the light plane and the unidentified object, according to the initial report, were observed on the local Air Traffic Control radar screen. According to the descriptions, the object displayed various and changing colors and shapes. Appearing as big as the moon in the sky, it once stopped about 500 ft. above a police car, lighting up the surroundings so brightly that the officers inside the car could read their wrist watches. As indicated in the detailed report of this case, supporting aspects of the main sighting report fell apart one by one as they were investigated, leaving us again pointing to Venus and finding the law enforcement officers surprised that she could be seen at mid-day near the position in the sky their UFO had taken after the early morning chase.
- Edward Condon, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1968
"On one of our space flights, Michael Collins, during one of his extra-vehicular activities, saw Venus rising as the sun was about to come up and thought it was his target satellite - asked the ground if the satellite was off in that direction and later on, of course, found out it wasn't a satellite: it was Venus. There has been even a case where a man, before the UFO phenomenon began - a train conductor - backed his train off the tracks because Venus was coming down the track at him; he thought it was an oncoming train. So the misperception of Venus is a very common thing and doesn't imply that people are not sober or honest or clear-sighted. It implies that they're human." - James Oberg, from a 1980s UFO Documentary
Air Canada, 2011:
Indian Army, 2013:
Scottish police, 2021:
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
■ METEORS
"People are still puzzled very much by a very bright meteor. Even trained pilots. We had cases where commecial pilots have swerved their airplanes thinking they were on a head-on collision course with something that turned out to be a very bright meteor 100 miles away or so." - J. Alan Hyneck, WJR radio interview, 1977
"Everyone is an experienced observer as long as what he sees is familiar to him. As soon as he sees something unfamiliar it's a UFO.
"Pilots probably come as close to falling into this category as anyone since they do spend a lot of time looking around the sky. But even those who can rattle off the names and locations of stars, planets and constellations don't know about a few relatively rare astronomical phenomena.
"The bolide, or super meteor, is a good example. Few pilots have ever, or will ever, see a deluxe model bolide but when they do they'll never forget it. It's like someone shooting a flare in front of your face. There are a number of reports of bolides in the Blue Book files and each pilot who made each report called each bolide a UFO. The descriptions are almost identical to the classic descriptions of bolides found in astronomy books.
"...If most people realized that meteors can have a flat trajectory, they can go from horizon to horizon, they can travel in "formation" (groups), and they can be seen in daylight (as "large silver discs"), the work of UFO investigators would be lighter." - Edward Ruppelt, Do They Or Don't They?, 1960
Bolide over the Roman Republic, 73 BCE, as depicted in The Augsburg Book of Miracles, c.1552
Jackson Lake, Wyoming, 1972.
In 2023, this meteor caused a media stir when a 16-year-old boy claimed it was a flying saucer which crashed near his Las Vegas backyard where giant space monsters were seen lurking in the shadows. George Knapp of 8 News Now was quick to exploit the story and it soon gained national headlines.
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
■ COMETS
###