If an astronomer supplied an explanation for an anomalous astronomical phenomenon, we can nearly always rely on Charles Fort to come along and explain how he was probably wrong, and it must have been something very much more mysterious. And sometimes he had every reason to raise doubts, as we will see with the case of the Great Meteor Procession and Professor Clarence Augustus Chant.
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Chant (1865-1956) was one of Canada's leading astronomers and a lecturer at the University of Toronto. On the morning of Monday, February 10th, 1913 the newspaper headlines probably made him regret that he had had a quiet night in the previous evening and had not been out and about to see the spectacular astronomical phenomenon in the skies over the city. In the typically expansive newspaper headline style of the time, the Toronto World reported “Fifteen Big, Fiery Meteors Shot Over City Last Night One Large As Halley's Comet”
One scarcely needs a summary of the story after that headline, and Chant was soon collecting as many detailed descriptions of the incident as he could, appealing for witness through local and regional papers. He summarised the accounts he received in a paper published in the May-June 1913 issue of the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
Summarising his summary, what was reported was a large, red meteor appearing from the north-western sky at about 2000hrs, Some observers saw it as a single body, others describing two, or three individual parts, each followed by a long trail. The effect was clearly spectacular, being described as golden-yellow or fiery red, like the glare from a furnace, the illumination of a searchlight or the trail of a skyrocket. In his account Chant records that the “outstanding feature of the phenomenon was the slow, majestic motion of the bodies … and the perfect formation which they retained.” The body or bodies eventually faded away as they disappeared into the eastern sky.
Despite the usual differences in descriptions from witnesses – some heard a rumbling sound as the objects disappeared, the number of separate objects reported varied from fifteen to hundreds, some even felt the ground shake – there was sufficient evidence to give a good idea of what witnesses had seen, and it was clear that this was not a conventional meteor, the observations lasting minutes rather than just a few seconds.
Chant was eager to see just how far this 'procession' had travelled and began to approach other astronomers and observatories along its predicted path across Canada and the North Eastern states of the USA. Eventually reports from locations further along the projected 'flight path' began to arrive, some from as far away as Bermuda, and a number of ships in the North Atlantic. However such a trajectory meant that the objects would need to be travelling at a considerable height. Chant calculated it would have to be over 200 miles high in order not to have been rapidly consumed by the friction of the Earth's atmosphere. It would also mean having to question those reports of the procession which reported noises associated with its passing.
IMPRESSION OF THE 1913 METEOR PROCESSION FROM
THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF CANADA
He concluded that it was a 'grazing meteor' that passed through the Earth's atmosphere at a considerable height, that it was large enough not to be consumed by it, and eventually freed itself from the Earth's gravity as its speed never dropped below escape velocity.
But it was not long after Chant's paper was published that doubts appeared about his explanation, because, quite literally, there were holes in it. Most specifically the large hole across New York State and the North Atlantic until the first ship observation and the sightings over Bermuda. Although observation conditions along this route were generally clear, there seemed to have been very few reports from this area after a sighting in Buffalo. Charles Fort mentioned the 'Procession' briefly as an anomalous phenomenon in The Book of the Damned, without comment, but in his second book, New Lands, which more specifically addresses astronomical anomalies he picked up on the 'missing' observations and questioned Chant's conclusion.
This matter of the missing reports was also examined by the astronomer Charles Wylie (1886-1976) who was an authority on meteors. His calculations suggested to him that there were two separate phenomena, firstly a low-level fragmenting fireball over Toronto, which produced the spectacular visual phenomena, and the noises heard there, but the later sightings over Bermuda and from ships at sea were probably fragments from a meteor shower and not part of a single procession.
Of course, Wylie's counter explanation was also challenged, most notably by Alexander Mebane (1923-2002). Mebane was not an astronomer, he graduated in organic chemistry, but more interestingly from a Magonian perspective he had a keen interest in the UFO phenomenon. He was a founder member, along with Leonard Stringfield, of Civilian Saucer Intelligence (CSI), and was probably introduced to the UFO world by Lincoln La Paz of Arizona 'Green Fireball' fame. He contributed a number of pieces to science fiction magazine in collaboration with Leonard Stringfield.
Mebane re-opened the case by contacting newspapers and meteorological stations along the supposed procession route to try to full in the gaps in observations. Although he was by now asking for reports from forty years previously, he did unearth a number of additional sightings from locations in New York and New Jersey, and from ships as far off as the coast of Brazil.
Although Smith finally presents a very plausible defence of Chant's original 'grazing meteor' theory, he also makes it clear that no explanation can be the last word, quoting Mebane saying that the most remarkable conclusion from his research was “the revelation of the extreme spottiness with which celestial phenomena are observed.”
A great deal of the book is an outline of the nature of meteoric phenomena and the varying theories advanced to explain the reported sightings and their distribution. Although some quite technical astronomical concepts are discussed they are presented in a way that is understandable to the non-expert reader, helped by clear illustrations and diagrams.
As well as the purely astronomical dates and theories, the author looks at the social and cultural aspects of the phenomena, from Walt Whitman's poem Year of Meteors, and a significant part of the book takes an informed overview of the Fortean and ufological treatment of the 1913 events and subsequent phenomena. It is a perfect example of how to combine the contrasting, but often complimentary, sceptical approaches of the scientist and the Fortean. Strongly recommended.
- John Rimmer
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