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The heavens have always been a screen on which people projected their deepest beliefs and hopes in the order of the cosmos. Weather might be unpredictable, but the regular cycle of the seasons stood behind every thunderbolt and hurricane. Meteors and comets flared above, but the ''fixed stars'' wheeled beyond them every night.
The heavens were, until recent times, seen as a unified system; the atmospheric events we call ''weather'' were not clearly separated from celestial events, and events that regularly occurred together were seen to have cause-and-effect relationships. The ''dog days'' of summer can be traced back to the Egyptian observation that the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, meant a period of hot, still weather. In all parts of the world the orientation of the crescent moon has been interpreted as signifying rain or drought. Not all such beliefs should be dismissed as superstition: the links between sunspots and climate and between the moons position and storms are being intensively studied today; both are thought to work through interactions in the thin upper atmosphere and through subtle ''air tides'' similar to the tides of the sea.
Large-scale weather could not be understood until good maps and communications were available to trace the movements of the air. Today the international network of weather stations and satellites gives reliable long-range forecasts of large weather patterns, but, in a seeming paradox, forecasters cannot tell us whether a given cloud will rain on us, on the next county, or not at all. The general laws and statistics that apply to large-scale weather are of little help on a small scale. The continent-sized loops of moving air that shape whole seasons are generally stable from year to year. The smaller loops that can tighten into hurricanes tend to follow repetitive tracks but can swerve with little warning. Tornadoes are dangerously capricious; and whirlwinds and dust devils are totally unpredictable.
So it is the local, unpredictable, sometimes bizarre and incomprehensible atmospheric events that are recorded here: waterspouts, abnormal fogs, inexplicable mirages, thunder and other noises that seem to come from nowhere, ball lightning, strange aurora effects, and more. Some of these events are now well documented and classified. Others are so rare that they must be considered inexplicable until chance brings together the right observers, instruments, and circumstances.
I - On June 18, 1178, a group of men saw the upper cusp of the new moon“split in two.”According to the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury:
From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile, the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety.... This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal.
Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn... took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes. . . .
Almost 800 years later, space scientist Jack Hartung put the medieval account together with modern calculations and realized that Gervase may well have recorded the lunar impact that created the 12-mile-wide crater Giordano Bruno.
Source: (Meteoritics, 11:187-94, September 30, 1976)
II - "A luminous cloud was seen, driven with some violence from E. to W., where it disappeared below the horizon” on the same day an earthquake occurred at Florence, Italy, on December 9, 1731. Like many accounts of earthquake lights, this one is tantalizing because it lacks detail that would identify it either as escaping gas or as some auroral display stimulated by magnetic effects of the earthquake.
Source: (Report of the Twenty-second Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 22:129,1852)
III - Before dawn on October 23, 1740, James Short, an expert optician and a Fellow of the Royal Society, was watching the sky:
Directing a reflecting telescope of 16.5 inches focus… .towards Venus, I perceived a small star pretty nigh her; upon which I took another telescope of the same focal distance, which magnified about fifty or sixty times.... Finding Venus very distinct, and consequently the air very clear, I put on a magnifying power of 240 times, and to my great surprise found this star put on the same phases with Venus [that is, it showed the same phase or pattern of sunlight and shadow, indicating that it was near Venus rather than a distant star].... Its diameter seemed about a third, or somewhat less, of the diameter of Venus; its light was not so bright or vivid, but exceeding sharp and well-defined.... I saw it for the space of an hour several times that morning; but the light of the sun increasing, I lost it altogether about a quarter of an hour after eight. I have looked for it every clear morning since, but never had the good fortune to see it again.
Short was a premier telescope maker and would have hardly been deceived by a “ghost Venus”—an internal reflection within the eyepiece—as some have suggested. Others who saw an apparent satellite of Venus included Gian Domenico Cassini, the discoverer of four of Saturn’s moons,in1672 and 1686; Andreas Meier in 1759; T. W. Webb in 1823; and M. Stuyvanert in1884. Today there is no trace of any satellite of Venus.
Source: (Nature, 14:193-94, June 29, 1876)
IV - Phantom soldiers appeared on and above a mountain in Scotland on June 23, 1744. Twenty-seven witnesses, some of whom gave sworn testimony to a local magistrate, watched the aerial maneuvers for up to two hours before darkness ended the display. Sir David Brewster, in his Letters on Natural Magic, suggested that it must have been a mirage of troops on the far side of the mountain and linked the hypothetical troops to the Scottish rebellion of the following year.
Source: (Notes and Queries,1:7:304, March 26,1853)
V - There were earthquakes at many points in England and throughout Europe in 1750. Several days before the March 2 tremor in London, “there were reddish bows in the air, which took the same direction as the shock.” At the moment of the April 2 quake in Warrington, England, the Reverend Sedden saw “an infinite number of rays of light, proceeding, from all parts of the sky, to one point near the zenith.'' An aurora accompanied the August 23 quake at Spalding, England, and Northampton felt the earth shudder on September 30. Dr. Doddridge reported a fireball that morning, a red sky the following night, and the night after that ''the finest aurora he ever saw.''
Source: ((Magazine of Natural History, 7:300-01, July 1834)
VI - An extraordinary fog astonished the colonists in Connecticut one morning in 1758. One of them wrote:
... about sun-rise, at this place was a fog of so strange and extraordinary appearance, that it filled us all with amazement. It came in great bodies, like thick clouds, down to the earth, and in its way, striking against the houses, would break and fall down the sides in great bodies, rolling over and over.
A book published in 1874, included this 1780 engraving entitled “Wonderful Dark Day,” which shows daytime farmworkers carrying lanterns.
Mariner 10 photographed Venus from 450,000 miles away on February 6, 1974. No recent observations of Venus have detected any satellites of the planet.
It resembled the thick steam rising from boiling wort [a plant used in making soap], and was attended with such he at that we could hardly breathe.
Chapter title page from “Our first century: being a popular descriptive portraiture of the one hundred great and memorable events of perpetual interest in the history of our country.” by R. M. Devins
When first I saw it I really thought my house had been on fire, and ran out to see if it was so; but many people thought the world was on fire, and the last day come. One of our neighbors was then at Sutton, 100 miles to the eastward, and reports it was much the same there.
Source: [Annual Register, 1: 90 - 91, 1758]
VII - A large number of luminous globes filled the air on the day of an earthquake at Boulogne, France, in 1779.
Source: (Felix Sestier, De La Foudre, Vol. 1, p.169)
VIII - A “bright ball of fire and light” accompanied a hurricane that struck England on September 2,1786. If it was ball lightning, it was unusually persistent, lasting a full 40 minutes.
Source: (Charles Fort, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, p.100)
IX - After Sir William Herschel's observations of“volcanoes” on the moon in 1783 and 1787, a German astronomer named Johann Hieronymus Schroter saw something even stranger. In 1788 he noted, to the east of the lunar Alps and in their shadow, “a bright point, as brilliant as a fifth-magnitude star, which disappeared after he had watched it for fifteen minutes.” After the moon had turned enough to bring the site into full sunlight, Schroter saw a round shadow, varying from gray to black, where it had been.
Johannes Hevelius's Selenographia (1647) contained this early detailed map of the lunar surface. Some of his names for lunar features, including the Alps, are still in use.
It has been proposed that Schroter saw first a mountain peak projecting above the shadow cast by the adjacent lunar Alps and then a shadow cast by the mountain itself, but as a selenographer esteemed enough to have another crater named for him in later years, would Schroter have failed to make that identification himself?And how could a steep mountain cast around shadow under light from any direction?
Source: (The Popular Science Monthly, 34: 158 - 61, December 1888)
X - A mirage of a walled town was seen at Youghal, Ireland, in October 1796, again the following March, and in June 1801 there appeared a mirage of an unknown city—mansions surrounded by shrubbery with a forest behind them.
Source: (Charles Fort, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, p.391)
XI - A weird marine noise was heard by naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and other members of his expedition to South America:
On the 20th of February, 1803, toward seven in the evening, the whole crew were astounded by an extraordinary noise, which resembled that of drums beating in the air. It was at first attributed to the breakers. Speedily it was heard in the vessel, and especially toward the poop. It was like a boiling, the noise of the air which escapes from fluid in a state of ebullition. They then began to fear that there was some leak in the vessel. It was heard unceasingly in all parts of the vessel, and finally, about nine o’clock, it ceased altogether.
Humboldt's French contemporary Baron Cuvier confidently ascribed the sound to fish of the group called the sciaenoids, but this was later studied and found to be unlikely.
Source: (Nature, 2: 46, May 19, 1870)
XII - Lewis and Clark, on their 1804-06 expedition to the far west of the United States, heard booming noises like cannon at a site near what is now Great Falls, Montana. A party outfitted by John Jacob Astor heard similar noises in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming a few years later.
Source: (Nature, 53: 487, March 26, 1896)
XIII - The light that filled the London sky for a few seconds one December night in 1814 was attributed to a meteor by the editors o (Annals of Philosophy. Their informant, John Wallis, described it:
... at about 20 minutes before 11, I was walking in an open part of the village of Peckham. . .. The night was cloudy and dark, the lower part of the atmosphere clear and calm.... Suddenly I was surrounded by a great light. I remember that at the instant I shrunk downward and stooped forward; as I was apprehensive of some danger behind me, I instantly ran a few paces. I turned about in a few seconds... . But I saw nothing to cause this light. It did not give me the idea of the force and intensity of lightning; its brilliancy was not so instantaneous and fierce; but it was a softer and paler kind of light, and lasted perhaps three seconds. I could discover no noise,though immediatelyI expected an explosion. The strength of the light was nearly equal to that of common day-light; all near objects were distinctly visible.... None of the persons I met that night thought it to be lightning, though none of them saw anything but the light.
Source: [Annals of Philosophy, 5: 235 - 36, March 1815]
XIV - At Comrie, Scotland, mysterious booming noises have been reported since 1597. In 1816 a resident observed “a large luminous body, bent like a crescent, which stretched itself over the heavens.”
Source: (The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 31: 117, April - October 1841)
XV - ''Strange, howling noises” in the air and large spots obscuring the sun were reported along with an earthquake at Palermo, Italy, in April 1817.
Source: (Report of the Twenty-fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 24: 111, 1854)
XVI - What seemed to be an unknown planet was seen crossing the sun's disk by the German astronomer Stark in Augsburg on October 9, 1819. He observed the same thing again on February 12, 1820. The second appearance was described as “a singular and well-defined circular spot with indications of an atmosphere, which was not visible in the evening of the same day”— as any planet with an orbit inside the earth's should have been.
Source: (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 20:98-101, January 13, 1860)
XVII - One of the most widespread “dark days” of history came to eastern Canada and New England on November 10, 1819. There had been a heavy, soaplike rain on November 8, which left behind a sooty residue. Then, in Montreal:
On the morning of Tuesday, the 10th, heavy clouds again covered the sky, and changed rapidly from a deep green to a pitchy black, and the sun, when occasionally seen through them, was sometimes of a dark brown or an unearthly yellow color, and again bright orange, and even blood red ... the day became almost as dark as night, the gloom increasing and diminishing most fitfully At noon lights had to be burned in the courthouse, the banks, and public offices of the city. Everybody was more or less alarmed....
About the middle of the afternoon a great body of clouds seemed to rush suddenly over the city, and the darkness became that of night. A pause and hush for a moment or two succeeded, and then one of the most glaring flashes of lightning ever beheld flamed over the country, accompanied by a clap of thunder which seemed to shake the city to its foundations ...
And then came a light shower of rain of the same soapy and sooty nature as that of two days before.... Another rush ofclouds came, and another vivid flash of lightning, which was seen to strike the spire of the old French parish church and to play curiously about the large iron cross at its summit before descending to the ground. A moment later came the climax of the day. Every bell in the city suddenly rang out the alarm of fire, and the affrighted citizens rushed out from their houses into the streets.... Directly the great iron cross, together with the ball at its foot, fell to the ground with a crash, and was shivered to pieces... the real night came on, and when next morning dawned everything was bright and clear, and the world was as natural as before.
The rains strange texture suggests a distant volcanic eruption or forest fire—the usual explanation for dark days. But the accompanying electrical storm hints at something more than just smoke. Meteorologists do not yet know much about the effects of such rarely occurring clouds of smoke and ash upon the weather.
Source: (Scientific American, 44: 329, May 21, 1881)
XVIII - At the village of Babino Polje in the center of a valley in Mljet Island in the Adriatic Sea remarkable sounds were heard. They started on March 20, 1822:
They resembled the reports of cannon, and were loud enough to produce a shaking in the doors and windows of the village. They were at first attributed to the guns of some ships of war, at a distance, in the open sea, and then to the exercise of Turkish artillery, on the Ottoman frontiers. These discharges were repeated four, ten, and even a hundred times in a day, at all hours and in all weathers, and continued to prevail until the month of February, 1824, from which time there was an intermission of seven months. In September of the same year, the detonations recommenced, and continued, but more feeble and rare, to the middle of March,1825, when they again ceased.
Source: [The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1:10:377, February 1826]
XIX - In 1829, on an expedition into what became New South Wales, Australia, Captain Sturt's expedition heard cannonlike noises on a clear, calm day in flat, wooded country along the Darling River. “To this day the singularity of such a sound, in such a situation, is a matter of mystery to me,” Sturt wrote.
Capt. Charles Sturt and his party were pictured in a small sailboat and a difficult situation in Romance of Australia. Sturt led three expeditions into the Australian interior.
Source: (Nature, 81:127, July 29, 1909)
XX - The mysterious cannonlike sounds at Comrie, Scotland, began a two-year “barrage” in October 1839. Almost 250 blasts, many accompanied by earth tremors, were heard between then and October 1841.
Source: (The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 32:106 - 09, October 1841 - April 1842)
XXI - At Forest Hill, Arkansas, the sky was clear on December 8, 1847. Then, in midafternoon, turbulent clouds formed suddenly, appearing “like a solid black fleece lighted from above by a red glare as of many torches.” A loud explosion shook houses and rang the bell of the church, and a barrel-sized flaming body crashed into the earth just outside the town,making a hole eight feet deep and more than two feet in diameter. The rock that was found at the bottom of the hole smelled of sulfur and was hot enough to boil away water thrown on it. Inside of 20 minutes the sky cleared and the sun shone again.
Fulgurites are formed when lightning strikes sand or rock and vitrifies it. Sand fulgurites characteristically have branched, tubular forms, as shown above.
Was the phenomenon at Forest Hill a meteorite impact? If so, there is no plausible explanation for the clouds before hand; a meteorite passes through the entire atmosphere within a few seconds and cannot affect the air over its impact zone while still scores or hundreds of miles away. Is it possible that lightning fused the soil into a solid mass at the bottom of the hole? Such a stone, known as fulgurite, is not uncommon, but barrel-sized chunks are unheard of.
Source: (The American Journal of Science and Arts, 2:5: 293 - 94, May 1848)
XXII - A phantom battle was reported at the village of Buderich in Westphalia, on January 22, 1854:
Shortly before sunset, an army, of boundless extent, and consisting of infantry, cavalry, and an enormous number of waggons ,was observed to proceed across
the country in marching order. So distinctly seen were all these appearances, that even the flashing of the firelocks,and the colour of the cavalry uniform, which was white, could be distinguished. This whole array advanced in the direction of the wood of Schafhauser, and as the infantry entered the thicket, and the cavalry drew near, they were hid all at once, with the trees, in a thick smoke. Two houses, also, in flames, were seen with the same distinctness. At sunset the whole phenomenon vanished. As respects the fact, government has taken the evidence of fifty eye-witnesses, who have deposed to a universal agreemen trespecting this most remarkable appearance.
Local citizens considered it a supernatural “replay” of a battle that had taken place nearby some years earlier. There were no battles anywhere in Germany inJanuary 1854, so the suggestion that it was a mirage of a faraway scene is scarcely more credible.
Source: (Notes and Queries, 1:9: 267, March1854)
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