Time and Chance
Probably the most amazing physical phenomenon I have ever witnessed—and ever will—occurred on Aug. 10, 1972, when I was yet a teenager and was working as a horse wrangler on the Heart Six Guest Ranch in northwestern Wyoming, a few miles from the settlement of Moran.
I witnessed what has been called the nearest approach of an asteroid ever observed. It is now known as “the Great Daylight Fireball of 1972,” and the details of its flight across the sky are well documented.
On that warm summer day I was walking with another cowboy from the bunkhouse toward the employee’s dining room at the main ranchhouse. The path we were taking—south and slightly westward—caused us to be facing the object as it came into view. Just to give some perspective—our line of view was across Jackson Hole, with the Grand Tetons lying off to the west (our right).
One report estimated the object’s “entry mass” at 4,000 metric tons, and its diameter at about 20 meters.
Most remarkable of all, it was captured on film. You can see it for yourself. Just click here.
The short clip you’ll see was from a different angle than our actual viewing, and not as close as ours. The film shows the object mostly moving away. For us, it was mostly approaching, though at an angle to us. Nor does that film give much sense of the thing as a solid object. But we could see the face of the rock.
It did not look like something real. It looked instead like a bad display of special effects, like something out of an old Flash Gordon movie. Flames were erupting across the face of the rock, stripping away, re-erupting.
As the years go by, I learn more about it. On the day that I am writing these words, I learned on one website that Astronomer Carl Sagan included the film footage in his PBS-Television documentary series Cosmos.
We guessed at the time that it went down in the Teton Wilderness that was to our backs— we knew there was more than a hundred square miles of it. Then later we heard the thing was sighted over Montana. But the most amazing part is that the bolide never touched earth at all. Apparently it entered the atmosphere and exited back into space somewhere over Canada, continuing on its way through the void.
Until recent years I have disbelieved the reports that the object passed over Utah, not Wyoming, and that it was roughly 35 miles or more above the surface of the earth. It seemed to my companion and me that it was low – hardly higher than a jetliner would fly – and that it was within cloud level. As I said, we thought it would have struck the earth north of us, somewhere well short of Montana. And at the time we had to look at it for some seconds to be sure that it was not a plane on fire. So, obviously, we did not think it was an object passing over a neighboring state. Also, in one of the videos that can be viewed on YouTube, the meteor seems to be piercing a cloud that hangs just above Jackson Hole. It seems to shred a part of the cloud as it “exits” it.
But after revisiting that video and considering further, I’ve come to the conclusion that the object was indeed passing over Utah, not Wyoming. And that it was somewhere up in the stratospheric heights, not down at cloud level. The impression that it shreds that cloud is a false one… the “con trail” left by the meteor is what gives that impression. It did not pass through the cloud – it passed far, far behind the cloud. It’s just that the object seemed so crisp and clear that it seemed to be much closer to us.
Wikipedia has a page on the event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Daylight_1972_Fireball
And I found an interesting eyewitness account posted by writer Bill Vaughn on the web in 2008, cross-posted to two websites: darkacres.com and newwest.net. I quote from that piece, wherein Vaughn recalls that he was trout fishing on that Aug. 10, in Montana.
“The grasshopper landed with a little splash and quickly drifted downstream toward the exact spot where [the trout] was lurking.
Then the heavens exploded.
I grew up around Air Force bases and I’ve heard sonic booms many times. But nothing as deep and as resounding as this one. In an instant the fish ran back under the bridge. He was permanently spooked. I’d never see him again.
The great hunk of rock, glowing and hissing and trailing smoke, passed directly over my head, from south to north, and sailed out of sight behind Mount Jumbo.
Gaping at the place where it had gone I wondered: What just happened here? Am I hallucinating? Was this an illusion, some kicking-in of a random bit of mescaline or LSD that had lodged in a remote back alley of my brain?
But as I would learn, the thing I had seen was real.
Thousands of people from Utah to Canada had witnessed what would be called The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972. There were hundreds of pictures taken of the thing, and a pair of home movies, and it was tracked using infrared sensors aboard an Air Force satellite.
Scientists inferring from the temperature of the ball and its 900-mile trajectory from Utah to Alberta calculated that it passed over Montana at an altitude of less than 35 miles, was between ten and thirty feet in diameter, and weighed at least 4,000 tons, big enough to obliterate a Denver-sized city with a force equal to Little Boy and Fat Man, the uranium and plutonium bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because no trace of the beast has ever been found, and because no sonic booms were heard as it sailed across Canada, astrophysicists now believe its low angle of descent allowed it to skip off the earth’s atmosphere like a flat stone on a still lake. One scientist predicted that the fireball would return in 1997, but no one saw it.
In 1972 the earth dodged a bullet. My fish dodged a bullet. And I dodged two bullets. From then on just standing by a stream would always seem a little bit like winning a prize.”
Interestingly, for myself at least, I had that same feeling of good fortune from having witnessed the event. Vaughn’s article, by the way, can be read in its entirety here.
I wrote about the Daylight Fireball in an article of my own, one which I put into the Aug./Sept. 2008 issue of American Cowboy.
After telling my story, I received this letter from a reader:
Dear Mr. Mullins:
Is this a trip or what?! Lo and behold, in the Aug./Sept. issue I find “the Great Daylight Fireball of 1972”! We were still in Spokane, Wash., and I was… driving east of Sprague Ave., probably headed home in the early afternoon when almost dead ahead (I have goose bumps!) I see the ball of fire going north in the low horizon. I think, what was that?? And I wonder, who can I tell that I saw this ball of fire? So I tell my faithful bride and she accepts it without comment that I can recall. Over the years it has been mentioned to me on occasion with the underlying thought that I may have been a bit delusional! I never mentioned it to anyone else—never a word about the “daylight fireball” that was 36 years ago! It is great to see that after all these years the thing I saw was in fact a fact! Thank you! Wonders never cease!” This was from Joe Schreier, of East Wenatchee, Wash.
Yes, wonders never cease. And my view is that they never cease to confront all of us. My whole point in relating my own tale within the magazine was not to suggest that extraordinary things have happened to me. Rather, it was that such things happen to everyone, but we don’t keep a mental inventory of the strange sights that cross our paths, and so we tend not to notice how extraordinary even the most “ordinary” life is.
As a journalist, I have found that fascinating tales exist within each person. And while I have not kept a thorough record of my own encounters, I shared (in that article) several of my own remembrances just as one person’s record of the phenomenon-packed parade that is human life on this earth.
I shared them not as proof that I’ve encountered more than my share, but as proof that each one of us sees or senses a lot more of life than we give ourselves credit for seeing.
And so I quote here some of the other phenomena that I shared in that piece:
“There was the nighttime lightning strike that was no more than 100 feet directly in front of me as I drove down Northwest Highway in Oklahoma City. As I passed through the spot where it had struck, my windshield was touched by some of the burning ash that was fluttering down, glowing red.
The time canoeing on the Buffalo National River in Arkansas, when a fully mature oak tree unexpectedly cracked, popped, and just toppled over, spanning the river, its topmost leafy branches reaching the far side and capsizing one of our two canoes, though injuring no one.
In Colorado, a neighbor’s teensy Shetland stallion interloped and drove off a horse herd into the national forest.
A bat giving birth to a litter on the sidewalk. A road kill beaver. The tarantula my dad casually pulled out of his shirt collar not knowing what had dropped there from the tree limb above. The giant, oblong, jagged hailstones in Wichita, Kan., on June 19th, 1992, in one of “the worst hailstorms in recorded history.”
The bald eagle just outside Sheridan, Wyo., who stood in the highway median and stared at vehicles as they cruised by on both sides. The man on our road construction crew who was struck and killed by the tack truck. The Great American Cattle Drive of 1995 entering into Miles City, Mont., after starting six months earlier in Fort Worth, Texas.
The heavy feeling in my chest when I first breathed in air at 40 below. The numerous funnel clouds observed before age 8—and none since.
The surprise and pleasure that was the initial broadcast of Lonesome Dove. In sports—the Immaculate Reception; Big E over Big Lew; Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series home run. All unexpected; all caught live on television. The Oklahoma-Nebraska “Game of the Century” for which my buddy Kim Carter won two 45-yard-line seats just hours before kickoff.
The way that my Angus bull Barney would do a standing broad jump that cleared the cattle guard and took him from the pasture to the lusher grass in the yard, but would do it only if I were looking off in some other direction, not directly at him. (So maybe that doesn’t count as an observation?)
The time at the National Cowboy Museum when I heard sculptor Allan Houser play an Apache pipe tune that his mother played for him. I reflected at the time that his mother dated to Old West days, that his father was Geronimo’s translator, and that this haunting melody I was hearing was precisely some ancient tribal music, removed from the Old West by only one degree of separation. That was magical.
Life is like that—so full of unexpected marvels. Nor does life require any special kind of living for it to reach out and confront us.
I daresay that a comparable record of wonders, anomalies, and surprises has confronted anyone else who has lived well into adulthood, and that for many the happenings must have been much more impressive than these.
As Will Rogers said, ‘We can’t all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the sidewalk and applaud as they go by.’ But there’s a lot to be said for the richness of watching the parade.
It was Solomon who said it best: ‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’ ”
Thanks for taking the time to savor this slice from my own no-more-significant-than-anyone-else’s life. Here’s hoping you can smell the roses and etch the memories that daily drift into your own.
JFM