The Spaced-Out Classroom

Annular Eclipse

Posted on December 3, 2023 by davidvblack

During the first few days of my new job at Clark Planetarium, my supervisor, who would soon be leaving for another position, handed off a rather large project to me as something to complete over the summer during our slower season. The planetarium had received grant money from the Rocky Mountain Space Grant Consortium to purchase and distribute solar eclipse glasses to all 6^th grade students in Utah. This was now my project.

He had already purchased the glasses which he showed to me sitting in large boxes at our storage and shop area in the Gateway Center near the planetarium. He had also purchased mailing boxes and tubes for them to be shipped in, and had printed out all of the labels. According to his calculations, we would need to send out about 113,000 pairs of glasses along with instructions for how to safely use them and 3-hole PUNCH pinhole projectors, which were oval pieces of cardstock printed on both sides with three holes punched in them, one a circle, one a square, and one a triangle. These were to demonstrate how pinhole projection works – that close to the projection surface, the light takes on the shapes of the holes, but further away it takes on the shape of the light source.

Stacks of boxes filled with solar eclipse glasses. We calculated how many would be needed for each school based on USBE estimates, then packaged them by school and separated them by district for delivery.

All of this was in preparation for a rare annular (ring-shaped) solar eclipse that would cross southern Utah on the morning of Saturday, October 14^th. Since all of Utah would be within the 90% band of the path of annularity, we wanted all 6^th graders to have a safe viewing experience since their curriculum includes lunar and solar eclipses (Utah SEEd Standard 6.1.1). We also wanted all students in rural districts to have the glasses, since the eclipse would be crossing directly over them.

Annular eclipses occur during a new moon when the moon happens to be at apogee, or the furthest distance it can be on its elliptical orbit around the Earth. At that point, if a solar eclipse occurs, the moon will not be large enough as seen from Earth to completely block the sun’s light – instead, a ring of fire will appear around the edges of the moon’s shadow. I had never seen an annular eclipse before, and never a total solar eclipse. This was indeed a rare opportunity.

As July came I started working on the project, going through the list of schools to verify they were correct and that we knew the right number of students. One complication is that in Utah, 6^th grade is sometimes found in elementary schools and sometimes in middle schools or intermediate schools depending on district (and sometimes in both). Some of the districts, such as Nebo District in Utah Valley, had recently moved their 6^th grade up to their middle schools and my previous supervisor’s list of schools was therefore out of date. He also didn’t have the latest estimates of students for each school, which we were finally able to find from the Utah State Board of Education for fall 2023. Many of the numbers had shifted and new schools had opened. The new data was detailed enough to break down by grade level and by school. However, it took my new supervisor, Jason, some time to find the complete spreadsheet for the state so I wasted a week or two going to the data for each individual school. It was time consuming and had obsolete data from two years before. I had to make several revisions.

The solar eclipse glasses came in packs of 50, so I had to round up to the next highest 50 and many of the elementary schools have just over 100 6^th graders – like 110 or 120, because they often have three 6^th grade classes. This meant rounding up to 150 to also ensure all students would have them if a class had more students than the state estimates, plus glasses for teachers. Because of this constant rounding up, I wound up calculating that we needed to send 122,000 pairs of glasses give or take 100 or so. Then came the packaging into boxes. We could fit up to 200 (four packages) of glasses in a box or tube along with a few PUNCH pinhole cards, safety instructions, and letters that I will describe in a moment. It was a tight fit. Depending on the school we would have several different amounts in boxes and tubes that were then taped together into packages and a label applied. We then separated them out by school districts into boxes. For Utah’s rural schools in the central, southwest, southeast, and northeast corners of the state we combined the districts in those areas into piles to send to the regional service centers. It was a huge undertaking and took up all of the free space in our storage area.

*With Clark Planetarium’s cargo van on my way to deliver eclipse glasses to Richfield.*

Along with the glasses, instructions, and PUNCH cards I wrote up a letter describing what the project was all about and encouraging teachers to gather photos and data of the eclipse to send to us (no one did). I included a sheet on upcoming events at the planetarium, including the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission in late September. I also created an advertisement and a two-page flyer on my 6^th grade science communication competition. Putting all of this together took hours of help from our part-time staff – notably Paul, Brooke, Jared, and Ethan. It was a lot of standing around a plywood table in our shop area and putting it all together in an assembly line. By the beginning of September we had them all packaged and labeled for the regular public school districts.

Then came the distribution. Rather than mail them, we felt it would be cheaper and more effective to deliver the packages to each of the larger Wasatch Front districts and to the four regional service centers. I had passed off my driving training, so I drove our large cargo van out to many of the district offices and asked the science specialists to send them onward to each school. I drove large boxes to Heber City for the northeast regional center, to Price for the southeast center, and to Richfield for the central regional center. Paul delivered boxes to Cedar City and to most of the districts in Salt Lake Valley (I delivered to Jordan District) and Jared delivered to Tooele district. I then delivered to all of the northern districts including Davis, Weber, Ogden, Box Elder, Logan, and Cache. It kept me on the road for much of early September and was a good way to get to know the district and regional specialists and spread some good will regarding the planetarium. I also found some nice dives to get lunch at, such as the Peach City Drive In in Brigham City.

*Models of the Sun-Earth-Moon system made from paper plates, one of the activities me did at the Delta Park event during the annular eclipse.*

But this was not all. As September proceeded, we became swamped with the UtSTA conference, the STEM Fest, Fan X (a local fan experience similar to San Diego ComicCon), and the OSIRIS-REx mission events (all of which I will write about in my next post). During the last week in September we needed to package up the eclipse glasses for all of the Charter Schools in Utah that have 6^th grade classes, which were over 105 schools. We had made up too many boxes of 200 glasses and only a few charter schools needed this many, so it meant repackaging many of the boxes. Given that charter schools are scattered all over the state and don’t have a central distribution point, we needed to mail these out. I brought them from our shop area over to our main offices (which were built from part of the parking garage – for some odd reason, when the planetarium was designed in the early 2000s, they never considered putting in offices) so that we could use the Salt Lake County mailing system. It took two days for the mail person to pick them all up as they filled up four large boxes and his van didn’t have enough room for all of them at once. We were into the first week in October by the time they all made it out, and I was worried they would not get to schools in time.

These are pinhole projections during the annular eclipse. Even though the three holes were different shapes, the shape of the light source (a crescent sun) is projected. You can see that the orientation of the pinhole projector doesn’t matter, it is the orientation of the sun. But the image is reversed – this was before annularity, so the moon was covering the top portion of the sun.

One 4^th grade teacher at Water Canyon School in far southern Utah asked for eclipse glasses once she saw that the 6^th grade teacher had received some, so I sent hers with the county mail system. She received them on Wednesday, Oct. 11 just ten minutes before the final bell. Her students were going out on fall break the next day, so she got them just in time. Two packages were returned to us because of faulty addresses on the labels and another school had been left off the list, so I had to hand deliver their packages on Thursday and Friday just before the eclipse. One school was C. S. Lewis Academy in Santaquin and the other was the Utah Schools for the Blind and Deaf which had built a brand new school west of Springville. I also delivered some braille eclipse guides to them. But they made it! 122,000 pairs of glasses all distributed in time. It was a monumental task. Later, upon visiting an elementary school in Herriman, I discovered that they never received their glasses. Upon checking, I found they were not on my previous supervisor’s list because their school was brand new. I will send them glasses in time for the April 8, 2024 partial eclipse. That appears to be the only school we’ve missed so far out of 650 schools.

Getting the glasses out was important but much more preparation was needed. Many of the Salt Lake County libraries were planning on eclipse events similar to what they had done for the 2017 eclipse that crossed Idaho and was about 90% total here. I helped Jason and Thomas, along with Robert Bigelow who had retired a year ago, and people from our Community Programs team to present seven training workshops at the planetarium and at several different libraries around the county. I explained the 3-hole PUNCH Pinhole Projectors and natural pinhole projection and how to safely view and photograph the eclipse indirectly.

*Crescent suns projected by hole between the leaves at Delta City Park during the annular eclipse.*

Doing these workshops gave me the idea to contact the librarian at the Delta City Library. The eclipse would be traveling right over the northern portion of Sevier Lake just south of Deseret, then over Kanosh, Elsinore, Loa, Bicknell, Torrey, and Four Corners. We had been preparing for this with our PUNCH outreach team since it would also be going right over Chaco Canyon and Albuquerque, where major events were planned by our team. So we worked up a plan for an event at Delta City Park. I would bring down some PUNCH activities and other items we had been presenting, such as making a model of the Earth-Sun-Moon system that showed the tilt of the moon’s orbit using only a paper plate, scissors, and a marker. The day before the eclipse I put everything together, got copies made, and brought it all home with me.

Early in the morning on Saturday, Oct. 14 I left home at 6:45 hoping to make it to Delta by 8:30 with our event starting at 9:00. The eclipse was to begin about 9:05 and reach a ring of fire about 10:32 for about 3 minutes and 20 seconds, according to the calculations. The freeway digital signs had warned for the previous week that traffic was expected to be backed up down I-15 and they were right. It took me 30 minutes just to get from Payson to Santaquin because the freeway closes down from three to two lanes. Once I got off at Santaquin on Highway 6, traffic was much lighter until I got to Elberta, where I hit a solid stream of traffic coming down west of Utah Lake. It was almost bumper to bumper the rest of the way. I knew I was going to be late, so I pushed the speed limit and passed car after car going 90 mph. It’s a good thing I know the road so well that I know all of the places to pass. There was far more traffic than on dear hunt weekend (which would be the next week), or the night before Thanksgiving, or Memorial Day which are the only other times I’ve seen heavy traffic on Highway 6.

*The eclipse reaches full annularity and projects circles of light upon the ground from every small hole between the leaves.*

Cars were splitting off to go to the Little Sahara Sand Dunes. Some pulled off the road everywhere there was a parking area, such as at the Brush Wellman turnoff and by the Delta Airport. I found out later that Robert Bigelow was out at the Delta Cemetery. I pulled in to Delta Park at 9:15 just as the eclipse was starting and got set up. The park was full of people with their chairs set up wherever the sun shined through the trees that line the park. I was in the northeast pavilion where we’ve done high school class reunions before.

I called as many parents and kids over as I could and explained the eclipse, how to use the PUNCH pinhole projectors (and what to expect), and to hand out bling (extra OSIRIS-REx posters, etc.). About 12 kids stayed and did the Sun-Earth-Moon paper plate model and about five did the sundial activity and about three did the sunscreen painting activity. But it was a chilly morning and most faded back to where their parents were scattered around the park as the eclipse progressed.

And it was progressing. A dark slice appeared in the upper right edge of the sun (I wore my own eclipse glasses, of course) as the sun shined through the power lines on the other side of the road. The PUNCH pinhole projectors were working well, and I took photos of people holding them and seeing crescent suns appearing on the sidewalks instead of the circle, square, and triangle shapes. But the most interesting things were the natural pinhole projections coming through the leaves of the many trees lining the park. Gradually the sun became a thinner and thinner crescent until 10:32 am, when right on schedule a complete and perfect ring of fire appeared around the moon. I took as many photos as I could but my cell phone didn’t have the capability to focus through the eclipse glasses. Then, about four minutes later, the ring became a crescent again.

I had some kids participate in the Birthdays on a Chaco Canyon Horizon activity but they didn’t want to stay to do the Dancing Up a Solar Storm activity. As soon as the ring of fire passed, most people began packing up. I talked with some people who had good cameras and telescopes with solar filters who had taken some excellent photos during the eclipse and asked them to send me copies, but I never received them. The park was pretty much empty by 11:00 so I began to pack up and left around 11:30 although the eclipse was still going on until about noon.

*Saturday in the park. People had set up chairs in every sunny spot in Delta City Park, watching the eclipse as it progressed.*

I knew the traffic would be horrible, so I stopped at Ashton Farms for lunch but had to wait almost 45 minutes. It was packed, and couldn’t find a table to sit at so I got out a camping chair and set up. I talked with an interesting guy named Robert who had lived in Taiwan for several years. I got a cheeseburger, an oreo shake, and some English chips. The traffic from Delta to Nephi wasn’t bad, but once I hit the freeway it was badly backed up and moving only at about 20 mph, so I got off at Santaquin and took the old highway through Payson, Salem, and Spanish Fork, then over through Mapleton, Springville, and up past the Provo Temple and back home, arriving about 3:00 pm. It was a tiring day, but certainly brought a lot of visitors to Delta. If I hadn’t set up an event, I would have watched the eclipse from Deseret. That would have been surreal!

The planetarium had a large event at the Gateway Center with about 800 people attending. The event in Richfield was quite crowded, as I understand it. Fillmore saw some people but not that many. I can only imagine how crowded Capitol Reef National Park must have been, being perfectly on the path. There were good crowds in Mesa Verde National Park (Jason was there). It was a great deal of work to get all of the glasses out to schools, but we managed it. Through my efforts, and with a great deal of help, we were able to impact about 300,000 people (given 6^th grade students have family). I feel very satisfied with my efforts and the influence they had.

*Rings of fire projected through the trees during the annular solar eclipse on Oct. 14, 2023.*

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 6th grade SEEd standards, annular solar eclipse, april-8-2024, clark planetarium, crescent sun, eclipse, moon, pinhole projector, sun, utah space science standards | Leave a comment

Starting Work at Clark Planetarium

Posted on October 20, 2023 by davidvblack

*Exterior of Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City, located in the Gateway development near the Delta Center.*

It is far too long since I have posted on this blog. I have been neglecting things; what with working toward my dissertation research and life in general, I have put aside these blog posts. It is finally time to resume posting and begin reporting on my new job. Starting June 6^th, 2023 I am an Education Program Specialist at Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City. My responsibilities are diverse and include traveling out to schools throughout Utah during the school year to present workshops to teachers and present astronomy activities in sixth grade classrooms. I also have other duties as assigned.

*A purple shirt and a purple van. I am a new Education Program Specialist at Clark Planetarium. I am using the van to deliver solar eclipse glasses to school districts.*

In Utah elementary schools, space science content and standards are part of the 4^th and 6^th grade curricula. 4^th grade students study observable patterns in the sky, including evidence that the Earth rotates (such as the cycle sof day and night, change in the length of shadows, and seasonal changes in nighttime constellations), and the apparent brightness of our sun compared to other stars because of its relative distance. We do train teachers in kinesthetic activities for 4^th grade teachers and students that show how the Earth’s day and night relate to the sun and stars, but our primary focus and funding is for sixth grade students and teachers.

Sixth grade has three space science objectives in the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) standards, which are borrowed from the Next Generation Science Standards and include Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), the core content of each grade level; Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs), such as using models, computational thinking, data analysis, arguing from evidence, and science communication; and Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs), common ideas that cut across all scientific disciplines such as patterns, cycles, scale, proportion, time, and space. For Utah, the sixth grade standards include: 6.1.1: To develop models to explain the patterns of the lunar phases, solar and lunar eclipses, and the seasons; 6.1.2: To develop models to explain how gravity and inertia affect the orbital motions of the planets and other solar system objects; and 6.1.3: To use computational thinking and data analysis to explain the scale, proportions, and properties of the planets and other objects.

*The mission and vision of Clark Planetarium.*

I join two other specialists who have their own niches. We all share going out to schools to make presentations and teach workshops, and we hit every public school in Utah every other year (except charter schools, who are on a three-year rotation). This works out to about 230 school visits per year between the three of us and some part time education staff. We do not go to private schools, and we hit every school district every year, so that some small rural schools see us more often. We also have other responsibilities. Thomas Quayle is over scheduling our part-time presenters and volunteers who do the planetarium dome shows and our Science on a Sphere presentations, help with summer camps, and do much of the daily teaching in the planetarium. Jason Trump is our new education supervisor and is the Assistant Director of Education and Outreach for the PUNCH mission, representing the planetarium in our partnership with Fiske Planetarium in Boulder, CO and several other groups. I help with this including planning for the upcoming annular solar eclipse on Oct. 14. He also is over scheduling and coordinating our school visits and a number of other tasks.

The Annular Eclipse:

*Boxes and boxes of solar eclipse glasses ready to distribute to Utah schools. We boxed and sent out 122,000 pairs of glasses to all sixth grade students (plus all rural students) in Utah.*

As for me, I was assigned several responsibilities off the bat by my supervisor, Nick Hoffman, who left the planetarium for another opportunity just three weeks after I arrived. We have purchased enough eclipse glasses to send to all 6^th grade students and teachers in the state, which is about 122,000 pairs, and I have calculated how many glasses to box up and distribute to all the schools as well as packaging the glasses with instructions. I had a great deal of help from the part-time staff, and we did most of the packaging iin August and early September. Since the start of September we have been distributing the glasses to all of the school districts. For rural schools, we drove the glasses out to the regional service centers in Richfield, Price, Cedar City, and Heber City and for the larger Wasatch Front districts we drove them to the district offices. This has been a good task for me in order to learn the names of all of the schools out there and to meet the science specialists, but I have done quite a bit of traveling. In Utah, 6^th grade is sometimes in elementary schools and sometimes in middle schools depending on the district (and in one district they even have intermediate schools). I have had to go through the Utah State Board of Education site and fall enrollment projections to look up the numbers in each school. Nick had already created most of the labels we needed, but there were changes over the summer such as one district moving all of its sixth graders from elementary to middle schools. As of last week (the final week of September) we mailed out the last of the boxes to all of Utah’s charter schools that have sixth grade (over 100). I am beginning to hear back that the glasses have been received, and in time for the Oct. 14 eclipse. It has been a monumental task, but it is done. Hooray!

Dissertation Research Project:

Knowing that I still have a huge need to complete my dissertation research, I was left with a quandary. I have been teaching at a private school in Provo this last year, helping to train the science teachers there how to implement project-based learning and designing the new lab station and science curricula. It was a good experience. I worked half-time so that I could have more time for writing up the first three chapters of my dissertation, which must be approved and defended before my committee before I can start the actual research data collection. My project was complex (go figure, knowing me) and required creating a series of flipped training videos on how to use browser-based media design software. I got about 16 videos completed and posted on my YouTube channel and tried to implement them with the students I taught last year, only to find that Generation Z (the Zoomers) learn quite differently than I am used to teaching. Instead of watching a 30-minute training video, stopping it to practice software or a task, they are used to smaller bites of training such as one would find on Tik Tok – two minute mini-lessons. So I now need to chop up my videos into smaller, more exciting bits, post them to Tik Tok, and create a channel for Digital Media Mini-Lessons (hmm – I should trademark that . . .). This is going to take even more time.

*A 3D model of 3D choice: one of the concepts that grew out of my work at Ivy Hall Academy.* *In student-created digital media projects, they should be given choice in three dimensions: topic, medium, and approach.*

Meanwhile, I created a new website to include project ideas, links to the videos, and other resources. It hasn’t exactly gone viral yet, but it allows me to link teachers to a one-stop-shopping site for using digital media in science classrooms. Here is the link: https://science-creativity.com. Let me know what you think.

I did have all the science students at that school do several projects during the year, including a nice project on DNA transcription, replication, and translation where the students could choose which type of animation to create. I developed a 3D model of student choice, and working with my dissertation advisor, made choice boards and student choice a central feature of my research. I also instituted the STEAM Showcase program that I have done at other schools, where teams of students choose a science topic from the year and work up a 15-minute mini lesson that includes a script/outline, presentation of information, demonstration or activity, and a handout for further information. They presented their chosen projects to each other for feedback, then made revisions and presented them again to our elementary classes downstairs, then revised again and added the handout and presented for a final time to their parents and our middle school classes at an afternoon Showcase event. We took over five classrooms for five sessions, with 25 presentations altogether, documented everything, and got some good data.

*A piece of moon rock brought back by Apollo 15, my favorite mission to the moon.*

We also had a weekly Stanford Innovation Lab class modeled after the d.school at Stanford University, where students use human-centered design principles to build innovative projects that solve problems in communities. As teachers we went out and found potential client businesses and institutions, then divided the students into ten teams to work through the design process. They were having a hard time making headway, so I used the idea of choice boards to create an open checklist that required teams to complete certain required tasks at each step of the design process but then also complete a set number of other tasks, with more listed than they needed to do so that they had a measure of bounded choice. They were asked to complete five out of seven, or nine out of twelve tasks, for example. As they completed the required number, I would check off that step and they were then allowed to go on to the next step, with tight deadlines as to when each step should be completed. All teams started making progress and those that followed the steps and deadlines the closest had the best results by far and won $100 each fot the best project as judged by a panel of judges at our presentation day in May.

Now all of this would have made an excellent dissertation research project but I was so slow at getting my initial three chapters done that the proposal defense has not yet happened. So, without approval, I cannot count the data we gathered. It will at least become two or three excellent articles for peer reviewed journals, and perhaps I will be able to quote myself in my final dissertation. It wasn’t wasted effort, but I am still hanging around as ABD.

*Advertisement for my dissertation research project: a Science Communication contest for 6th grade students.*

Part-time work isn’t enough to live on for very long, so I had to find a full-time position. I applied at several universities including for a 3D animation professorship at Utah Valley University (didn’t even get an interview) and two positions at Brigham Young University (nothing there either). But when I saw that an Education Specialist position was open at Clark Planetarium, I jumped on it. I had had my eyes open for this opportunity for five years, ever since I interviewed for a similar position but was beat out by someone who had more experience in informal education. This time I was accepted.

So I was left with a difficult situation: how to fulfill the mission of the planetarium and the responsibilities of my new full-time position while also creating a means to gather data on student-created digital media projects in science classrooms, the central question of my dissertation. Then a brainstorm hit me: what if I proposed a contest for Utah students for science communication, one of the SEPs of the Utah SEEd standards? Students would fulfill specific content standards while creating their own science media to effectively communicate the concepts. We would have participating teachers go through training workshops, then they would have their students compete in eight categories such as best article, best illustration, best podcast, best video, and so on. It could work! So I wrote up the proposal and presented it first to my supervisor (before he left) and then to the Education Programs Director and overall Planetarium Director. They were all enthusiastic about the idea, especially since it will involve continuing support and training for teachers during the contest. We often go out and present one-and-done workshops without really following up on how well teachers are implementing our programs or providing the needed support; this will provide a new model for our training and collect a great deal of data that can be used to improve the program in subsequent years. For this year, it will be a pilot program and can be placed under our Utah iSEE (Informal Science Education Enhancement) funding as long as it is directed at sixth grade students.

Things are progressing well. My dissertation committee chairperson has given approval, the State Science specialist for elementary schools has approved, and I have now created a descriptive flyer and advertisement for the program. We had this posted in the monthly science newsletter and sent out the flyers with the eclipse glasses. We held a kick-off event for the contest at the Utah Science Teaching Association’s annual conference on Sept. 15 and signed teachers up, and I have started the training workshops (more on this in a later post). Everything is falling into place for what will be a great research project.

*We have some excellent artists and designers at the planetarium. This appeared on our chalkboard one day.*

I hope to recruit some teachers to participate in the contest who will go through the workshop training, some who participate who are not trained, and some to merely act as an untrained and non-participating control group. I hope to get at least ten teachers in each group. Data I collect will include teacher surveys, workshop feedback forms, student project descriptions, peer evaluation forms, and the student projects themselves as artifacts. This will provide both quantitative and qualitative data for a mixed-methods approach.

Now I just have to get that gul durned proposal completed. I’ve hit a snag in that I came down with a 1.4 cm kidney stone during the summer and it certainly put a crimp in my style (and a hitch in my giddy-up). I also had a series of ear infections that were painful, but I am back in business and back on track for my research project to begin. Wish me luck!

School Visits:

*On our way to present to schools in Cache Valley, Utah we pass through Sardine Canyon and saw gorgeous fall colors.*

Now that the school year is progressing we are beginning to visit schools. We have mostly been providing training and presentations on the scale and proportions of the solar system (standard 6.1.3).and gravity and inertia (standard 6.1.2). I have been to nine schools now, including four schools in Cache Valley, three of which were in one week alone (on three different days – quite a bit of driving and long hours involved). I’ve racked up enough comp time for these long days that I was able to take two days off, one to celebrate my wife’s birthday and one for a doctor’s appointment and to work on my dissertation proposal. We try to hit all parts of the standards, including the core ideas, the science and engineering practices (using models and computational thinking) and the crosscutting concepts of patterns, cycles, scale, and proportion. The lessons are typically one hour and we do anywhere from two to six lessons per school. One school in Logan required two of us doing six presentations simultaneously, teaching over 300 students in one day. So far I have presented to about 1044 students and around 75 teachers with all we are doing.

On top of this, we provided training sessions for local libraries and teacher groups to help them prepare events for the annular eclipse on Oct. 14, which crossed southern Utah. We’ve done other training workshops for districts on how to use the various kits that were sent out to them, including a session at Davis School District on how to use the Reasons for the Seasons and Lunar Phases kits. We had 14 teachers in a 2.5 hour workshop, and I also visited an elementary school in Cedar Hills that day, so it was a long day and about 14 hours worked. I have also presented a session at the UtSTA conference (more on this in a later post), manned a booth at STEM Fest at the Mountain America Expo Center, and helped out with events surrounding the return of the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission to asteroid Bennu, which landed out in Utah’s west desert. I will talk about this in a later post, too. I also need to report on the road trip I took with my family this summer to the Black Hills and Devil’s Tower. It has been an eventful four months.

*Paul, one of education team members, explains Science on a Sphere to some summer campers. Here’s looking at you, Frodo!*

In my next post I will explain more about the education programs and organization of Clark Planetarium and how informal education institutions can contribute so much to classroom education. I’ll take you through typical a day here. Then a post on UtSTA, STEM Fest, and OSIRIS-REx (or maybe two), and more. By then, I will also need to report on how the contest is going and how the data collection for my dissertation research is progressing. I hope this will settle down a bit once the eclipse is done – we’ve had an unusually busy season. I expect things will remain intense for me through next May and the projected (longed for) completion of my doctorate. We are planning a family cruise at the end of next June, and that will be greatly needed as a celebration of earning my doctorate.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged annular solar eclipse, astronomy, astrovan, clark planetarium, informal science education, science communication, space science, student-created digital media projects, three-dimensional choice, utah seed standards | Leave a comment

Dissertation Progress Report and an Invitation to Participate

Posted on February 19, 2023 by davidvblack

Today’s post is to provide you with a progress report on how my doctoral dissertation research is going.

Please read through this to the end, as I have a request to make of you that could be very beneficial for your students. I would like your help in implementing my dissertation research in your STEM classes, including trying out my new website: https://science-creativity.com and the types of STEM projects and software training videos I’ve put together there.

Over the past 3 ½ years I have been working toward a Doctor or Education (Ed.D.) degree through the University of Northern Colorado. In May 2022 I completed my coursework and comprehensive exams and started the process of developing my dissertation research. The first phase is writing the first three chapters, which include a rationale for the study (Chapter 1), a literature review and reasoning why this particular study will fill gaps in previous research (Chapter 2), and a planned methodology (Chapter 3). It is February 2023 and this first phase is nearing completion; I have written drafts of these chapters and have tightened up my research questions with the help of my committee chairperson. Now I need to make revisions to the chapters and submit them to the full committee for scrutiny before getting the final approval of the university’s Institutional Review Board. Then it will be time for gathering the actual data before the school year ends in May and writing up the results and conclusions (Chapters 4 and 5) by August. I hope to defend this dissertation by the end of October.

*David Black by the space shuttle Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center; July 2022.*

By the middle of last summer it was apparent that the proposal writing process was harder than I had anticipated and required setting aside enough time each day for thinking and pondering about what I was reading in order to achieve any kind of insight. In fact, one of my major areas of research is into the process of gaining insight as one definition of creativity. Altogether, I have identified at least ten different definitions of creativity based on approaches in the literature, ranging from the ancient Greek concept of the daimon through to modern multi-factor, multi-level theories such as Kaufman and Beghetto’s 4-C model.

To give myself the time I needed while also providing a new platform through which to conduct part of my research, I left New Haven School in mid-July, attended the second year of the Teacher Innovator Institute at the National Air and Space Museum for two weeks (which I will write about in the next few posts), then found a part-time teaching position at a private school near my home. Because I need to keep the school’s identity private as part of the requirements for my dissertation, I will not provide its actual name here but will call it Westview School. I am mentoring the science teachers at the school to train them on project-based learning strategies, hands-on activities, and student-centered teaching pedagogies. The school has been moving into a high school program, building the grades upward and installing a new science lab, which I helped to design and which is almost complete, so I have ordered supplies, equipment, and chemicals that will arrive this week.

*With Buz Carpenter, one of the pilots of the SR-71 Blackbird behind us. This was taken at the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center; July 2022.*

Meanwhile I am writing and writing, but also editing videos. Since part of my research is how STEM teachers can teach concepts through student-created digital media projects, part of what I have to investigate is how to best teach the media design software. We can’t assume that our students already know how to do video production or computer programming or 3D animation just because they are digital natives, and most STEM teachers have neither the time nor inclination to learn it themselves and develop lesson plans for teaching it, given all the standards they already have to meet. The alternative is to provide online training for students through flipped video instruction. That has been a major part of what I am working on over the last seven months. I used TII grant money to purchase a new cell phone with a better camera and equipment (lights, a good microphone with plosives filter, etc.) and took it with me (it all fits into a small suitcase, which was why I bought it) to TII to start recording the videos during the evenings.

*Banner for my new website which I have developed as a resource for using media-design software for student-created projects in STEM.*

I have continued to record and edit these videos on how to use browser-based free software for digital media creation. Altogether I will have 16 videos completed this weekend. More importantly, I have created the new website ( https://science-creativity.com ) to provide links to all of the YouTube videos and to write blogs specifically on my dissertation topics. It is still a work in progress, but I did complete a major portion of it this week which was to create a kind of choice board with descriptions and examples of different types of projects that students can choose for each category of software. Through their digital media creations, students will demonstrate their mastery of STEM concepts, their creativity and quality, and their ability to teach other students. It has been and continues to be a major focus and needs to be up and running by the time my research proposal is approved. I hope that it can be a major resource for STEM teaching and student-centered learning.

At Westview School, I am now implementing a series of projects is each class that will lead to my ultimate dissertation research:

*A 3D matrix of possible project choices for biology students. They include choices for topic, software, and project type.*

In-Class Projects: This final in-class only project is the culmination of several projects they did last semester designed to lead up to the last two large projects described below. In this project, I am using different levels of choice and structure for the three classes to provide comparison and research data. The biology students will be creating an animation on one of three topics: DNA replication, DNA transcription and translation, and protein synthesis. They have three choices for software usage: do a stop-motion animation with video software to compile the images; use MIT Scratch to program a linear animation or game; or use Wick Editor, which is a linear animation program similar to an older version of Adobe Flash. I am finishing up the second Scratch video today and will get it posted to YouTube and my website tomorrow. Their third dimension of choice is the type of project they choose to do – it can be a linear animation, a branching information program, or a game or quiz. Altogether, since you cannot do a branching program or game using stop-motion animation (which has to be linear), there are 21 possible choices for each group. The entire project has fairly high structure and limited choice, which is needed for this group of students.

*Chemistry students will have a choice of four possible topics, but over 40 project types for about 160 combinations.*

For the chemistry class, they are creating a project on chemical reactions. They have four topics: balancing reactions, the five different types of reactions, stoichiometry, and limiting reactants/percentage yield. They can choose any category of software and any type of project, giving them something like 160 possible choices, allowing high choice with moderate structure. At the end, they must have some type of media-enabled product they can use to teach the other students and demonstrate their mastery of chemical reactions. A PDF version of their choice board with short descriptions of each type of project is provided here:

For physics the students are finishing up classical mechanics with a complex machine project. Here the possible projects can be a Rube Goldberg device using all six types of simple machines, eight steps, and as many consecutive repetitions as possible (the record last year at New Haven was 25 times). Or they can choose to do a cardboard marble run with six types of machines and a method to get the marbles back to the top without touching them, looking for at least 25 cycles. Or they can create a perpetual motion machine that has to go through 25 rotations without any extra energy added. We are now in the design phase after I showed them great examples, such the Rube Goldberg device music video created by OK Go for their song “This Too Shall Pass” or Mark Rober’s squirrel mazes or the Wintergarten marble run music box machine. The students must show a 3D diagram of the device and create an animation of how the objects will work. I am encouraging them to use Wick Editor, Scratch, or Stop Motion but they are independent enough that they are probably going to use dedicated iPad animation and drawing software such as Procreate instead. Although I would like them to test my recent videos, I want this project to have moderate choice and low to moderate structure so I will not force it as much as I will for the biology class animations.

*Different phases that the physics students will go through for their Complex Machines project. All three classes have three levels of choice and moderate to high structure.*

At the end of each of these in-class projects, the students will use the critique process I have trained them on last semester to evaluate each others’ projects. They will also complete a reflection assignment, which we haven’t done much of yet but is essential for project-based learning to be effective.

STEAM Showcase projects: The next project will be the same for all classes: it is the STEAM Showcase, which I am resurrecting here at Westview School. They have already begun to choose topics and I have talked with our elementary and middle teachers to know what topics they will be teaching at the end of March. Student teams of 2-3 people are choosing a topic, writing a script/outline, creating a presentation, practicing an activity or demonstration, and designing a handout. This will require using several different types of online software. They will first present their projects to their peers in class at the start of March and receive feedback from them, then make revisions. At the end of March they will visit the K-8 classes and present their topics and receive feedback from the teachers. The purpose of this is to provide them with a real audience, plus if they can explain science concepts to kindergarteners, they really them them down. The bonus is that this will get the K-8 students excited and begin drumming up some positive PR.

On April 27 we will hold the final showcase. We will take over 4-5 rooms and run simultaneous sessions of 20 minutes each just as I have done before. We will video and photograph all of this and I will write about it here and compile a YouTube video. After that showcase night, students will complete a reflection assignment and survey to provide me with research data and to cement their learning.

To demonstrate how to set up an augmented reality scene, I placed T-Rex and Godzilla in our school common room to have a Battle Royale. The steps of the Stanford Innovation Lab process are on the poster behind.

Stanford Innovation Lab project: The final big project is happening in what we call the Stanford Innovation Lab class. All high school students take this class, which is for two hours each Friday. It is basically an engineering design class focused on human-centered design, based on classes taught at Stanford University. Teams of students are working with different organizations locally to identify problems, design prototypes, and propose solutions. Westview School is private and focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation (a good match for my dissertation) and this is all about learning through collaborative problem-solving. Each team’s situation is unique, but as they get further into the design phase (they are in the problem-finding and ideation phases now) they will need to use more design principles and software. They are working toward a final presentation day in May when all the participating businesses/groups will bring representatives and judge which team has the winning proposal, and the winning team members will receive cash prizes.

To provide structure (and an additional research source), I created a choice board/checklist of each step in the process with requirements that the teams complete so many (say five of eight) possible tasks for each step. Some of them are required, others they can choose, so that there is a good combination of structure and choice involved. As soon as we introduced this choice board last week, the teams started making measurable progress. I will videotape the final presentations and photograph the teams as they progress, collecting periodic surveys as data points for my dissertation.

All of these projects, put together, should be enough to gather both quantitative and qualitative data sufficient for my research requirements. It will be a mixed-methods study, and should provide some important insights in how to combine student-created digital media projects, choice boards, critique and revision, and STEM education.

Our exoplanet paintings from New Haven School drying out in my classroom. We had some great final paintings. My last day of teaching there was the day before I left for the Teacher Innovator Institute in Washington DC. After the workshop I returned to New Haven just long enough to pack my stuff home.

There is a major weakness here, of course, which is that this is just one private school and it is highly unique, just as New Haven was, so whatever conclusions I draw from this research will not be very generalizable to a larger population of public schools. This is another reason for the website: to create a resource for other teachers, then recruit them to try it out in their own classes, fill out surveys, and add to the data of how well this program will work in other schools and without my direct instruction/involvement. I call this Phase 3 of the larger project, which will ultimately go beyond my doctoral dissertation and become part of what I do as an Ed.D. and what my future books and papers will discuss. I will be presenting at two different conferences in March on the subject of my dissertation and hope to recruit some teachers there. I will send out emails to the TII teachers to ask for volunteers, and I will scour all the contacts and teachers I know in Utah to help out. I hope for 8-10 teachers to participate, but even more would be great.

If you are a STEM teacher interested in project-based learning and teaching creativity in your classroom, you would be an ideal person to help out. I know this because you are still reading this post! What this would entail is looking over the https://science-creativity.com website, including the training videos and project ideas, then setting up a similar project to the ones I have described above. Give your students three dimensions of choice: Choice of specific topic, choice of software, and choice of approach or project types. Use the choice document I posted above, and have your students look through the website – it may need to be unblocked – and make their choice of software and project, then plan it out. I am also posting a PDF of my biology DNA animation project presentation and my chemistry reactions project here so you can see the level of structure and requirements for each. Then provide your students with the scaffolding, structure, and support they need while allowing them the freedom to choose and to create. At the end, I will provide a survey for you to complete as the teacher and a consent form and ask that you share some of your students’ projects with me.

*I used the marble paintings that my students made at New Haven as the backgrounds for the titles and captions in my media design software training videos.*

I realize this is quite a bit to ask so late in the school year, but if you are planning a project-based learning experience anyway this could be a great way to increase student engagement, content mastery, creativity, quality, and choice. I hope that you will try this out, or at least provide some feedback on how to make the new site more useful.

To provide your students with descriptions of possible projects I am posting a PDF of the choices at the bottom. More detailed descriptions and good examples of each type of project, from graphic novels to interactive games, can be found at the website.

Thank you for reading this. I hope to hear from you! My contact information is: David Black, elementsunearthed@gmail.com.

Here is the PDF for project choices listed by software category:

choice-matrix-browser-software Download

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged browser-based media design software, project-based learning | Leave a comment

Two Famous Alien Abduction Tales

Posted on September 4, 2022 by davidvblack

Barney and Betty Hill hold up a drawing they made of the flying saucer and gray aliens that blocked their way on a dark night in rural New Hampshire in 1961.

In this blog post I will share two essays written by students in my astrophysics class this summer as an exercise in critical thinking and making claims based on evidence. They both report alien abduction cases that became quite famous, one of which even became the basis of a motion picture.

Betty and Barney Hill: The Zeta Reticuli Incident

by Maya

The Betty and Barney Hill case, also known as the Zeta Reticuli incident is one of the most known and credible alien abduction cases in the world. Many people have researched and been informed about this case in the 1960s and how it became an important prototype for abduction stories from then on.

The background on this case starts out simple. Betty and Barney Hill were a biracial couple in the 1960s. They both had busy lives with intense tiring jobs. Barney worked a night shift at a post office located 60 miles away from home. He made the tough commute to work every day. Betty worked a lot in the child welfare field, which can be brutal. The couple spent most of the time doing their jobs. In the little free time they acquired they spent most of it working at church in the civil rights movement.

They were married for 16 months before they were able to take a 3-day break for their honeymoon. The couple decided to take a trip to Montreal and Niagara Falls. On September 19, 1961 they were at a diner nearing the end of their trip. They decided to stop and eat before they continued the journey home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They left the diner at about 10 p.m. to avoid all the hurricanes and storms that were supposed to hit. They planned to get home at around 2 or 3 a.m. While driving home they noticed a strange light hovering over them. Barney was an ex-WWll vet and he just assumed that it was a satellite going off course. Betty, not knowing much, was worried that it was something more. The light grew closer and closer with each mile. Eventually, the light was straight above their heads. That was the last thing either of them remembered before the end of the night.

An artist’s rendition of the Hills confronted by the alien space ship as drawn by Barney. They stated that the ship came down in front of their car and blocked their way through a narrow gap in the New Hampshire hills.

They came around 2 hours later and surprisingly 35 miles down the road. They both felt dirty and could not recall anything that had happened in the past 2 hours. They drove all the way home. They both tried to remember what happened but could not seem to. Throughout the next month Betty and Barney developed an increasing amount of anxiety surrounding the incident. They both decided to seek help from a mental health specialist. They met with a psychologist and neurologist named Benjamin Simon. He specialized in hypnosis. He was able to recover memories for the couple through intense therapy. They claim to have remembered being abducted. After the light hovered over them, they recalled being taken into a ship that blocked their way through a narrow pass. They could see alien-looking gray creatures inside, who came out to meet them, but they found themselves unable to move. The creatures took them inside the ship, where they were stripped and evaluated. One of the creatures showed Betty a kind of diagram on the wall of the ship that showed a network of dots connected with dotted, single, and double lines. The alien pointed to two larger dots near each other on the bottom right of the diagram, and Betty felt this indicated where the aliens came from.

The real question though is: Is this incident real? We also must find credible evidence that points to an alien abduction. Betty and Barney Hill have a lot of believers and credibility. However, I have done a lot of research on many different websites and I have not found any credible sources. Most websites just explain the story in similar ways that other websites explain the incident. I have seen quotes directly from the Hill’s. Everything they are saying is being believed with no solid evidence. The only piece of evidence that we had is the star map drawn by Betty.

A teacher named Marjorie Fish studied the map in a magazine. She spent a lot of time building a 3D model of the nearby stars using the best data for distance and position then available and identifying stars that were most like our sun. Since there are many stars in the radius of our sun (estimated to be around 1,000 stars), Fish spent a lot of her time sorting stars into various categories. She eventually came down to 46 stars. It took Fish five years of looking at her model from every angle to find a match.

The star map drawn by Betty Hill under hypnosis. She assumed that the solid lines represented common travel lanes for the Reticulans whereas the dotted lines (one of which represents our solar system) represented infrequently visited star systems.

The view point was right above Zeta 2 Reticuli, which she assumed to be the double star system on Betty’s map. She stated “Since we did not have the data to make such a map in 1961 when Betty saw it, or in 1964 when she drew it, it could not be a hoax. Since the stars with lines to them are such a select group, it is almost impossible that the resemblance between Betty’s map and reality could be coincidental. Betty’s map could only have been drawn after contact with extraterrestrials” Fish concluded that this would give us major evidence to help conclude whether the abduction really happened. If the map had not been created when Betty drew it, it would have to conclude that something had happened that night.

However, if you look back at Betty’s map today and line it up with a more accurate model (the map from the 60s was not completely accurate, as we now have very accurate parallax measurements from the HIPPARCOS and GAIA satellites) you can see that the stars on Betty’s map do not line up with any stars.

Another piece of evidence that is critical is the reliability of using hypnosis to recover lost memories. Research says hypnosis is not a reliable method for memory recovery. People who undergo hypnosis therapy tend to be super confident in their memories which can lead to “persistence of false memories.” There have been laboratory studies that prove that someone can be influenced into believing something that did not happen is real. Hypnosis is a state similar to a dream or alpha state where therapists can plant memories in the patient’s minds, whether intentionally or not. There is not any legitimate science found behind unlocking memories through hypnosis. Everything “recalled” after the Hills blacked out cannot be trusted.

Details of the Hill drawing of the space ship.

My conclusion on this incident is that there was something that happened the night of September 19, 1961. Alien abduction seems a little stretched. It could be aliens and it could be something different.

Sources:

Lacina, L. (2019, June 5). The First Alien-Abduction Account Described a Medical Exam with a Crude Pregnancy Test. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/first-alien-abduction-account-barney-betty-hill

Barney Hill, UFO Witness born. (n.d.). African American Registry. Retrieved June 29, 2022, from https://aaregistry.org/story/barney-hill-a-story-of-alien-beings-on-earth/

Observatory, A., & Planetarium. (2011, August 19). The Truth about Betty Hill’s UFO Star Map – Astronotes. https://armaghplanet.com/betty-hills-ufo-s tar-map-the-truth.html

Betty Hill, 85, Figure in Alien Abduction Case, Dies. (2004, October 23). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/us/betty-hill-85-figure-in-alien-abduction-case-dies.html Hypnosis. (n.d.). http://Www.hopkinsmedicine.org.

Recovered Trauma Memories and Hypnosis – Abuse. (2015). Mentalhelp.net. https://www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/recovered-trauma-memories-and-hypnosis/

A poster from the movie “Fire in the Sky” based very loosely on the Travis Walton incident.

The Travis Walton Abduction

by Emma

On November 5th, 1975, a lumber jack from Arizona named Travis Walton allegedly went missing while at work in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona for five days and approximately six hours. Scent dogs were called in and helicopters were issued to try to find Walton. Investigators thought that Walton’s co-workers had murdered him, but this was false. Once found, his story was told.

On November 5th a crew of seven men, including Walton, went to work on timber stands in the national forest. While riding out to the timber stands, the group allegedly saw a hovering mass that looked like a saucer. The “saucer” was thought to be approximately 110 feet away from the truck with the seven crew men. They claim to have heard a loud buzzing noise. Walton exited the truck and approached the object when a light came down on him and he lost consciousnesses. The six other crewmen were frightened off and left Walton behind.

When Walton returned to town, he told the story of waking in a room that resembled a hospital room surrounded by small creatures that were bald who seemed to be studying Walton. He noted that the creatures weren’t humanlike at all. Walton claimed to have fought the creatures until a human intervened while wearing a red helmet.

Another depiction of the abduction, this time for a 2015 “documentary.”

The man took Walton to a different room. In the second room, Walton claims to have been approached by three other human men that covered Walton’s face with a plastic mask. He then blacked out losing all consciousness. Walton stated that he remembered nothing else following the moment that he blacked out in the room with the three men. He claims to only remember waking up five days later walking down the side of the highway while he watched the saucer disappear into space. Walton had gone missing near Heber, Arizona.

There were some immediate responses to Walton’s story. That he first told it to the newspapers instead of reporting to the police was seen as questionable, and it was found that Walton had a motive for making up an alien abduction hoax. His lumber crew were behind on their forest service contract and about to default, which would have cost them thousands of dollars. Claiming there were aliens would give them a legitimate reason for not wanting to go back to the site or finish their contract. Another motive was that The National Inquirer was offering $5000 for the best UFO story of the year, which they paid to Walton despite their own investigator stating he felt the story was a hoax.

While considered a hoax, Walton’s story raises some interesting questions. All crew members passed the polygraph test but one which was determined to not be conclusive. Their stories were congruent with that told of Walton.

How could this be if it is really a hoax? It makes me question the credibility of the story. I ask myself, could this be true? I do think this story is most likely a hoax, but I do believe that there very well could be true UFO incidents. One thing that leads me to the conclusion that Walton’s story is a hoax is the cash prize of $5,000 that was awarded to Walton for the best UFO case. There was obviously an incentive for such an elaborate story. A movie was even made about the story following the event. It is called Fire in the Sky, making the Walton case a very famous story, although the movie greatly exaggerated the peril described by Walton. These lead to my suspicions about the veracity of Walton’s story.

Travis Walton in 2019 at a UFO convention. He continues to maintain he was abducted and examined by aliens.

The Travis Walton case is a puzzling incident. While the story was deemed a hoax, the workers’ stories all lined up with Walton’s. Could Walton be telling the truth? I don’t believe so, but the possibility is still an interesting mystery to look into.

Some Thoughts

As a science teacher I use UFO encounters and alien abduction stories to teach students critical thinking skills and how importance it is to use solid evidence when making extraordinary claims. Both of the incidents above were very famous and are continually debated by UFO enthusiasts and debunkers alike. What would constitute sufficient evidence that UFOs are actually alien space craft, which, despite all the evidence of science that such travel would be impossible or take hundreds of years, have travelled trillions of miles just to visit our backwater little planet and then leave no conclusive proof that they ever came. Doesn’t make much sense.

Science teaches us to have two opposing frames of mind when examining extraordinary claims. First, we need to keep an open mind that such claims might be true, because extraordinary things somethings become accepted. But that doesn’t mean we keep such open minds that our brains fall out. A healthy dose of skepticism is important for scientists. Just because someone wrote about it in a blog post (myself included) doesn’t make it true.

I hope you have enjoyed these UFO stories. What do you think? Are we not alone? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I am posting our finished Ad Astra Per Educare Volume 4 newsletter again here:

ad-astra-4-seti-and-ufos-s Download

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged alien abductions, betty and barney hill, fire in the sky, travis walton, zeta reticulli | Leave a comment

Famous UFO Incidents: 1948-1954

Posted on August 31, 2022 by davidvblack

A drawing made by pilots Chiles and Whitted after sighting their UFO. Most UFOs don’t have rocket exhaust coming out of them, and this looks suspiciously like a German V2 rocket or Buzz Bomb.

The UFO craze of 1947 wasn’t the last incident of URO sightings. It was just the beginning of what would be a long series of incidents through the 1950s and 1960s. The U.S. Air Force was concerned enough to begin an official investigation called Project Blue Book. Teams of investigators interviewed thousands of people who claimed to have seen UFOs or even to have made contact with aliens. Most of the sightings were easily explained away, but enough of them were credible enough that official reports were written and remain unexplained to this day. This post will explore several of the most famous and credible incidents of the late 1940s through middle 1950s.

The Chiles-Whitted Sighting

by Ali

You may have heard a lot about aliens, from movies to sightings, but are they real? One could argue both ways, however there are multiple sightings where it makes it almost impossible to not believe in aliens.

On July 24, 1948 around 2:45 am there was an incredible sighting while two different American commercial pilots were doing their normal flights over Southwest Alabama. Those commercial pilots nearly collided with a strange torpedo shaped flying object.

One of the pilots (Chiles) saw a flying object for 10 seconds before he lost sight in the clouds. He described what he saw in an official statement about a week later: “It was clear there were no wings present, that it was powered by some jet or other type of power, shooting flame from the rear some 50 feet. There were two rows of windows, which indicated an upper and lower deck, [and] from inside these windows a very bright light was glowing. Underneath the ship there was a blue glow of light.” (Daugherty, 2018)

The other pilot (Whitted) offered a similar description “The object was cigar shaped and seemed to be about a hundred feet in length. The fuselage was about three times the circumference of a B-29 fuselage. It had two rows of windows, an upper and a lower. The windows were very large and seemed square. They were white with light which was caused by some type of combustion…. I asked Capt. Chiles what we had just seen and he said that he didn’t know.” (Daugherty, 2018)

There were 20 different passengers aboard but only one of them was awake. He could not describe much other than the fact that there was an object that flew past his window fast.

The pilots drew sketches of what they saw, and they match the description quite well – a cigar-shaped vehicle with flame coming out the rear and two rows of shiny windows.

A captured German “Buzz Bomb” rocket used during World War II. The rocket was the large cylinder on the top. A more advanced version was the V2 rocket, which looked like a conventional rocket standing vertically with fins and a central rear nozzle.

At first The Pentagon had suggested that it was a weather balloon, however this was quickly disputed. The interpretation of what the three people saw was quickly discussed and dismissed as a crazy story. A common modern theory was it was a German “buzz bomb” or V2 rocket, where the windows were a reflection off of metallic patterns on the rocket. The Air Force had captured a number of these weapons at the end of World War II and brought them back to the United States for testing, along with a number of German rocket scientists such as Werner von Braun. The chief site for testing these rockets was to become Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. That the flight was over Alabama at the time of the sighting is rather telling, and the drawing of the pilots looks almost identical to a Buzz Bomb or V2 rocket, right down to the flames coming out of the rear. Of course the Air Force denied this – they wouldn’t want to admit that their test went off course and almost shot down a commercial airplane with 20 passengers on board.

Daugherty, Greg. “Two Pilots Saw a UFO. Why Did the Air Force Destroy the Report?” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 16 Aug. 2018, https://www.history.com/news/ufo-chiles-whitted-soviet- spycraft-air-force-coverup.

The Haneda Air Force Base Incident

by Hannah

August 5th, 1952 Japanese USAF operators at the Haneda Air Force Base noticed something off in the sky. They saw a blueish- white light across the way from the control tower. Quickly the operators took action, they called the GCI radar unit. The GCI unit is a group of people who work with a ground-controlled interceptor. Initially formed to help train pilots, it uses a remote-controlled drone or a piloted aircraft that works to train officials to use a ground interceptor in a combat or high-risk situation. The GCI gives a 360-degree view around where it is stationed. It is a commonly used defense tactic. At Haneda airport the GCI team called in an F-94, an American made all weather jet interceptor that was used for air defense and carried no guns. The F-94 created a radar scrambler. Their radar then got returns from the area of the blueish light. The GCI then vectored, directed (an aircraft in flight) to a desired point, the F-94 towards the light. They then picked up an unknown orbiting target. Furthermore, the F-94 picked up an unknown radar. After 90 seconds there was an airborne pursuit where the target moved out of radar range and the pursuit was followed by another GCI radar. The unknown light/radar source then disappeared.

As UFO incidents go, this one is puzzling. Usually UFOs do not produce radar returns or are seen by such a high number of trained personnel, including the pilot of the F-94 interceptor. But to say it was aliens visiting Earth does not make must sense scientifically. Why would an alien species come to an airport on Earth to simply just look? They also did not stay for an extended period of time, why make a long trip to only stay a little over a minute. Also, assuming they were developed enough to make a craft that can travel to Earth, why would they have run away when the radar was scrambled. Assuming the level of development necessary and the fact that they supposedly had a radar system it is confusing as to why then they would turn and leave. Applying human logic to the situation this becomes confusing as to why something would travel so far, how advanced I’d have to be to do this, and why no contact would be made. The sighting took place at an airport. This means there is high air security. Meaning it is harder to just ‘see’ an aircraft with no evidence. There also is evidence of a radar system being detected. This is harder to fake than just a pure sighting. Furthermore, this sighting and action was taken place by USAF operators, as well as people working with the GCI and F-94’s. The more people involved the harder the sighting is to be dismissed. It is harder to convince 20 people to lie about a sighting than it is for one person to just make a claim. In my belief the sighting may have been real, an unidentified flying object was seen; this object may not have been aliens though. It seems highly unlikely all these people would lie about an object somewhere as secure as an airport, but it seems more unlikely that this object would be sent by another species. Therefore, it may have been sent by another human, perhaps as a prank or a mistake or even something more sinister. That we may not ever know.

“Saucers over Washington” (Comic) 09204_2004_001

Washington DC Mass Sightings

In 1952 there were also a number of sightings occurring over Washington DC. Multiple people reported seeing flying discs or flying saucers directly over the U.S. Capitol and White House, as shown in the illustration. The incidents became the basis of several popular movies, including Earth Versus the Flying Saucers. But other movies may have been the trigger for the sightings. For example, the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, where an alien spacecraft landed on the National Mall (“Klaatu, barada nikto!”) came out in 1951, so it may have been the inspiration for many of the sightings.

The Fiorentine Stadium Mass Sightings

by Lilly

On October 27, 1954, the Fiorentina club soccer team was playing against their rival Pistoiese. There were about 10,000 spectators sitting in the concrete bowl of The Stadio Artemio Franchi Stadium in Florence, Italy that fall day. In the second quarter, Fiorentina was in the lead at 6-2 when the game came to a pause because of a sudden shift in the crowd of spectators. Their normal competitive frenzy turned to something more like hysteria. Everyone in The Stadio Artemio Franchi turned their eyes to the sky. Adrico Magnini, a defender for Fiorentina, described the sight as he saw it: “I remember everything from A to Z,” he says. “It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter.” Every one of the ten thousand other viewers described similar events, details altering slightly from person to person. Many concluded that the only explanation for this event was that the objects in the sky were UFOs.

This was not a case of mass delirium experienced in the stadium that day, there were many other sights of these strange egg-like, presumed spacecraft all over Tuscany, Italy. Another of the players, Romolo Tuci, years later when asked about the event stated, “In those years everybody was talking about aliens, everybody was talking UFOs and we had the experience, we saw them, we saw them directly, for real.” But what are the possibilities of that being truth? We know now that these UFOs were not Martians as many people at the time believed, but what if they truly were some types of extraterrestrial intelligence, something that cannot be explained by anything on Earth? One of the most mysterious parts of this sighting is the substance that fell from the flying objects, what Magnini described as glitter. This substance was hard to study because it seemed to disintegrate quickly after landing from the sky. Many recounted this material to look like cotton or spiderwebs. A journalist for the Fiorentino newspaper, Giorgio Batini, was able to collect the mystery glitter carefully with a matchstick and brought it to the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. Many types of analysis were performed on the substance and the only conclusion made was that it contained boron, silicon, calcium, and magnesium, and was not radioactive. This information did not tell us much about the possible origin of the material. James Mcgaha, former U.S. Airforce Pilot and now astronomer, came to his own conclusion that it was nothing but migrating spiders. This theory could also explain the cigar shaped flying objects. He claims that the UFOs were a mass of spiders, similar to a school of fish. This theory seems plausible because September and October are the months in which spiders in that area begin migration. These peculiar spider migrations still make headlines to this day. The spiders create a super colony incased in spider web which then is blown into the air. Such spider groupings have been observed to reach 14,000 feet in altitude and migrate for miles.

A sketch of the UFOs over the stadium in Florence, with silvery dust coming out.

Still, people are not convinced. They are adamant about the idea that the Stadio Artemio Franchi was visited by alien life that afternoon in Tuscany, even with sufficient evidence against that claim. Seventy years since the event, it has become something of a legend for the stadium, and will no doubt be debated for decades longer.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407

An artist’s fanciful drawing of UFOs over Florence, Italy in the mid-1950s.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged mass sightings, migrating spiders, ufo, v2 rocket tests | Leave a comment

The 1947 UFO Craze

Posted on August 28, 2022 by davidvblack

A recreation of the supposed alien recovered from the Roswell UFO crash. This model is in the Roswell UFO Museum. The video of an alien autopsy was admitted to be staged by its creator.

During June and July of 1947 there was a wave of UFO incidents, many of which made national news and have become the sources of persistent popular beliefs regarding UFOs, flying saucers, and Little Green Men. As a final project in my astrophysics class at New Haven School this summer, I asked my students to choose from various famous incidents and write up an analysis of what was reported and what they think actually did happen, if anything. Of the over 60 reported sightings during those two months, four stand out as the most significant. This post explores those four.

Chronologically, the first incident occurred near Roswell, New Mexico when William “Mac” Brazel found some debris on his ranch in early June 1947. It appeared to be some sort of metallic plastic with a frame of metal rods which had apparently blown or fallen onto his property. To prevent his cattle from getting tangled up in it, he gathered it all up and stuffed it under some brush to get it out of the way, not thinking much about it. A few weeks later, when the entire UFO craze hit the papers, he decided the debris must be a crashed flying saucer and the whole Roswell incident became the stuff of legends. But more on this later. First, we have to travel to Puget Sound off the coast of Washington state.

The Maury Island Incident and Kenneth Arnold sightings

by Eva

On June 21, 1947, Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl made a claim that the two saw unidentified flying objects in the sky over Maury Island, and soon after received threats from the Men in Black. In popular UFO conspiracy theories, Men in Black are described to be men dressed in black suits, who supposedly are government agents. These “agents” harass, threaten or assassinate UFO witnesses to keep them quiet. After his supposed sighting in 1947, Harold Dahl claimed to have been approached by a man in a dark suit and was warned not to talk about his alleged UFO sighting on Maury Island.

Three days after Crisman and Dahl made the Maury Island claim, private pilot Kenneth Arnold allegedly saw a string of nine UFOs flying past Mount Rainier at an estimated speed of 1,200 miles per hour. When asked to describe what he saw, Arnold reported that the objects looked like tea saucers flying past the mountain. The term “flying saucers” therefore made it into the newspapers. Arnold’s report led to nationwide news coverage and caught the attention of editor Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer quickly contacted Arnold and passed on the story of two harbor patrolmen, Crisman and Dahl, who supposedly had pieces of these flying objects. Palmer suggested that Arnold fly to Tacoma to investigate and on July 28 the investigation began.

When arriving in Washington, Arnold first interviewed Harold Dahl. During the interview Dahl said, “On June 21, 1947 in the afternoon about two o’clock, I was patrolling the east bay of Maury Island […] I, as captain, was steering my patrol boat close to the shore of a bay on Maury Island. On board were two crewmen, my fifteen-year-old son and his dog. As I looked up from the wheel of my boat I noticed six very large doughnut-shaped aircraft.” Dahl continued to claim that one of the flying objects began emitting what seemed like “thousands of newspapers” from the center of the object. These “newspapers” ended up being a light weight white metal that fell to Earth. A substance resembling lava rocks fell onto the ship and ended up breaking a crewman’s arm and killing their dog. Dahl said he brought in Fred Crisman to investigate, who reported that he was able to recover debris from Maury Island. Both Crisman and Dahl continued to claim their sightings were concrete as the investigation continued.

When reading this article, I was skeptical. It turns out that I was not the only one and there were others who felt the same. As the investigation furthered, evidence began to appear that contradicted the two men’s claims. Crisman later showed this “white metal” to Arnold and it was concluded that it was inconsistent with Dahl’s story. Lt. Frank Brown of Military Intelligence was brought into the investigation along with Captain William L. Davidson. Davidson and Brown held interviews and collected fragments.

A cover from a book by Gray Barker claiming that Davidson and Brown were killed by the Men in Black because they knew too much.

Eventually the officers planned to return to California and not further the investigation. On their way back, their B-25 Bomber crashed outside of Kelso, Washington and the two died. The FBI then took over the case and continued the investigation. The FBI was able to quickly come to the conclusion that the Maury Island UFO Incident was a hoax. They noted that during Dahl’s interview he said that “if questioned by the authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter.” Crisman and Dahl were also found to have shared different stories to different newspapers and media outlets. It was concluded that they had shared their stories with many publications with the hope of building their story and earning a profit. The “Tacoma Harbor Patrol,” the organization both Dahl and Crisman allegedly worked for, was revealed to be a for-profit business who charged owners of vacation homes in exchange for the security of their home while they were gone. The two men just wanted money any way they could get it.

The case was then closed, having been proven that it was a fake story. Written later in 1956, Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt stated “the whole Maury Island Mystery was a hoax. The first, possibly the second-best, and the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history.” The conclusion of this case had many opinions. The majority of people who believed in the UFO story felt it was true because the government never prosecuted or exposed the two hoaxers. It was later stated that the reason for the thorough investigation was that the government had full intent to prosecute them for the death of Lt. Brown and Capt. Davidson. After talking to Dahl and Crimson, they decided that the hoax had no ill intent and the death of Davidson and Brown could not be placed on the hoaxers. The story ultimately brought popularity to the Men in Black theory, and the concept of flying saucers, just as Dahl and Crisman had hoped for. In the end, the scientific evidence discovered provides enough to agree with the FBI’s claim, the Maury Island Incident was a hoax.

Captain Emil Smith (right) and officers of Flight 105

Flight 105 Sighting

by Gillian

Throughout human history, there have been countless reported sightings of extra-terrestrial interactions. Perhaps the most famous of these are the identifications of these alien’s modes of transportation; they are known as “Unidentified Flying Objects,” or, more simply, “UFOs.” UFO sightings are often the butt of jokes made at the expense of hillbillies, hicks, and red necks. But what happens when the witnesses of an extraordinary occurrences are reported by educated members of society? The Flight 105 incident gives us some insight.

On July 4th, 1947, United Airlines Flight 105 departed Boise, Idaho at 9:04 PM. After eight minutes, Co-pilot Stevens turned on the aircraft’s landing lights. He did this because he saw two groups of objects ahead of the plane, and thought that they were other planes. Upon further investigation, Stevens and Captain Emil J. Smith realized that the objects had neither fins nor wings. They called a flight attendant into the cockpit to get a third opinion and witness. After attempting to receive ground-confirmation from Ontario, Oregon, they watched the objects for a few more minutes before they spurted “ahead and disappear(ed) at high speed off to the west (Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects, James E. McDonald, 1968).”

When considering the reliability of a report of something scientifically disputable, there are many factors to consider. For instance, the reputability of the witnesses, the conditions in which the incident was reported, outside influences on perceptions, and more. We can consider these closely. To provide some context on potential outside influences, we look to the sensational reported sighting by private pilot Kenneth Arnold, not a week before. This certainly creates potential for susceptibility to influenced conclusions on the part of the Flight 105 witnesses. However, when being interviewed by James E. McDonald, (Senior Physicist, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and professor, Department of Meteorology, The University of Arizona), “Smith emphasized that he had not taken seriously the previous week’s news accounts… But, after seeing this total of nine unconventional, high-speed wingless craft on the evening of 7/4/47, he became much more interested in the matter. Nevertheless… he stressed that he would not speculate on their real nature or origin (Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects, James E. McDonald, 1968).”

An additional factor to consider is the reputability of the witnesses themself. Had the witnesses been known for eccentric and sometimes fanciful beliefs, it would be easy to pass off the report as nothing more than a fantastic feat of imagination. However, Emil J. Smith’s “complete reputability” was vouched for firmly by interviewed United Airlines employees who had known Smith for years (Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects, James E. McDonald, 1968). A final factor worth considering is the environment in which the sighting was reported. Natural weather phenomena such as Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, have been cited in past as explanations for “UFOs.” In this specific instance, though, the witnesses reported “no cloud phenomena to confuse them (Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects, James E. McDonald, 1968),” and that the weather was completely clear.

The Flight 105 incident is, “by no means the most impressive UFO sighting by an airliner crew, nevertheless, it is a significant one. It occurred in clear weather, spanned a total time estimated at 10-12 minutes, was a multiple-witness case including two experienced observers familiar with airborne devices, and was made over a 1000-ft altitude range (climb-out) that, taken together with the fact that the nine objects were seen well above the horizon, entirely rules out optical phenomena as a ready explanation. It is officially listed as Unidentified (Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects, James E. McDonald, 1968).”

Newspaper report of the supposed flying saucer in the Roswell Daily Record. No details were revealed . . .

The Roswell Incident

by Ari

The Roswell Incident occurred near Roswell, in southeastern New Mexico, in 1947.

Unlike many UFO sightings, the Roswell incident had no witnesses of the object in the sky. In 1947 a rancher named William “Mac” Brazel found debris in one of his pastures. The debris included, “metallic rods, chunks of plastic and unusual, papery scraps” (Waldek, 2017, para. 6). He believed that the remains were related to the stories of flying discs and flying saucers that had been published previously before the discovery. He reported what occurred to Sheriff George Wilcox of Roswell, which was then brought to the attention of Colonel William Blanchard, the commanding officer of the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). The day after, the RAAF released a statement hinting at the wreckage being part of a flying disc. However, when the Roswell Daily Record attempted to write a story about the RAAF’s claim, the RAAF retracted their previous statement, stating that it was actually the remains of a weather balloon. In 1994, the U.S Air Force admitted via a report that the weather balloon story was fake. Their explanation was that the scraps were actually from a classified project named Project Mogul, which was testing a new spy device. Their reasoning for lying was to ensure that no details of the project would be leaked, thus ruining the classified nature of the project.

Despite the evidence, many people formed their own opinions about what happened.

Conspiracy theorists worked hard to prove that the wreckage Brazel discovered was the result of an extraterrestrial. Ray Santilli, a conspiracy theorist with the belief that the wreckage was extraterrestrial, released a video in 1995 of a supposed “alien dissection” that occurred after the incident. Later, in 2006, Santilli confessed that the video was staged, however, he continued to claim that it was based on real footage. In addition, another theory was argued by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore. According to Britannica, “They argued that the original debris, which they believed was from a crashed flying saucer, had been flown to Wright Field (later Wright- Patterson Air Force Base) near Dayton, Ohio, and material from a weather balloon was ‘hastily substituted’” ( In order to spread their argument in 1980 they published The

Roswell Incident, a book supporting their beliefs about the incident. Furthermore, some conspiracists forged a document by the name of Majestic 12 (MJ-12), a document supposedly authorized by Harry S Truman that explains, “… how the crash of an alien spacecraft at Roswell in July 1947 had been concealed, how the recovered alien technology could be exploited, and how the United States should engage with extraterrestrial life in the future” (Wikipedia, 2022). Afterwards, the documents were determined to be fake due to the lack of evidence to support the existence of the MJ-12.

As a result of all the widespread news coverage of the Roswell incident, other media sources used this opportunity to produce more content. The articles that were released were by, but are not limited to, The Roswell Morning Dispatch, The Roswell Daily Impact, and more. In addition, numerous books were published, such as, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen, The Roswell Legacy by Marcel Jr., The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You to Know by Kal K. Korff, and many more. Furthermore, movies and films used the Roswell incident as inspiration or as the main plot. Some popular examples being: Independence Day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Roswell: The Aliens Attack, etc.

Because of the widespread news coverage that this incident had, it sparked interest among the public,. For instance, Roswell became known as a major hotspot for UFOs and aliens. According to Britannica, “In 1992 the International UFO Museum and Research Center opened in Roswell, and since 1996 Roswell has been the site of an annual UFO festival” (Brittanica, 2022). Due to the Roswell Incident, it stimulated and became a significant part of the city’s economy.

The Men in Black, protecting our world from the scum of the universe. Funny how a hoax incident can lead to a popular movie franchise . . .

Conclusions

Most of the rash of UFO sightings during these two months in 1947 can be attributed to weather phenomena, copy-cat accounts, or general hysteria. The Roswell incident is explained as a radar experiment undertaken by the local air force base, with the supposed Little Green Men as plastic dummies suspended from a weather balloon to see if they would create a radar return. The Maury Island incident is most likely a hoax made up by the two men. No samples of the mysterious metal have ever come to light.

The Kenneth Arnold sighting had no other witnesses; despite the credibility of Mr. Arnold, one person can be easily fooled by a trick of the light or a sun dog or lenticular cloud. But Flight 105 is harder to explain away. Here we have three credible witnesses all agreeing on the details of what they saw.

As with any extraordinary claim, extraordinary proof is required and none is available other than the statements of the witnesses. It is hard to say what they saw; their flight path from Boise to Oregon isn’t near any air force bases where experimental aircraft might have been tested. They were all trained airline personnel, and the angle of their ascent out of Boise makes weather phenomena unlikely.

These four incidents shaped the future of UFOlogy, or the study of UFOs. They provided much of the mythology that has grown up around such incidents, including the Men in Black, flying saucers, and Little Green Men.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged flight 105, maury island incident, men in black, roswell incident, ufo | Leave a comment

UFO Incidents: Battle of Los Angeles and Foo Fighters

Posted on August 19, 2022 by davidvblack

Over the next several days I will be posting a series of short articles written by my astrophysics students this summer. As our final assignment, I asked the students to investigate various famous UFO sightings and alien abduction incidents and evaluate the evidence based on sound critical thinking. These articles have become the main part of our latest edition of Ad Astra Per Educare, with a link included at the end of this blog post. I will present their articles in the chronological order in which the events occurred, although this gets a bit difficult during the UFO craze of 1947 when a number of these incidents happened and overlapped in time.

Battle of Los Angeles

by Fizzy

On February 25, 1942, admits World War 2, US military radars picked up an unidentified aircraft fly over Los Angelos. During this time Pearl Harbor had caused tensions to rise and Americans believed the Japanese were going to attempt to invade. A few months early in December 9, 1941, false reports of aircraft had caused some invasion anxiety in New York City. At the time lots of untrained pilots had been making calls of Japanese warships and submarines when later found to be fishing boats, logs, and even whales.

A few days before on February 23rd a Japanese submarine surfaced and fired at the mainland. This attack caused minor damage but scared the armies in California. With the armies on high alert, a radar scanning reported that an aircraft was approaching Los Angelos and was 120 miles away. Immediately troops prepared to fire and swept the night sky with a spotlight.

About an hour later the army started shooting. Not long after many coastal city‘s weaponry joined in. The LA Times wrote, “Powerful searchlights from countless stations stabbed the sky with brilliant probing fingers while anti-aircraft batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, if sinister, orange bursts of shrapnel.” Soldiers claimed they shot down one of the six reported planes but the next day nothing was found but shrapnel from the attack of the night before. Coastal artilleryman Charles Patrick later wrote, “I could barely see the planes, but they were up there all right. I could see six planes, and shells were bursting all around them. Naturally, all of us fellows were anxious to get our two-cents’ worth in and, when the command came, everybody cheered like a son of a gun.” Even the next day some soldiers claimed they saw nothing but smoke and clouds.

Later that morning they called it off after firing 1,400 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition. When they searched for bomb sites of enemy planes they were met with no proof of an attack from the night before. “Although reports were conflicting and every effort is being made to ascertain the facts, it is clear that no bombs were dropped and no planes were shot down,” said the Army’s Western Defense Command.

This ‘attack’ was shoved off and said to be a false alarm. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said it was just nerves triggered by the ongoing war. Japanese leaders say that they did not fly any aircraft over the city. It was later claimed to be a weather balloon mistaken for enemy planes in the dark. This balloon could have reflected light from the moon, catching the eye of the service members.

I believe that ‘The battle of Los Angeles’ was merely a strange accident. The whole country was on the balls of their feet from the war going on and seeing a plane would have sent them into a frenzy. The fact there is proof a weather balloon was sent just before this all happened was and when the soldiers thought they shot down a plane they merely saw the balloon get shot and fall into the ocean.

An artist’s drawing of the strange orange, white, and green lights that seemed to follow World War II aircraft. They were nicknamed Foo Fighters after a saying by a character in a popular comic strip.

The Foo Fighters

by Lola

During World War two there were strange sights that had been observed by WWII airplane pilots. The pilots had said that there were strange lights that were following their planes. There had been multiple sightings saying that there would be eight to ten lights that would follow the planes, the lights would be orange, green or red. The reports would say that the lights would show up alongside them but would mysteriously disappear and would never show up on the pilots’ radars. Each sighting had an unusual way of the lights approaching the airplanes. The lights would fly alongside, follow behind, close in on the pilots or rise to the planes. The pilots would set their planes to defense, attempt to flee, or try to take defensive maneuvers but each time the lights would follow and eventually disappear.

When the sightings had finally made it to the public, theories attempted to find a reason for these strange lights. None of the theories would match up because of all the things that were unusual about the sightings. It would be easy to produce a theory but it would be shut down by the fact that the lights would not appear on the pilots’ radars and how they could easily keep up with the planes and move faster and easier than the airplanes being used. The strangest part was the lights disappearing and reappearing.

The UFOs were named ‘Foo Fighters’ by the pilots that sighted the lights. The UFO was named after a cartoon comic strip called Smokey Stover. Smokey was a fire man that had a catch phrase that said: ‘where there’s a foo, there’s a fire.’

I had heard the name ‘Foo Fighter” before but I did not know what it was. I was not expecting the sightings to take place in World War II, I thought that the ‘Foo Fighter’ sightings would have been more recent. UFO sightings have been seen for many years, we must keep wondering and exploring the possibilities of what could be outside of our world.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged battle of los angeles | Leave a comment

A Modification of the Drake Equation

Posted on August 17, 2022 by davidvblack

My version of the Drake Equation, which uses the total number of stars in our galaxy instead of the rate of star formation. Many of these variables have been narrowed down using advanced space telescopes, but the final term, the lifetime of a civilization, winds up being the critical factor.

by David Black

It has been two years since Lily wrote the article in my previous post and I am only now putting together the 4^th edition of our Ad Astra Per Educare student newsletter which will include her article. At the time that Frank Drake created the equation in 1961, hardly anything could be answered about any of the variables in the equation except perhaps the first variable about the rate of star formation per year in the Milky Way galaxy, which at the time was estimated to be about three stars per year. With additional data and the advent of space telescopes, we are beginning to get ever better estimates of some of the variables.

One thing that has always puzzled me about Drake’s equation is the inclusion of this first term. Since it is a yearly estimate, the final answer must be the number of communicating civilizations that come into existence per year, which seems an odd way of looking at it. We want to know the total civilizations out there that we might converse with, not just the newbies like us. Carl Sagan spoke of how, given how many of these factors were considered to be close to 1 (or 100%) if given enough time, the truly limiting factor is the final one, the life-span of a civilization where they are able and willing to communicate over interstellar distances. This is why he was so adamant about preserving the Earth and getting rid of nuclear weapons. He wanted us to last long enough to become part of some great Encyclopedia Galactica, a galactic storehouse of the wisdom of all civilizations.

If we do want to estimate the total communicating civilizations, I suggest a modification of the Drake Equation. Here is my own version of it:

N = S_tot • f_m • f_FGK • f_p • f _HZ • f_l • f_i • f_c • L

N = the total number of communicating civilizations at any one time.

S_tot = the total number of stars in our galaxy, which is around 200 billion based on mass estimates.

f_m = the fraction of those stars that have high metallicity, such as our sun. These are primarily Population I stars compared with the metal poor, older Population II stars. For life to exist, the proper elements including metals must be present, and the older metal-poor stars are poor candidates. That gets rid of about half the stars, as fm is about 0.5.

f_FGK = the fraction of those stars that are like our sun, with long enough life spans for intelligence life to evolve and stable enough to not have UV flares or small habitable zones like red dwarf stars. Counting the number of such stars in the space around us out to 15 light years (this is where we pulled out our 3D model), we see there is one F type star, three G stars, and five K stars out of about 45 nearby stars, or 9/45 or 0.2.

f_p = the fraction of those stars that actually have planets, which we know is near 100%, probably about 0.9 to be conservative, based on all the planets we are currently finding.

My astrophysics students created these exoplanet paintings using spray paint and various circular masks like bowls and platters. This shows an orange dwarf star with a purple exoplanet orbiting.

f_HZ = the fraction of those planets found inside the habitable zone (HZ) of that star. Based on various planetary systems we have detected, if appears this number is about one in four or 0.25.

f_l = the faction of those planets that actually evolved life on them. This becomes hard to estimate since we only have one example of life evolving so far. However, we do know that as soon as conditions settled down after the Late Heavy Bombardment ended, life evolved rather quickly within a hundred million years or so. So this number also approaches 1, given enough time. To be conservative, let’s say it is about 0.8.

f_i = the fraction of planets with life that evolve intelligent life. This is where I disagree with Drake’s initial estimate that if life hangs on long enough, it will eventually evolve into intelligence. There is no proof of that and it took a rather lengthy time to happen on Earth, despite several near misses. Certainly there was impetus for intelligence during the Mesozoic, what with large predators running amok, but the rodent-like creatures were too small (a necessity to avoid the large predators) and intelligence never happened. So there have been intelligent creatures capable of using tools for the last three million out of 3.8 billion years since life first evolved. This gives us a limiting factor of about 3/3800 or 0.00079.

f_c = is that fraction of intelligent creatures that develop technology capable of sending messages over interstellar distances, which for us occurred in 1932 with the first television broadcast capable of reaching beyond the ionosphere. It was sent from the opening ceremonies of the summer olympics, were held in Berlin that year, and hosted as master of ceremonies by none other than Adolf Hitler himself, with a parade of goosestepping Nazis. Yes, Hitler is our ambassador to the stars and there is nothing we can do about it. That gives us 90 years that we’ve had the technology to send signals, or 90 out of 3 million years, a factor of 0.00003.

L = the number of years a civilization will be capable of sending out or detecting signals. If it is only a hundred years or so for us, if we destroy ourselves sometimes soon, then the numbers look grim. But if we can overcome our adolescent tendencies for self-destruction then we might keep radio technology around for a long time, perhaps 10,000 years. This is the real kicker – it all depends on surviving long enough to become a part of the intragalactic conversation.

As a project in my STEAM class this summer my students learned pyrography, or wood burning. I created this little saying (Bonus points if you know its origin) as a demonstration.

Putting all these numbers together, we get:

200,000,000,000 • 0.5 • 0.2 • 0.25 • 0.9 • 0.8 • 0.00079 • 0.00003 • 100 and we get: 8532 communicating civilizations in our galaxy. That’s still a decent sized number. Tweak the numbers such as adding to the lifetime of a civilization and there could be more. Other estimates put the number at less than 1.0, which would mean we are an oddity and possibly alone in the galaxy.

Enrico Fermi was famous for asking a question that is now known as the Fermi Paradox: If there are so many civilizations out there, why haven’t we heard from them by now? Why the great silence?

If you take 8532 worlds and spread them out randomly throughout the spiral arms of the Milky Way (where the metal-rich stars are found), which is 100,000 light years in diameter and is basically disk-shaped, you can use the formula for the volume of a cylinder with a radius of 50,000 light years and a thickness (height) of about 1000 light years. This gives an overall volume of about 7.85 trillion cubic light years. In all that space, 8532 civilizations will be greatly spread out, probably thousands of light years apart. The answer to Fermi’s Paradox becomes obvious: we haven’t heard from anyone because our little Nazi parade has only been traveling for 90 years. No one has heard us yet, if our signal is even strong enough to be picked up. Maybe that’s a good thing.

There have been proposals to send out other, stronger signals and to send them in a tight beam to probable star systems instead of broadcasting in all directions. We’ve sent plaques out on the first space probes to go beyond the solar system, the Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 probes. But it will take tens of thousands of years for them to reach even the closest star systems. We may have to wait awhile before we join the conversation.

I have now completed the fourth edition of Ad Astra Per Educare and it can be downloaded here:

ad-astra-4-seti-and-ufos-s Download

A green exoplanet painted by one of my astrophysics students.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged drake equation, exoplanets, habitable zone, intelligent life, stellar metallicity | Leave a comment

What We Know About the Drake Equation

Posted on August 16, 2022 by davidvblack

A spray painted exoplanet scene created by my astrophysics students, summer 2022

Written by Lily M.

In 1961 an astronomer named Frank Drake created the Drake Equation. He created it for a way to understand the factors involved in finding life outside our Earth in our galaxy and to roughly calculate the amount of life that can communicate with us. The equation he developed is the following:

N = R* • f_p • n_e • f_l • f_i • f_c • L

It is a complicated equation and contains quite a few variables.

N means the number of extraterrestrial civilizations we as humans can communicate with.

R* is the rate of star information, which we now know to be about 1.5 stars per year.

f_p is the number of stars that have planets. When our Sun was born our solar system organized as a natural consequence with planets forming inside eddies of the solar accretion disk. Astronomers feel that this process would occur around other stars as they formed, and that on average every star should have at least one planet, so this factor approaches 1 or 100%.

A painting of the Epsilon Indi system. An orange dwarf star is orbited by two brown dwarfs which revolve around each other

n_e means the number of planets per stars that could possibly support life, or be like Earth. n_e is even more difficult to figure out then R* and f_p,but was assumed by Drake to be around 3, since there are three planets in our solar system that are or were within the habitable zone.

f_l is the fraction of planets that support life and can develop it. With the different types of extremophiles we have found on Earth it looks like life could exists in very hostile environments. This means that f_l approaches 1 or 100% with enough time.

f_i is the fraction of life-bearing planets that have intelligent life on them, finding out the value of f_i is really hard since we only have one example: humans. Some anthropologists still argue on why one of the branches of the ape family evolved into the human species. We don’t really know if this is really unavoidable or just a coincidence. Scientist think that there are other species that could potentially evolve into intelligent beings such as dolphins and chimpanzees. Scientist think that if life could evolve then intelligent life could too, given enough time, since it has happened on Earth and there is no reason to think Earth is a special case.

f_c is that fraction of planets with intelligent life where that life is willing and able to communicate with us across interstellar space. Scientist believe that if there is intelligent life out in our galaxy that they will eventually advance to a technology level to send out a signal into space. Knowing the human species, we can only guess that if there is another human-level species they would have either deliberately or accidentally shown that they exist by now. Which could mean that f_c could be as high as 1.

A system of exoplanets with two gas giants and a habitable moon

Finally, the last letter L means the time span that the other life can communicate with us. The Earth’s population has grown so much over the past few centuries that the human species has the potential to destroy itself with man-made catastrophes, wildlife disasters, diseases, and nuclear war. If we all start to have a pessimistic view on this then we cannot be sure that human race will live through to the next century, that we will destroy ourselves and our advancement in technology will only have existed for a couple of centuries. It is difficult to say if another species will have the same rate of technological advancement or will have the same tendencies for self-destruction. Scientist think that L is approximately 200 to 10,000 years.

Putting in all the estimates for these variables we come up that N would be about 50, or 50 communicating civilizations per year would arise in our galaxy. The Drake Equation does not have a concrete solution yet because the last four variables are very hard to figure out. You may also have heard of the Drake Equation as the Green Bank equation or Green Bank formula, as the first meeting of astronomers interested in SETI, or the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, occurred at the Green Bank radio telescope facility in West Virginia. Carl Sagan was one of the astronomers at that meeting, and brought up the Drake Equation in his television series Cosmos. The Drake Equation has been a very popular equation to help us identify the factors we need to solve to look for intelligent life in our galaxy.

An orange dwarf star orbited by a blue gas giant with two red moons

drake equation

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My UFO (or is it UAP?) Encounter

Posted on August 7, 2022 by davidvblack

A complex display of halos, sun dogs, and partial parahelic arcs.

It was just past sunset on a cold, clear winter evening in early December. I was driving south down I-15 past the small town of Mona, Utah and the small reservoir nearby. I was teaching at a residential treatment center in Provo, Utah but living in a small town 40 miles south called Nephi, and this was my normal evening commute. I wasn’t really thinking about anything, just listening to music, when I saw it: a glowing object to the right and above my pickup truck, following me. It didn’t have any definite edges, and I couldn’t tell how large it was but it appeared to be keeping pace with my truck. The hackles rose on the back of my neck. For about five seconds I was completely freaked out. I was having a UFO encounter!

Sun dogs near Fargo, North Dakota. These are seen when sunlight is refracted through a thin layer of ice crystals.

Then I realized what it was. It was a sun dog, the frequent explanation given by the air force for many UFO sightings, but literally true in my case. You see, the sun had just set from my position at the bottom of the valley, but it was still shining a few hundred feet above Mona Reservoir. The day was cold, one of the first cold days of the year, but the water in the reservoir was still warm. Water vapor rising above the warm water was hitting a cold air layer a few hundred feet up and crystallizing into tiny ice crystals, which were reflecting the sunlight down into my truck window. It seemed to be following me because it wasn’t really as near my truck as it appeared – it was miles away and the reflection moved with me. Another possibility is that the ice crystals were much higher, part of a thin veil of cirrus clouds and the reflection part of a parahelic arc.

As soon as I moved beyond the reservoir, the sun dog disappeared. Some people report seeing these objects suddenly vanish as if they are moving hundreds of miles per hour when really it is just the ice pocket no longer reflecting the sun. I know a teacher who once saw a UFO, and from her description it was pretty clear what she saw was St. Elmo’s fire, or ball lightning, as it appeared as a ball of light following along a fence line after a thunderstorm.

Image of a sun dog in the Nuremberg Chronicles

There have been many historic accounts of sun dogs; the term itself means an object that dogs (or follows) the sun. The Nuremberg Chronicles, a rare book full of wood cut illustrations, includes an image of a sun dog, and to the plains Indians of North America they were considered omens of bad weather and blizzards to come. There is quite a bit of truth to this, as the cirrus clouds that cause them often do precede a warm front which in the high plains can turn into a blizzard.

Other natural phenomena that are mistaken as UFOs include swamp gas, or pockets of methane with traces of phosphine that can bubble up from methanogens deep in a swamp that decompose organic material. Once the phosphine hits the air, it ignites and causes the methane to burn with a bluish light. These fairy lights are called will o’ the wisps and are thought to be impish spirits leading the unwary to their doom. Of course, following a blue glowing light into a swamp is not a very safe activity. Yet another explanation for UFOs is lenticular clouds. When clear air containing some water vapor is forced to rise up over a conical-shaped mountain it will condense to form a cloud which then is whipped in a circular pattern around the peak, creating a lens-shaped cloud formation that can consist of several layers spinning around the peak. They can look like flying saucers.

Does this mean that all UFO/UAPs are no more than lenticular clouds, St. Elmo’s fire, sun dogs, or swamp gas? Or do the many reports of sightings actually have a kernel of truth to them? What about the recent video footage of Navy and Air Force fighter pilots showing some kind of ill-defined objects tracking along with carrier groups? Like any extraordinary claim, for UFOs to actually be alien spacecraft would require extraordinary proof, as Carl Sagan liked to say. Unidentified flying objects only stay such until they are identified or explained.

Funnel shaped lenticular clouds, stacked in layers, formed from powerful rotational winds around the central peak.

During our astrophysics class at New Haven School this summer, students chose from various famous sightings and investigated them with a critical thinking lens. Does the claim make sense? Is their any indisputable evidence? Did more than one person see it, and were they credible witnesses? Their short essays on their chosen sightings are included in this edition of Ad Astra Per Educare, in which we will explore the possibilities of extra-terrestrial intelligences and our search for them, starting with the Drake Equation and ending with the recent sightings by air force and navy personnel. We will look at various methods for detecting exoplanets, and which ones are the most likely to be Earth-like and in the Goldilocks Zone, or Habitable Zone, of their stars. We’ll also look at an intriguing experiment to detect galaxy-wide civilizations by their waste heat signatures, called the G-Hat project. I will put the main articles of this edition into this blog site over the next few weeks, and upload the final version by next week.

I was contacted last year by a reporter for a news outlet called The 74, meaning the 74 million students who are in school in the United States, regarding how I use my UFO encounter in the classroom. She wanted to capitalize on the rash of press about the navy and air force sightings and congressional investigation, and she had contacted people I know at SETI, who put out the word for any volunteers. I said yes so she called me up and I told her my story. And thought nothing more about it.

Then later in the year I had a parent of one of my students say he had seen an article about me in The Guardian, a British world news magazine that I often read for international perspectives. I thought he must mean a different David Black, because there are quite a few of us around. But no, he said it also mentioned New Haven School. Intrigued, I found the article and it was a reprint of the one done by the reporter for The 74. It seems strange to me that my little UFO incident went international. If you want to read the entire article, here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jun/09/ufo-science-classes-us-students

I think I’ve pretty much used up my 15 minutes of fame.

A spray-painted image of the Epsilon Indi star system, with the main K-dwarf star in the upper right and the two brown dwarfs, which orbit around each other, in the foreground.

As a separate but related assignment, my students created exoplanet paintings similar to the ones shown in our previous editions. I had 12 students in the class, used better equipment, and most students did two paintings, so I have more to choose from. Their paintings provide most of the illustrations in this 4th edition.

I hope you enjoy the readings and student analyses. This is the fourth of seven editions that use articles written by students at New Haven School. Because of the nature of the school, I cannot provide the students’ full names due to privacy concerns. In most cases the students have worked through three drafts of their essays with peer and teacher review. I think they have done a marvelous job. Enjoy!

Another spray-painted illustration of a purple planet orbiting an orange giant star.

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