Art Bell replays a 1999 Coast to Coast AM episode where Peter Davenport details UFO sightings—like Brixon Price’s blue-white flashes near Lava Hot Springs, Idaho (June 26) and Owen Mitchell’s silent, ball-shaped object in New Jersey—defying conventional explanations. Roy A. Tucker, an asteroid expert, discusses undetected near-Earth objects, their chaotic orbits (e.g., 1999 AN-10), and the futility of current deflection methods against extinction-level threats, while debunking myths like "planet busters." James Tague’s lunar shadow question pivots to Tucker’s celestial mechanics before Bell transitions to KCMO’s Mike Murphy. The episode underscores humanity’s vulnerability to both cosmic and unexplained phenomena, urging vigilance in the skies. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be wherever you are in this great land of ours.
And that's a lot of territory, folks, from the Hawaiian and Tahitian Islands out west commercially, eastward, all the way to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Talleyo and St. Thomas, and elsewhere, south into South America, north all the way to the pole, and of course, worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
Now, in a moment, we're going to have Peter Davenport on, and yes, we're going to ask him the Gersten question.
And he's got some eyewitnesses to bring forward tonight.
I think you're going to be fascinated.
In the second portion of the show tonight, we're going to be talking about near-Earth asteroids with somebody who knows about them and has found them, Roy A. Tucker.
One, we are having a rare, unusual internet domain name auction.
Two infamous domain names can be yours if you're the high bidder.
And that's going on on our website right now.
Not to be missed.
One of the top headlines.
Sometimes life is so much fun.
Anyway, we're having an auction.
Doname names that are owned and we're willing to, you know, it's like you have to sign a little green card on the car or whatever it is, right?
Pink slip, right?
So we're going to have an auction and then turn the pink slip on these domain names over to anybody who wants them.
All right.
That's one item, so you must go to my website and see if you wish to make a bid at www.artbell.com.
Same place you can get the G2 player and then come back, put it, load it into your computer, come back to my website, and you'll be able to see the show underway live.
Item two, the Drudge Report.
I quote verbatim.
High flying, it says freak rare cloud with possible warning.
And I read you yesterday about a pollution cloud over the Indian Ocean, just a giant thing.
Listen to Drudge tonight.
High-flying clouds of ice crystals were spotted in the sky over Colorado Tuesday night.
The first time ever that they have been this close to the equator.
The cloud clusters are common closer to both poles of our Earth during the summer, but they have never been spotted in the U.S. south of North Dakota.
According to Gary Thomas, a professor at the University of Colorado's Lab for Atmospheric and Space Physics, he told the Denver Rocky Mountain News, this could be a signal that something's happening to our upper atmosphere.
The news, Charlie Brennan, reports that Tuesday's sightings were recorded by three men in three locations.
An instructor for meteorology, Richard Keene, near Boulder, a Utah State University physics professor, Mike Taylor in Logan, Utah, Mark Ziklik, I believe, a cloud researcher in Edmonton, Canada.
Diverse theories about what could cause such ice crystals over such a strange mid-latitude area indeed.
They range from a trend of change to perhaps greenhouse gases.
All right, Peter, you're here tonight from New Jersey because there's some hot stuff going on.
But just before we get to that, we're about to.
As you well know, I had Peter Gersten on the show, and he expressed an intent to depose you, as well as Dr. Greer, attempting to extract the names from you of those government agents and the agencies they said they represented so he can go forward with disclosure.
And we had quite a talk about that last night, and I can't let tonight start without asking Peter Davenport what he'll do.
Well, I don't think we'll have to get to having Peter depose me.
He and I have exchanged a couple of emails on this, and I actually support his work to the hilt.
I think he's doing a wonderful job.
I did consent in one of my emails to him to contact these individuals and request their permission to release their names and addresses to Peter so he may contact them.
I think Peter is probably dissatisfied because I haven't done that yet.
But on the other hand, he probably doesn't understand how busy I've been for about the last two months.
It's been inhumanly busy.
And I'll get in touch with him when I get back to Seattle.
But I don't think it'll have to come down to his deposing me.
After all, that's a very expensive process in terms of time and treasury.
I think we can avoid that.
I will do the best I can to put him in touch with these individuals, and he can proceed from there.
And I think our listeners tonight are just going to be fascinated with not only what our eyewitnesses have to say, but the significance of what they may be describing, since there were events just before what happened over northern Idaho this past Saturday night and events elsewhere in the country shortly after the incident.
Well, the first was a sighting over Nicholasville, Kentucky at about 10 minutes after midnight.
That's Central Daylight Time, I believe.
And the event that we're going to be talking about tonight and the eyewitnesses will be describing occurred about five to eight minutes later.
Now, we have no guarantee, of course, that we're talking about the same objects.
It could well be that we had two groups of objects over the United States on Saturday night of this past week.
But what I'd like to do is give just a very brief pricey synopsis of what happened over Idaho, and then perhaps we could go to our first witness and let her describe with her own words what she saw and what she experienced.
But basically, in a nutshell, a mother and her son witnessed a very, very bright object in the vicinity of Lava Hot Springs, Idaho.
I'm on the road.
I don't have a map with me, but I presume it's somewhere in the upper reaches of Idaho.
What they did not realize at the time is that a very experienced pilot, in fact, an Air Force pilot, was just closing his eyes to go to sleep at about that time, or perhaps a minute or two later, when he saw an intensely bright flash that caused him to open his eyes.
What I would like to do is go to our first eyewitness, Art, and invite her to describe and perhaps followed by her son's description.
What your mother just described to me really sounds pretty close to a scene right out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a bright, intense light.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, as my mother was saying, she was standing, she saw the blinking lights the four times it flashed.
She was sitting on the edge of the deck, so she saw that a lot better than I did.
I saw the flashes.
But as she was standing in the door talking to my uncle, I was watching the woods the whole time.
And when it started, everything started moving, it looked like, and you could see real intense beams of light that was shining through the trees.
So the presence of that object, are you saying, somehow interrupted your perception of it or your memory of it, or it caused some kind of anomalous response in you.
Is that correct?
unidentified
Correct.
Like I say, I was facing north and it was just coming over the house where I could see about a quarter of it.
And next thing I remember, I'm facing east and facing down in the woods, and it's pitch black.
Well, a lot of people are doing work with regressive hypnosis, and if what happened to you happened to me, I think I'd find somebody and see if I could find out what happened to me during that time.
Well, I could probably tell you a lot, but I'm going to leave it up to him to describe a little bit about his background.
But let me just say, Art, that one of the reasons I wanted to bring this case to the attention of our listeners tonight is, one, because of the bizarre nature of it.
Two, because there were multiple witnesses at about the same time.
But the third reason is perhaps the most important, and that is the credentials and the seeming serious-minded nature of the witnesses who remember the incident very well and who report very precisely what it was they saw.
Not only does it seem precise, but what they describe is very similar to what I think we'll hear our next eyewitness, Owen Mitchell, describe.
And I'm going to leave it to him to discuss some of his background, some of his credentials in the military and aviation, and allow him to share with our listeners tonight what it was that he experienced and what he saw near Lava Hot Springs, Idaho on Sunday night.
But if I may kind of orient the position of our cabin in relation to the prices, we're located on the eastern slope of a mountain.
Both cabins are.
My cabin is about a half a mile almost due north and down the hill slightly from where the prices cabin is.
Okay.
What happened was Sunday night, I had just gone to bed.
It was about 11.15.
I had laid down in bed and I was watching out the window to the east, which faces on a heading of about 060 from our back of the cabin.
And I was looking, the direction I was looking was a northerly direction.
And I laid there for a few seconds looking at the stars, commenting to myself how beautiful it was and how clear it was and how bright the stars are.
And anyway, I laid there for a few seconds and then I closed my eyes to go to sleep.
After I had my eyes closed for, oh, maybe four to five seconds, extremely bright, intensely bright light startled me, and I opened my eyes.
At the second I opened my eyes, I happened to be looking in the same direction, and this round object traveling from east to west at an elevation I would say probably about 60 degrees in the sky from a horizontal plane.
It was so intense, you could just scarcely look at it.
And if it hadn't disappeared so quick, I probably would have looked away.
But I was so intensified myself with it that I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
But it appeared on a from about passing through about a heading of 030 to a heading of about 355 degrees, going, like I said, from east to west, almost directly west.
I'd say on a heading of about 280.
It was very bright.
It lit up the whole canyon.
The whole cabin, the side of the hills, the trees and everything was just like one continuous flash of lightning.
But the size of it was slightly larger than oh, the best I could describe it is if you held it held a silver dollar at arm's length when I saw the object.
It was about a little bit larger than a silver dollar at all.
And like I said, I would estimate it was about half a mile away.
Based mainly on what we'd heard from people that had seen it from down on the canyon on the opposite side of the hill, they were looking up to the east from their place, and their place is about three-quarters of a mile from my place, as a crow flies.
They were looking up and to the east, and they said they thought they saw lightning, steady flashes of lightning.
And if they lived three quarters of a mile, and I thought between here and there, so that's why I would say it was about a half a mile away.
I've talked to all of these people two, three, four, even five occasions now since Monday morning of this week, and their story hasn't changed one whit.
I might add, too, Monday morning after it was all over, and I was going to call the Sheriff's Department the night it's happened on Sunday night, and I thought, well, they'll be inundated with phone calls.
I won't bother them.
Monday morning, I called the Sheriff's Department.
I called the state police, three TV stations in Pocatello, and a control tower at the Pocatello airport, and they said nothing had been reported to them at all.
And it's yet another, what we've been talking about for months, even years now, Art.
These objects are not meteors.
They may fall under the category of fireballs, but they're fireballs with an intelligence, it seems.
This one apparently maneuvered, and I didn't tell our audience the whole story about how quickly this object may have gotten from Nicholasville, Kentucky up to Pocatello or Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, but the people in Nicholasville, Kentucky reported that they saw it at 11.10 p.m. Sunday night, and they watched it for two or three minutes.
That means that if we're talking about the same object that was seen over Nicholasville, Kentucky, that it traveled that distance from Nicholasville up to Idaho in two minutes or less.
And it did not generate a sonic boom that has been reported to us in any event.
That's pretty respectable, if it's the same object.
And the other part of the story that I have not yet reported is that a gentleman down in the San Diego area shortly after this incident, probably within 20 minutes or so, saw a very anomalous object.
He called it a turbofan.
I don't know what a turbo fan is.
It's a type of engine.
It's not a type of craft, to the best of my knowledge.
Coming up in a moment, we're going to talk about near Earth asteroids.
So far, they've been near.
Roy A. Tucker is going to be here, and he knows what he's talking about.
As a matter of fact, he has discovered three near-Earth asteroids, which we will catalog for you.
And that really must be something to look out there and to see this rock tumbling through space, one that nobody's seen before, and then have the adrenaline rush of trying to figure out where the rock is going.
He holds a bachelor's degree in physics, a master's in scientific instrumentation, and was a graduate student in the planetary sciences for three years.
And we've got a place on the web where you can see his full bio.
So, and by the way, his observatory is the Goodrick, and I'm going to say Pejong Observatory.
If an American pronounced it, it had come out Piggott.
We will ask him which is right in a moment.
So, we're going to talk about near-Earth asteroids, and we're going to talk about the Sun.
Now, somebody really raked me over the coals in email for something I said the other day.
I said, you know, there's some numbers flying around somewhere that say you are as likely to be killed by an asteroid in your lifetime as by a car or in a car accident.
And I said that, and they raked me over the coals.
In a moment, we'll ask the right person that question, Roy Tucker.
First of all, when I was sort of promoing the show we were going to do tonight the other night, I quoted a stat I heard somewhere, it might have been CNN or I don't know, that you are as likely to be killed by an asteroid in your lifetime as you are to die in a car crash.
Well, basically what's going on is that the numbers are being cooked, sort of like the way people, insurance companies, determine what their risks are for various things like earthquakes and such.
That's how they develop their actuarial tables.
To give you an idea, the current population of the Earth is 6 billion people.
And it's likely that some object like 10 kilometers like the KT, the Cretaceous Tertiary Boundary Impact event, will occur about once every, say, 100 million years or so.
And so that'll kill everybody.
And if you divide 6 billion people by 100 million, you get an average annual risk or number of people killed annually on the average of 60 people.
So assume a person's lifetime is like, oh, say 50 years, hypothetically, just for the sake of the numbers, 50 times 60 winds up to be about 3,000.
And you divide 3,000 by 6 billion, and you come up with some small percentage, but it's equivalent to some rare things like being killed in an airplane crash or something like that.
Ah, well, much of it is attributable to modern CCD technology.
The development of the charge-coupled device about 20 years ago, a little over 20 years ago, has produced an absolute revolution in astronomical research.
In my backyard, I've got a little observatory.
It's got a 14-inch aperture telescope, the Celestron 14, which is commercially available.
It's an amateur-sized telescope.
And the CCD imaging devices are terribly sensitive to light.
They will convert a good one will convert like 90% of the light that strikes it into a detectable signal that will register as a star image on the display screen.
And with this telescope, I'm able to see things as faint as the 200-inch telescope used to see 20 years ago.
To give your audience an idea of numbers and such, consider that the very faintest star you can see with the unaided eye on a clear dark night is about six magnitude.
The brightest thing you can see in the sky right now is the planet Venus over in the western sky after sunset.
Yeah, I think the I'm not an expert in seismology.
I think the way the Richter scale works is that Every number on the magnitude scale corresponds approximately to a factor of ten.
The eye responds to light logarithm logarithmically, sort of like.
And the magnitude scale was developed by a English astronomer by the name of Pogson about a hundred years ago, and it's basically for visual estimates.
And he was sort of trying to get an idea of, you know, star star A is approximately twice as bright as star B.
And the way it worked out, when they started developing photoelectric photometry in the early part of this century, it turned out that the magnitudes were turning out to be about 2.5 or thereabouts, a factor of 2.5 per magnitude.
So to make the mathematics work out nice and neatly, they just call it fifth root of 100 or 2.514.
Well, my telescope has a camera attached to it, a C C D camera.
And basically I just open up the shutter for a period of time.
The light strikes the C C D imager and the C C D imager is basically a X Y array of individual little photo cells.
You can imagine it.
And each one of these little photo cells is converting the light into an electric charge and then storing it in what is in effect a capacitor underneath each photo cell.
And then after the integration is completed, the exposure, you close the shutter, and then you electronically measure the accumulated charge on each one of these pixels.
And then you can, in the computer, build that up into a displayable image on the computer monitor.
And the way it works, with a two-minute exposure, I can see objects as faint as 20th magnitude, which is about 600,000 times fainter than the faintest thing you can see with the unaided eye.
It's basically imagine taking the moon, breaking off a small piece of it and putting it out further away from the Earth.
It's a rock just reflecting sunlight.
And when we discuss asteroids, we talk about their reflectivity or albedo.
And this varies considerably.
Some types of asteroids, the so-called sea or carbonaceous type asteroids, are very dark, darker than a blackboard, darker than a piece of cold, basically.
Whereas you take a silicate type asteroid, and silicate rocks tend to be kind of reflective, and they're easier to see, so they don't have to be quite so big to see those at some distance.
A near-Earth asteroid can be quite easy to distinguish because it's moving typically quite rapidly when you see it.
Normally these are small objects.
You only see them typically when they're close to the Earth and they're moving quite quickly.
And I have to tell you, when you see one and you know that's what it's got to be because it's moving so fast, I I tell people it's like every pleasure center in your brain goes off at once.
Yeah, so you see it's moving rapidly against its background, but you sort of get the impression, yeah, maybe it's getting closer to me, but it'll have the same sort of angular orientation with you.
But in celestial mechanics and polygon asteroids and such, it gets a wee bit more complicated because you're not often going to see an object just before it strikes you.
Basically, you're going to see them some millions of miles off, and you have to figure out their orbit before you can find out what it's going to do in the future, if it's going to pose some kind of a risk.
It's possible that in future times, say millions of years in the future, their orbits may evolve to where they will become Earth crossers, but for right now, no, they're just pretty to look at.
Apollo asteroids are objects that have orbits that are bigger than the orbit of the Earth, which means they take a little bit longer to go around the Sun than the Earth does.
But the near point of their orbit to the Sun lies within the orbit of the Earth.
Those are Earth crossers.
They can pose a hazard.
And then the Atens are asteroids that actually have orbits that are smaller than the Earth's orbit, but their most distant point from the Sun will be greater than the distance of the Earth.
Well, the ones we worry about are those objects that are bigger than one kilometer in size approximately.
It's at that point that the energies become quite extraordinary.
For example, a one-kilometer object, if it strikes at a velocity of 20 kilometers per second, which would be fairly typical, will release an energy equivalent to 100,000 megatons.
Well, you know, despite ladder movies that always have kazoom noises when things happen in space, the fact of the matter is, these rocks are whirling along at world-ending speeds without making so much as a whisper of sound as they pass.
There's an asteroid named Spock for the character Mr. Spock.
The earliest asteroids were given names from classical mythology.
But after the orbit is sufficiently well defined, after a long series of observations, usually requiring some years, the orbit is sufficiently well determined that it can be officially numbered.
And that basically means it's never going to get lost.
It might only have an error accumulate a few seconds of arc every decade or something like that.
Well, usually there are some stories from the early days of asteroid discoveries.
For example, there is a numbered object, 719 Albert, which was discovered, as I recall, back in 1911.
And at that time, it was pretty easy to get an asteroid numbered.
And so they went ahead and numbered this thing after only a short series of observations, but it was lost.
Nowadays, the procedure for getting objects numbered is much, much tighter.
So before an object is officially numbered, it has to be observed for many years, and the orbit has to be known quite precisely.
The way it works, when an object is first discovered, you have to get two nights of observations of it, and it is given then a provisional designation by the Minor Planet Center.
And that provisional designation is used until the object finally becomes numbered.
Well, listen, Paul, you know, Roy, I've been doing this show now for, oh boy, going on 14 years or something.
And so I've been reading stories about asteroids for all that time from the Associated Press, UPI, wherever, whatever news service we had at the time.
And I can't tell you how many times I've read stories I know from the Associated Press, for example, that will begin by saying, yesterday the Earth had a surprisingly very close call.
And when I read a story like that, I go, hmm, yesterday we had a close call.
Well, they didn't tell us about that yesterday, nor the day before.
They're telling us about that today.
And that always worried me a little bit because, you know, this means they didn't see it until it actually passed.
And they're about once every year or two you'll get some close approacher like that.
And perhaps it's disturbing to contemplate, but that's only the ones we actually see.
Up until about a year or so ago, the primary search operations professionally were, for example, Space Watch Camera here in Tucson at the Kitt Peak Observatory.
It's operated by some folks at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
They've been in operation since about 1981 or 82, as I recall.
And they've got quite a good number of stories, but they only observe a tiny fraction of the sky every month, about, as I recall, 400 square degrees or so.
Bearing in mind that the sky consists of something like 27,000 square degrees or something like that.
They're only looking at a tiny fraction of the sky.
And so a lot of the sky gets unmonitored.
The other search operations, for example, NEAT Near Earth Asteroid Tracking, that's run by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as I recall.
About a year and a half ago, another program was started in New Mexico, Socorro, New Mexico.
That's what's called LINER, the Lincoln Laboratory's Near-Earth Asteroid Research Program.
And what they are doing is operating an Air Force telescope.
It's a one-meter aperture telescope, lots of light-gathering ability.
And they have engineered an extraordinary camera to go on that telescope.
It covers a lot of sky every night, something like 1,200 square degrees per night.
It's a huge area of sky.
And they do this for a good portion of the month.
And the idea being to look at as much of the opposition region of the sky and the region surrounding it as again.
Asteroids are brightest when they're opposite the sun in the sky.
That's when they're closest to the Earth.
That's when they're directly opposite the Sun.
The reflectivity is geometrically most ideal for making them appear bright.
And typically, an operation like Linear will see a faint object, typically on the order of, say, 18th or 19th magnitude, terribly faint, and it'll be observable for two or three weeks, and then quite possibly will become too faint to see again for a while.
discuss that but in Armageddon there was actually in both there was quite a bit of warning and In other words, they knew months or better ahead of time that here she comes.
Both of those movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, the threat was posed by a long-period comet or basically just suddenly appeared.
And that's quite plausible.
You can look at, for example, about two years ago, Comet Hyakate appeared in, as I recall, February or so, and made a very close approach to the Earth in March and April.
It got as close as about 10 million miles, which is one of the closer approaches in history.
And we only had perhaps three months' warning.
If, for example, Comet Hale Bop had been on an intercept orbit with the Earth, we might have had perhaps three years' warning.
Yes, basically, when you first discover an object, an asteroid or a comet, your knowledge of the orbit is very poorly known.
You have to watch it over a period of time, days, weeks, before you finally start getting a very good idea of what the orbit looks like, how much of a threat it compose.
And the example that I saw in the literature about Hakotake was basically the threat envelope, if you will, looks like an ellipse on a plane with the Earth represented as a circle.
And this ellipse is much bigger than the Earth.
The ellipse essentially represents the probable range of possible orbital elements, possible missed distances, if you will, statistically.
And only when it gets very close, after you've got a very long arc and you refine your knowledge of the motion very precisely, can you really say for sure it's going to hit or not.
But even three years out, if the early calculations looked like it was going to hit, or had a possibility of hitting, if it was in that sort of window, then what would begin to happen, do you think?
Yeah, when I think of, you know, somebody coming up with a realistic movie about trying to prevent the impact of a comet or an asteroid, I more or less think of something along the lines of the movie On the Beach, if you'll recall.
And On the Beach, for those of you who don't know, folks, is a sad, morbid tale of the end of humanity with the southern latitudes being the last to go after a nuclear war with radiation spreading and finally killing everybody.
You're telling me your scenario would be more like that?
The problems are essentially our poor current state of knowledge of what asteroids are really like.
The idea is that if you could loft a large enough weapon, and the literature I've been reading has been talking about weapons that weigh some tens of thousands of tons, if you will.
And you have to get them there soon enough, like months, maybe even years in advance, to really deflect a really large object one kilometer in diameter.
Yeah, hypothetically, if you could deflect an object, say, three years before it was going to hit, you'd only have to nudge it with a velocity of about one centimeter per second so that that tiny little velocity accumulates over a long period of time, and it whizzes by the Earth instead of striking it.
Now, the problem, there's a problem there also.
Sure, you might cause it to avoid the Earth this time, but you've changed its orbit a little bit, and what you might have done is merely postpone the execution until a later time.
If an object of that sort hit and we had no prior knowledge of it, this is a question you may not be able to answer.
But would the United States, or even perhaps more worrisome, would Russia, if such a thing hit Moscow or Leningrad or a major city and not Shunguska, would they be able to immediately or quickly enough discern that they had been not the victim of a nuclear attack of some sort?
The effects may initially appear somewhat similar as far as the blast and heat and such, but the total absence of radioactivity would be a dead giveaway that it was not a nuclear attack.
Well, the difference, I dare say that even in such an event, the types of emissions and such, in such an event, yeah, there would be some radiation perhaps, but the types of radiation and such probably would be distinguishable if you took a close look at it.
Of course, with a major city suddenly vaporized virtually, it might be hard for the leadership to make a decision because it would have to be a very fast decision.
Yeah, well, an object penetrating the atmosphere would leave a long trail.
That would be another bit of evidence, too.
People would see this thing flying along.
It'd be extraordinarily bright, far brighter than the sun.
And the fact that a lot of people would see this thing passing through the atmosphere before it finally hit the surface, that would be another line of evidence that would be a dead giveaway that it wasn't a nuclear attack.
For example, about a year and a half ago, I think it was December 1997, as I recall, a small object entered the atmosphere and struck above Greenland.
There should be a total of about 2,000, but the correction, let me correct that.
That's potentially hazardous asteroids.
I need to introduce another concept here.
The potentially hazardous asteroids are those of the Earth-approaching asteroids that are known to present hazard because they get fairly close within about 5 million miles or so.
Now, the total number of asteroids, near-Earth asteroids, that are larger than 1 kilometer is 377.
But of those, only 76 are recognized as potentially hazardous asteroids.
So we have a population of approximately 2,000 objects larger than a kilometer or thereabouts.
And when you start going to the smaller sizes, objects down to about 100 meters or so or slightly smaller, for example, Tunguska was about 60 meters in size.
You can expect that there may be in the vicinity of the Earth, some estimates indicate there might be over a million, although many estimates indicate some hundreds of thousands.
It's basically sort of like an exponentially decaying type thing dating back to when the solar system formed four and a half billion years ago.
And a lot of the objects that we're going to hit have already hit, so we've exhausted that supply.
But there's nevertheless a continuing supply of new objects being provided by the main asteroid belt.
It's expected that collisions occur among the main asteroid belt, and that's like, say, two to three astronomical units away from the sun.
They're safe out there, but over time, perturbations from the major planets will cause the orbits of objects to evolve or change.
And there's a continuing supply of small objects, and they have to be fairly small for various reasons.
Their orbits will change until finally they'll cross the orbit of Mars, and interactions with Mars will greatly speed up the process of delivering them to the inner solar system.
And not all of them will impact the planets.
Actually, more than likely, they're either going to dive into the Sun or they're going to be ejected from the solar system or something like that by a close encounter with major planets.
The planets really are small targets, so we don't often get hit.
Most of the asteroids that are moved into the inner solar system, like I say, will strike the sun or be ejected.
With our current technology, a large object, on the order of, say, between the range of 1 to 10 kilometers, our current technology wouldn't be able to do much about it in that kind of time scale.
If we've got a couple of decades, maybe we can do something about it.
But 18 months, yeah, basically you want to put your final affairs in order or something like that.
But bear in mind that it's difficult to discern the risk that well.
There's always a slight chance it'll be off a decimal place or something like that.
It could still whiz by.
And I think to some extent, as far as governments and wishful thinking and such, a lot of people are I think there's a natural human tendency to doubt that people have really got their stories straight.
And of course there are folks that will leap upon it and say the end of the world is coming.
So there's going to be a I would imagine there'd be quite a broad spectrum of responses.
Well I guess I'm asking would the public likely be told right away and here's why I'm asking.
There was a recent big controversy not about something that might happen soon but for like 24 hours they thought there was a possibility something in I forget 2030 or 40 was going to hit the earth something big.
Yeah there have been three instances in recent times.
There was the 1997 XF-11 affair which was really the first time the alarm bell was rung and then m more this year they recognized 1999 AN-10 and then just about a month or two ago 1998 OX4 I guess it is.
These are objects that could pose serious risk.
In fact, 1998 OX49 AN10 is the one that's supposed to be essentially in the vicinity of the Earth for something like 600 years and could pose a risk all during that time.
And the orbit is sort of chaotic.
You can't really tell into the indefinite future exactly what it's going to do.
The folks at the Minor Planet Center were embroiled in a controversy about having mentioned it in such a public forum and such.
As far as what would actually happen, it kind of depends upon how well disseminated the original information was with regard to the observations of the object.
If the positions of the object were published in the literature and other researchers, other researchers, there's a very active group in Italy that look at asteroid and comet orbits.
If this data was in the open and people could analyze it and try to analyze what sort of risk was involved, I think it would become public knowledge, no matter what any particular government wanted to say.
And I used to go up to the library and check out a book every once in a while to read during study hall and such.
I checked out an astronomy book, and I read about a phenomenon called the zodiacal light, which is produced by dust particles in orbit around the sun.
Basically produces a sort of twilight glow after the sunset and before sunrise when the true twilight in the atmosphere has faded.
And I tried to go out that morning, one morning to see it, but I didn't actually see it or didn't recognize it at the time.
But I was so entranced with the beauty of the morning sky that it was my habit to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning for the next year.
And I just happened in November of that year when I got up.
I went out to get the newspaper and I was trying to make out the headline by the light of a distant street light, and all of a sudden the front page of the newspaper was lit up.
And I looked up and the sky was just filled with meteors.
Since we are on the subject of meteor showers, there was quite a controversy about the last big one, whether last year was going to be the big show or whether this year is going to be the big show.
Basically, it's a complicated world we live in, and the universe, there's so many very subtle effects.
For example, if you look at the rings of Saturn, before the Voyager spacecraft went by Saturn, people just sort of thought, well, gee, it's sort of broad, general rings without much in the way of features.
Through a small telescope, you can see some features like the Cassini's division and such.
But they look through a telescope like fairly smoothly structured.
But of course, we know when the Voyager spacecraft went by, we could see all sorts of grooves, almost like a phonograph record, of fine ringlets or divisions in these rings.
And it's just that there's all sorts of little subtle effects going on.
And celestial mechanics, the motion of objects with essentially no friction in a vacuum, very tiny, subtle effects can add up over long periods of time to make things more complicated like that.
And our knowledge of nature in the universe is imperfect.
That's an extinction-level event if you didn't see the movie.
No worry, no need for stored food or anything else.
Just a little introspection, I imagine, would be the order of the day.
We have with us a very, very interesting guest, Roy Tucker, who, by the way, if you had not been listening earlier, holds a bachelor's degree in physics, a master's in scientific instrumentation.
was a graduate student in the planetary sciences for three years.
And we're talking about lots of things.
Right now, I want to ask him a little bit about the sun.
The minute she rounds about 200, it begins to get pretty interesting on the HF bands.
Anyway, you know, a lot of people, we've got this satellite out there, SOHA, and it watches the sun, and we're getting all these reports now on space weather that we've never heard before, and reports on the sun.
And really weird things are going on in the media.
I mean, they were all worried about Y2K at the beginning of the year, and then we began to get these reports that forget about Y2K.
What's going to happen with our Sun right around January of 2000 may be more of an impact than Y2K.
They've recognized that in ultraviolet imaging, they can recognize an S-shaped arrangement of magnetic fields on the surface of the sun.
And if that happens to be more or less sort of in the middle of the disk of the sun, it's sort of like the cosmic equivalent of having a cosmic shotgun barrel pointed at you because it's very likely that very shortly it will eject a lot of charged particles in your direction.
There was such a big one released here in the last week or so, week and a half, that for a few nervous moments, according to the BBC, scientists were not sure whether this incredible coronal mass ejection was headed directly away from us or directly toward us.
And they referred to it in the article as a planet buster.
Now, that may have been a little overkill with rhetoric, but that's what they called it, a planet buster.
Well, I think they may have been taking some liberties there.
Generally speaking, when one of these things happens, you might get, for example, a power grid knocked out because of transient voltages induced into the lines.
Communications might be disrupted.
And you could get some extraordinarily wonderful northern lights and such, too.
But as far as anything really death-dealing or anything like that, I think that'd be a bit of an exaggeration.
Also, scientists lately have seen suns that they had thought to be stable suns suddenly brighten unaccountably.
And it seems to be puzzling them, but it would seem to indicate that there is a possibility that suns that we require, that we think of as generally very stable, like our sun, I would hope, can occasionally do something really weird and get very bright for some reason.
There are very uh there's a pretty large number of mechanisms that uh cause stars to vary in brightness.
But generally speaking uh these are stars that are more evolved uh than our sun.
Um the way stars work is that when they first form they uh go through a a rather rambunctious period when they're settling down to normal life and they'll go through some periods of variability.
But once they more or less settle down to where they to what we call their position on the main sequence which more or less depends upon the mass of the star an object a star will sit there quite quietly for most of its life.
Our sun we should expect to remain quite stable for a lifetime on the order of 8 to 9 billion years and then it'll swell into a giant star.
And it's usually at this time in the lifetime of a star that they'll go through some sort of some sort of phenomenon that will cause them to vary in brightness for various reasons.
I think I can pretty safely state our sun's going to be pretty stable.
There's interesting questions about, for example, why are there so few neutrinos being observed coming from the core of our star?
Apparently our understanding of how our sun produces its energy is not totally understood.
There's basically only two ways you can see what's going on inside of a star.
You look at the number of neutrinos or the type of neutrinos being produced by the nuclear reactions at the core, which is something they've been doing since the 1960s, and a more recent technique.
Yeah, they were very puzzled because initially there were too few neutrinos being observed.
These neutrinos are produced by these nuclear reactions at the center of the sun.
And there was various speculation about, gee, perhaps the sun's in a quiescent period where it's not really producing much energy now or something like that.
And there's a lot of speculation now that perhaps there's a, because of our imprecise knowledge of the neutrino, they used to be thought to be totally massless particles.
And they recently found out that there is indeed apparently a very tiny rest mass.
So our understanding of the neutrino is not perfect.
And they're speculating that in the time that it takes these neutrinos to fly from the sun and arrive at the Earth, they may be changing from one type of neutrino to the other.
And we've just been looking at the wrong kind.
And that seems to be looking that there's a very close examination of that hypothesis right now.
You may recall during the Apollo program there was lots of concern that the astronauts would be flying to the moon during times of solar activity and they could get doses of X-radiation and such.
Yeah, I'm not really quite sure how much dose they would get, but it was a significant concern.
Consider, for example, just flying across the Atlantic in a transcontinental aircraft.
You're flying at about, say, 30,000 feet or so.
And if a solar flare occurs while you're on that flight, you could get about 100 millirem of radiation exposure, which is almost a year's worth of normal background radiation exposure.
Oh, now it is very interesting you should mention that, for I have two short stories to tell you.
One comes from a first officer of a major airline, and you're welcome to take a stab at this, flying a daily route to Minneapolis, St. Paul.
Okay.
And he said, this was several months ago, as a matter of fact, and it was during a period of very intense sun activity, you know, sunspot activity, solar storms were occurring.
We were getting some real buttes.
And they said that the entire sky was lit.
And they were used to seeing northern lights, and I've seen them many times.
I used to live in Alaska, you know, the shimmering northern lights you get.
But in this case, the sky was almost completely artificially lit, it seemed.
And they began to feel, both the first officer and pilot, a disorientation of some sort.
Queasy, funny feeling.
And they sent me a fax, and it was followed by another pilot flying nearly the same route.
Now, check this out, who, when he landed, going through the same disorientation and strange feeling with a lighted sky.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, one of the more significant effects as far as solar cycle and such is the far ultraviolet and X-radiation that will cause the outer atmosphere to expand.
Satellites will tend to spiral in faster because of the increased drag on their orbits and such.
Really?
This could perhaps cause some change in the upper atmosphere, the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.
As far as effects on the climate, though, I'm afraid that's kind of beyond my expertise.
But one of the things that people have wondered about is the output of sunlight by the sun constant, the so-called solar constant.
And there's been a lot of monitoring, efforts to monitor the solar constant very precisely to see if there is a tiny variation in output of the sun and therefore changes in the warming of the surface and such.
The effects that I've encountered in the literature seem to be too small.
It would appear that the more significant effect as far as climate change might perhaps be m related to changes in the orbit of the Earth.
Over long periods of time, thousands of years and such, the shape of the Earth's orbit will change, the eccentricity, the close and most distant positions of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun will change, so that perhaps the summertime may correspond to a time when the Earth is closest to the Sun in its orbit.
And you might expect then the summers will be hotter at that time.
These types of variations are pretty well known for, for example, Mars.
When the Mariner spacecraft began looking at Mars at the northern and southern polar regions, they saw that these polar caps had a terraced type of appearance.
And by carefully studying these features, they were able to determine that this was water ice that had been deposited over thousands of years.
And the variations in these terraces appeared to correspond to changes in the orbit of Mars.
They seem to be closely correlated.
And so it would appear that the water ice had been deposited on the Martian poles.
The deposition was affected by the orbital characteristics of Mars at various times in the past.
And so they speculate that a lot of the water is soaked into the upper crust of Mars and it's basically there percolating through the soil.
Although it's quite possible that a lot of the water has been simply lost.
Mars is a small plant.
The gravity isn't terribly strong.
And water vapor would be lost.
Or alternatively, or perhaps in addition, the solar ultraviolet radiation would break the water up into hydrogen and oxygen, and these lighter gases would be lost because the gravity is so weak.
Although it's quite apparent there used to be an awful lot of water there.
You can see all sorts of canyons and such from the distant past.
There are others who speculate something very violent might have occurred to Mars.
For example, an asteroid or a comet could have made a pass not hitting Mars necessarily, though it might have, actually grazing the atmosphere and destroying it.
A lot of the literature I've encountered in the past suggests that the comets do more to deposit water onto a planet's surface rather than cause it to walk away.
For example, they recently determined that there's very likely water on the poles of Mars.
And it's speculated that this water essentially has, this ice has accumulated because of impacts on the moon by small comets and such over geologic time.
And this would produce a very tenuous transient atmosphere around the moon.
And since these permanently shaded parts of the moon are pretty cold, the water vapor would tend to condense there and form these ice deposits.
So as far as removing the water from Mars, I think that that's probably not a very plausible hypothesis.
Basically, the numbers, you know, you can calculate the numbers and they look very plausible.
You know, it's been four and a half billion years since the solar system formed.
There have been calculations that suggest that the loss rate might be appropriate for just simply the water vapor essentially leaking away from the atmosphere of Mars.
If you look at the distribution of velocities of molecules in an atmosphere with temperature, you can see that at the size of Mars, you know what the escape velocity is going to be from Mars, and the extreme high-velocity tail of distributions of molecular motions in the atmosphere might exceed the escape velocity from Mars.
The ejection velocities of these particles being thrown from an impact on the moon would be basically distributed around the moon's orbital motion around the Earth.
And so what we'd probably see is these particles would just basically weave around in orbit around the Earth and could eventually either fall back to the moon, perhaps eventually make their way to fall into the atmosphere of the Earth, or totally escape from the Earth-Moon system and go into orbit around the Sun.
And you're listening to Roy A. Tucker, who has discovered three near-Earth asteroids, three of them, a high-inclination Mars-crossing asteroid, and a comet.
Pretty cool stuff, actually, when you think about it.
If you have a question for them, we're open for it.
We're going to lay heavily into the lines this hour.
Last year, there were two comets that I guess they slammed into the sun June of last year.
And it looked like they, based on what the SOHO satellite was observing, it looked like a large ejection came from the sun after the two comets collided into the sun.
Was there any other follow-ups from that collision?
And also, did anybody from Earth see these two comets coming towards the sun before SOHO picked them up?
Soho has been doing some remarkable stuff as far as discovering these sun-grazing and sun-impacting comets.
In fact, I think they just announced the Minor Planet Center announced two or three more sun grazers.
I guess I should mention that there is a website, the Minor Planet Center's website, where they post these discoveries and such.
I don't recall the web address right off the top of my head, but just do a web search for Minor Planet Center and you'll wind up there.
And SOHO has been finding quite a string of these objects.
They generally tend to be rather faint objects, although as I recall, there was one last year that did achieve naked eye visibility and could be seen for a brief time after sunset.
But generally speaking, these are faint objects, and they only get observable because they get close to the sun.
They're small objects.
And they get close to the sun, they become quite bright because the sunlight's very strong there.
And some of the SOHO satellites is out in space, and they don't have to worry about the Earth's atmosphere and such to interfere with things.
When an object like one of these comets strikes the Sun, I imagine that it would be observable as far as causing some event in the Sun's atmosphere.
For one thing, there's a tremendous amount of kinetic energy when one of these comets impacts the Sun.
And of course, you have all the volatile material.
It suddenly gets evaporated.
And I imagine it would affect the Sun's atmosphere perhaps in an observable fashion.
Although, of course, you have to recognize the Sun is an enormous thing.
It's 865,000 miles across.
It's almost a million miles across.
And of course, it has a powerful gravity and things like that.
But nevertheless, I would expect, actually being ignorant of the literature as far as this goes, but I would expect that there should be some observable transient phenomenon related to the impact.
Actually, I seem to recall that was a relatively small one, but they still said that it was equivalent to about a half a kiloton or something like that.
Again, as you noted, it was sort of close in time to the Greenland event.
It happens that such events occur fairly often for these small impactors.
For example, on a sort of once-a-year type basis, you can expect an object on the order of five or six meters in size to enter the Earth's atmosphere, and that will yield 10 or 20 kilotons of energy, approximately equal to a Hiroshima-type bomb.
But unless they're made of iron, they're basically going to produce an explosion high in the Earth's atmosphere.
It's very rare for something like that to penetrate the atmosphere.
It would have to be essentially made out of iron to actually penetrate the atmosphere and reach the ground.
So, yeah, they do produce quite a bit of noise, a flash and such, but only if they're getting to be on the order of some hundreds of kilotons of yield, some tens of meters in size, do they actually penetrate deeply enough into the atmosphere that they can start posing a hazard?
And there's another website basically related to the Air Force Space Command that reports such events that are detected by the network of satellites that look for nuclear weapons tests that apparently see these things two or three times a year, and they post the notices as far as geographical location and approximate energy yield.
Again, I don't have that web address, but I think a web search could lead one there pretty quickly.
Boy, to the observer on the ground, you really wouldn't be able to immediately detect whether this thing was headed toward you or was going to hit the ground.
Your perspective from the ground would be you really wouldn't know, would you?
No, in fact, when various meteoric events have been analyzed after the fact, it's quite notable that many witnesses often estimated the altitude as much lower than it actually was.
They often note that it was totally silent.
And of course, if an object is 50 or 60 kilometers up in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is thin enough that the sound doesn't propagate very well.
Oh, yeah, it's fully one-thousandth the mass of the sun.
And in fact, the solar system has occasionally been described as the sun, Jupiter, and debris.
The solar system is predominantly, as far as gravitational influences and such, the solar system is primarily the sun and Jupiter.
And there has been a lot of discussion in the literature in recent times about what the life in the inner solar system would be like if Jupiter weren't there.
Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune are thought to have ejected a lot of loose material left over from the formation of the solar system, To have ejected it from the solar system and cleared a lot of this loose debris out.
Otherwise, we might have there we might have a much higher rate of impact or flux than we do now.
Yeah, but some of them, when they hit Jupiter, even though I guess they were going faster, left blackened marks or marks that seemed to remain for a while, sort of an afterglow, that were actually the size of Earth itself.
Oh, yeah, I looked at Jupiter with a small telescope at that time.
These marks were plainly obvious, even through a small telescope.
One wonders about the actual nature of the coloring matter.
Was this some sort of substance produced because of the heat and impact and shock of the impactor, or was this some material that was deposited by the impactor?
The exact nature of the coloring matter was debated quite a bit.
Yeah, it was quite notable in leaving these marks.
I seem to recall estimates on the order of a kilometer or so, and some of the other, the smaller ones, were probably on the order of some hundreds of meters.
Roy, there's been more than one occasion that we've had these, I don't know what you, asteroids?
Smaller than a baseball that have hit in our area in the last few years.
And I was concerned, well, no, I was wondering how many times the how many times does this happen that they're not reported?
Because at one point we had one that had fallen that they said was about the size of a softball, and when the authorities got there, some kids had already snatched it up and run away with it.
Well, the closest I've ever actually come to finding meteorites myself, I was in the Air Force in Thailand back in 1973 and 4.
And this is an area where Australasian tectites are found.
Essentially, about 600,000 years ago, an object impacted somewhere in that region and produced a spray of ejecta, glassy stones essentially called tectites.
And I knew when I went to Thailand these objects were found there, and I spent some time go out in the local hills looking for them.
And I actually brought back 110 pounds of them with me.
Really?
I didn't find them all myself.
I had a lot of help from some of the Thai locals.
I basically offered a bounty for them, and they provided, like I say, about 110 pounds of them.
So I can't say I've actually collected a meteorite, but I had an experience not too dissimilar from that.
Yeah, I actually did look through some of these to see if there were like little tiny particles or something like that, but they really are interesting objects.
I've seen some interesting things, but as far as something that one might call a UFO, back in my early days, about 1968 or so, I was out looking with the telescope, and I saw this red light, sort of like a bright star, moving along at a fairly stately pace.
And I pointed my telescope at it and immediately recognized that it was a railroad flare hanging underneath a bunch of balloons.
So I'm afraid that's the closest brush I've ever had with anything like that.
Soho right now is in one of the vibrational points.
I think it's at some vibration point that's between us, on the line between us and the sun.
And it's hard to see how they would be able to do that unless they were going to move it into a different orbit that would carry it over behind the sun.
But that's not likely because it was sort of designed as far as the radio transmitters and such to be sort of close up, like a million miles away or so.
Could it possibly be they were referring to the Ulysses spacecraft by chance?
Well, I'm sort of reminded of the Chernobyl disaster some years ago.
Sometime afterwards, some Russian official was describing to a room full of reporters what had happened and basically told them that the engineers had conducted a poorly planned and unauthorized experiment and things had gotten out of hand.
And one of the reporters asked, oh, what happened to those engineers?
And I've got a question regarding the relative velocity of these different asteroid objects that might be out there.
And my question is really, could there be an object coming pretty much straight at us at some incredible speed that we would basically have no chance whatsoever to detect it or intercept it?
Are there some physical limitations as to how fast an object might be able to enter our solar system?
Generally speaking, when we discuss the asteroid and comet threat, we more or less confine our considerations to solar system objects.
There has been some speculation that there may have occasionally been some cometary visitor from outside of our solar system, but it's not really been obviously so as far as their motions.
Essentially, all the comets that have been observed can be explained plausibly by stipulating that they were solar system objects.
So as far as a maximum possible speed, the comets are the most serious threat.
They have orbital inclinations that can be just any angle, including absolutely retrograde, which means we can hit one of these guys going head-on, going the opposite direction.
And in such an instance, the maximum possible velocity would be on the order of about 75 kilometers per second.
That's pretty fast.
You betcha.
The amount of energy is just incredible at that rate.
Remember that the energy goes up as the square of the velocity.
Wow.
And these long-period comets are one of the aspects of the impact threat that you really can't do much about.
Yeah, some of these comets have huge orbits that take them out to what's called the Oort cloud, a distance of some tens of thousands of astronomical units.
It's not implausible to discuss orbital periods that are tens, hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps even as much as a million years.
If it's basically a comet, you figure it's going to have a density pretty similar to ice.
The density of an object does play a part into what sort of damaging effects you would expect, but the range and density would be, say, seven for iron, seven grams per cubic centimeter, which is a, you know, it's like having a cannonball shot at you instead of a big snowball.
Right.
And some of the near-Earth asteroids are thought to be pretty fluffy things, perhaps with densities less than water.
But nevertheless, when you've got something going that fast, if it's large enough, it will pass through the Earth's atmosphere with a very sizable amount of its energy intact.
If you're talking about objects that are on the order of a kilometer in size.
The question first is, why don't they use the Hubble telescope more in this kind of work in trying to find the different asteroids that they really couldn't see, especially like the long-period comets?
To make a serious search for long-period comets, you would need a very large telescope that collects a lot of light because these things are going to be terribly, terribly faint.
And in fact, when you talk about objects that faint, you almost need to get above the Earth's atmosphere because the Earth's atmosphere glows.
You go out at night, even when you're in a place far from the cities where there's no artificial sources of light, you can hold your hand up.
You can still see a silhouette of your hand because the sky is not really dark.
The atmosphere glows.
In fact, it's reddish in color if your eyes were sensitive enough.
And there's enough light produced by the atmosphere at an altitude of 50 or 60 kilometers that it inhibits your ability to see faint things.
So to make a serious search for long-period comets, you'd have to have a really big telescope, much bigger than Hubble.
You'd have to be, almost have to be above the Earth's atmosphere.
And the optics would have to provide a very large field of view because you need to observe a lot of the sky, cover a very large amount of the sky to increase your chances of finding these things.
unidentified
Right, I know Hubble is more geared more to just specific objects.
And then what had happened, I noticed throughout the day well, not even throughout the day over a short period of time relatively within an hour, it went and shifted over to from Washington over to Utah over to Colorado and then back down to Arizona.
unidentified
And then it was really strange that one from Scotland got...
If those are noctalucent-type clouds, they're at a very high altitude of, like I say, about 85 kilometers or so, which is well above the troposphere, above the jet streams.
And also, you'd have to speculate about whether there is some sort of ionization associated with them.
At that altitude, I can imagine that that's in the lower reaches of the ionosphere.
You might speculate that there could perhaps be some sort of effect, although, like I said, I'm not even sure what kind of clouds they actually are.
Oh, well, the only time you see the shadow of the Earth on the moon is during a lunar eclipse.
And you will see that the shadow of the Earth is round.
It will be sort of always round under those circumstances.
The phases of the moon are caused by the fact that half of the moon is lit up by the sun, and the moon is going around us.
So a thin crescent moon is because we're seeing the backside of the moon that's the shadow of the rest of the moon.
Geometrically, the division between light and dark on the moon is half of an ellipse.
And if the moon is between us and the sun, we'll see this backside, unlit part of the, or we won't see it.
We'll only see the lit-up crescent part.
And as the moon goes around us, when it's over to the side, essentially forming a 90-degree angle between us and the sun, we will see half of the moon's lit illuminated surface, and we'll see a half-moon.
And then as it goes around us, and it's opposite in the sky from the sun, we'll see it entirely illuminated.
We'll see all the fully illuminated part of the moon.
All right, that, folks, is Roy A. Tucker, who has discovered a bunch of near-Earth asteroids, some Mars-crossing asteroids, one actually, and then a comet as well.
It's been a fascinating evening.
So we'll have him back.
In the meantime, tomorrow night, KCMO's Mike Murphy is going to be here.
And I think you're going to find it very interesting.
Mike is a man after my own intellectual curiosities.
We'll leave it at that.
He's quite a guy.
So that'll be tomorrow night, and I'll be back on Tuesday night.
So for now, from the high desert to you all, you know, keep your eyes on the skies.