Art Bell - 19990624_Art-Bell-SIT-Roy-Tucker-Near-Earth-Asteroids-The-Sun
Aired: 1999-06-24
Duration: 02:31:06


=== High Desert Good Evening (04:58) ===

[00:00:10]  Welcome to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[00:00:14]  Tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from June 24th, 1999.
[00:00:19]  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.
[00:00:27]  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.
[00:00:48]  This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
[00:00:52]  Now, in a moment, we're going to have Peter Davenport on, and yes, we're going to ask him the Gersten question.
[00:01:02]  And he's got some eyewitnesses to bring forward tonight.
[00:01:06]  I think you're going to be fascinated.
[00:01:09]  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.
[00:01:20]  And our son, that's going to be fascinating.
[00:01:22]  Two items very quickly before we get underway.
[00:01:26]  One, we are having a rare, unusual internet domain name auction.
[00:01:34]  Two infamous domain names can be yours if you're the high bidder.
[00:01:39]  And that's going on on our website right now.
[00:01:42]  Not to be missed.
[00:01:43]  One of the top headlines.
[00:01:48]  Sometimes life is so much fun.
[00:01:51]  Anyway, we're having an auction.
[00:01:54]  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?
[00:02:02]  Pink slip, right?
[00:02:03]  So we're going to have an auction and then turn the pink slip on these domain names over to anybody who wants them.
[00:02:13]  All right.
[00:02:14]  That's one item, so you must go to my website and see if you wish to make a bid at www.artbell.com.
[00:02:24]  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.
[00:02:34]  Item two, the Drudge Report.
[00:02:38]  I quote verbatim.
[00:02:40]  High flying, it says freak rare cloud with possible warning.
[00:02:46]  And I read you yesterday about a pollution cloud over the Indian Ocean, just a giant thing.
[00:02:52]  Listen to Drudge tonight.
[00:02:55]  High-flying clouds of ice crystals were spotted in the sky over Colorado Tuesday night.
[00:03:02]  The first time ever that they have been this close to the equator.
[00:03:08]  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.
[00:03:20]  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.
[00:03:38]  The news, Charlie Brennan, reports that Tuesday's sightings were recorded by three men in three locations.
[00:03:50]  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.
[00:04:06]  Diverse theories about what could cause such ice crystals over such a strange mid-latitude area indeed.
[00:04:17]  They range from a trend of change to perhaps greenhouse gases.
[00:04:26]  They really don't know.
[00:04:27]  But I'm telling you, folks, change is underway.
[00:04:30]  Peter Davenport coming up next.

=== Peter Davenport's Deposition (04:09) ===

[00:04:53]  I have one other item I've got to get on.
[00:04:55]  You remember Play Incorporated, Snappy?
[00:04:58]  They were an advertiser for a long time.
[00:05:00]  Well, that was because Paul Montgomery, the CEO of Play Incorporated, was a great fan of the show.
[00:05:10]  And he has sadly passed away of a massive heart attack at 39 years of age.
[00:05:18]  I had spoken with Paul several times.
[00:05:22]  Brilliant guy.
[00:05:24]  Dead of a heart attack at 39 years of age.
[00:05:28]  Way, way too young.
[00:05:31]  So a sad note.
[00:05:33]  All right.
[00:05:34]  Forward we go.
[00:05:36]  Always forward, one day at a time, huh, folks?
[00:05:39]  Here comes Peter Davenport, and he runs the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, Washington.
[00:05:47]  He, however, is not in Seattle, Washington right now, but he's back in New Jersey.
[00:05:54]  Is that right, Peter?
[00:05:56]  That's correct, Art.
[00:05:57]  Birdland County, New Jersey, just a stone's throw from New York City, actually.
[00:06:02]  All right, Peter, you're here tonight from New Jersey because there's some hot stuff going on.
[00:06:09]  But just before we get to that, we're about to.
[00:06:12]  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.
[00:06:37]  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.
[00:06:44]  Well, I don't think we'll have to get to having Peter depose me.
[00:06:49]  He and I have exchanged a couple of emails on this, and I actually support his work to the hilt.
[00:06:54]  I think he's doing a wonderful job.
[00:06:56]  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.
[00:07:09]  I think Peter is probably dissatisfied because I haven't done that yet.
[00:07:15]  But on the other hand, he probably doesn't understand how busy I've been for about the last two months.
[00:07:20]  It's been inhumanly busy.
[00:07:22]  And I'll get in touch with him when I get back to Seattle.
[00:07:25]  But I don't think it'll have to come down to his deposing me.
[00:07:29]  After all, that's a very expensive process in terms of time and treasury.
[00:07:33]  I think we can avoid that.
[00:07:35]  I will do the best I can to put him in touch with these individuals, and he can proceed from there.
[00:07:42]  I frankly think it's a good idea.
[00:07:45]  I agree with Peter.
[00:07:47]  And what about your counterpart?
[00:07:50]  Dr. Stephen Greers, you know, he claims to have, what, a hundred names, a couple hundred names of people with very critical information.
[00:07:59]  Peter Davenport is probably going to attempt to depose him as well, or at least talk.
[00:08:04]  Peter Gerson, I'm sorry.
[00:08:05]  Yeah.
[00:08:06]  So what do you think?
[00:08:08]  Well, I don't know anything about Stephen's work.
[00:08:13]  I mean, we're in sort of different orbits in the same subject.
[00:08:19]  I don't know who his contacts are.
[00:08:23]  I don't know how willing he is to share those with other researchers.
[00:08:27]  I.e., you can't speak for him.
[00:08:29]  That's a good answer.
[00:08:30]  I'm not sure.
[00:08:30]  That's a good answer.
[00:08:31]  I hate to build a surmise on a supposition.
[00:08:34]  It just doesn't work very well.
[00:08:36]  That's right.
[00:08:36]  All right.
[00:08:37]  You have some hot news for us tonight and a couple of eyewitnesses.
[00:08:40]  Boy, do we ever.
[00:08:42]  And I'm delighted to be on.
[00:08:43]  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.

=== Bright Lights in the Woods (09:33) ===

[00:09:04]  Well, what was the first?
[00:09:06]  Well, the first was a sighting over Nicholasville, Kentucky at about 10 minutes after midnight.
[00:09:11]  That's Central Daylight Time, I believe.
[00:09:14]  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.
[00:09:24]  Now, we have no guarantee, of course, that we're talking about the same objects.
[00:09:28]  It could well be that we had two groups of objects over the United States on Saturday night of this past week.
[00:09:35]  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.
[00:09:50]  But basically, in a nutshell, a mother and her son witnessed a very, very bright object in the vicinity of Lava Hot Springs, Idaho.
[00:10:00]  I'm on the road.
[00:10:01]  I don't have a map with me, but I presume it's somewhere in the upper reaches of Idaho.
[00:10:08]  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.
[00:10:27]  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.
[00:10:36]  All right, actually, everybody will be on here at once.
[00:10:38]  She is Mrs. Janice Price.
[00:10:41]  And Mrs. Price, welcome to the program.
[00:10:44]  Hello.
[00:10:45]  Hi.
[00:10:46]  Hi.
[00:10:47]  Actually, Lava Hot Springs is in Southeast Idaho.
[00:10:51]  Southeast Springs.
[00:10:54]  Okay.
[00:10:54]  And we were sitting on our porch, and it was very quiet and still that night.
[00:11:03]  And we were just visiting.
[00:11:05]  And all of a sudden, this light came through the woods up above our home.
[00:11:13]  And we thought someone had a flashlight on the upper road.
[00:11:16]  And we live in a vacation subdivision up in the hills.
[00:11:22]  And there was no one up here.
[00:11:24]  So we didn't, you know, that we knew of.
[00:11:27]  And we listened, and there was no noise.
[00:11:30]  And this bright flash came down, four separate instances.
[00:11:36]  And it was just very unusual because we listened, and like I said, there were no noises.
[00:11:44]  And you would normally hear something if someone was up there.
[00:11:48]  And we just...
[00:11:49]  Excuse me, what do you mean by a bright flash came down?
[00:11:51]  It was like someone had a very, like a million-watt flashlight, one of those great big beams, you know.
[00:11:58]  Right.
[00:11:59]  And like they just shined it down for just a second.
[00:12:02]  It was just a split second, and it shone down, and it hit our driveway, and it stopped.
[00:12:11]  And so that's why we thought, you know, someone was up there, and then there was nothing, just nothing.
[00:12:17]  No helicopter.
[00:12:18]  No helicopter.
[00:12:19]  There was no noise.
[00:12:20]  It was perfectly still that night.
[00:12:23]  And so we just sat here, you know, and we thought, okay.
[00:12:29]  And about five minutes later, I reached my head in the door and I told my brother-in-law, please don't let out the cat.
[00:12:37]  And when I turned around, our house was engulfed in light.
[00:12:41]  And there was light all the way around our house.
[00:12:44]  The really bright, intense light, kind of like close encounters of the third time that.
[00:12:50]  It was like an arc welder light.
[00:12:52]  White, white light, you know, blue-white light.
[00:12:55]  Oh, my.
[00:12:56]  And the trees were just lit up, and it was like they were moving because the shadow was moving.
[00:13:03]  There was something moving above.
[00:13:06]  And the way it was moving, it almost made you dizzy because the trees were just lit up like day.
[00:13:15]  And it was so strange.
[00:13:17]  And I walked over to the other end of our deck that isn't covered.
[00:13:22]  And I asked my son, I said, well, what was that?
[00:13:26]  And he just stood there for about, it seemed like a long time.
[00:13:31]  It was probably anywhere from five to eight seconds.
[00:13:34]  And he didn't say anything.
[00:13:37]  And I thought, well, that was very strange for him.
[00:13:40]  And then he looked at me and he said, did you see that?
[00:13:46]  And he, well, I'll let him explain the rest of the story.
[00:13:50]  All right, and your son's name is Brixon.
[00:13:53]  Brixon.
[00:13:54]  Okay.
[00:13:54]  All right.
[00:13:55]  All right.
[00:13:55]  Thank you so much, Ms. Truss.
[00:13:58]  Hello.
[00:13:59]  Hi, Brixon.
[00:14:00]  How are you doing?
[00:14:00]  Oh, pretty good.
[00:14:01]  How about you, Art?
[00:14:01]  All right, fine.
[00:14:02]  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.
[00:14:12]  Yeah.
[00:14:14]  Well, as my mother was saying, she was standing, she saw the blinking lights the four times it flashed.
[00:14:22]  She was sitting on the edge of the deck, so she saw that a lot better than I did.
[00:14:26]  I saw the flashes.
[00:14:28]  But as she was standing in the door talking to my uncle, I was watching the woods the whole time.
[00:14:35]  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.
[00:14:45]  Your mother said that, too.
[00:14:48]  It almost made her dizzy, things moving.
[00:14:50]  What do you mean by moving?
[00:14:51]  Do you mean that something above with the light itself was rotating, you believe?
[00:14:56]  Well, it was on the north end of the house.
[00:15:00]  See, we were on the south side.
[00:15:02]  Right.
[00:15:02]  And it was moving from west to east.
[00:15:07]  And it came through the trees, and there were trees blocking the view, you know, from the light.
[00:15:12]  And the shadows were moving very intensely around everything.
[00:15:17]  And then once it got over the big pine trees, it opened up and just lit everything up.
[00:15:23]  And all of our little quake naspens, the shadows were very intense, and you could watch them move.
[00:15:29]  You know, if you take a flashlight and beam it on anything and move the flashlight, you know, the shadow.
[00:15:34]  Well, if the shadows were moving, then that would have given you a sense of how fast whatever it was above you was moving.
[00:15:42]  It was moving pretty darn fast.
[00:15:45]  It was on the other side of the house.
[00:15:48]  Like I say, I ran to the end of the deck and got to where I could stare up at it.
[00:15:55]  And the house is still blocking the view, but I could barely see it around the corner.
[00:16:00]  And it was just heading out into a great big open spot where I could see it.
[00:16:05]  And that was the last I could remember.
[00:16:09]  The next thing I remember, I'm staring down the woods, and it's pitch black.
[00:16:13]  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.
[00:16:25]  Is that correct?
[00:16:26]  Correct.
[00:16:27]  Like I say, I was facing north and it was just coming over the house where I could see about a quarter of it.
[00:16:36]  And next thing I remember, I'm facing east and facing down in the woods, and it's pitch black.
[00:16:42]  So in other words, Brixon, you have missing time, or you might have even been abducted, or who knows?
[00:16:54]  But in other words, you were oriented one way, and then kaboom, you were oriented another?
[00:17:00]  Exactly.
[00:17:01]  And it just, it really scared me.
[00:17:04]  It would, sure.
[00:17:05]  Very disorienting.
[00:17:07]  Yes, it just happened so fast.
[00:17:10]  Any memories or just boom?
[00:17:13]  There weren't any memories.
[00:17:15]  The last one I recall is looking at it and seeing it come over the house.
[00:17:18]  Just, I was so tickled because I thought, great, I'm going to see it.
[00:17:22]  It's going to come out into an open spot.
[00:17:23]  I'll see the whole thing.
[00:17:25]  And just as it was popping out into the open area, baboom.
[00:17:30]  It's pitch black.
[00:17:32]  You found yourself then staring down into the woods, staring at the side.
[00:17:35]  I had to turn back around and look at where it was at before.
[00:17:39]  Yep.
[00:17:39]  And the whole time, I felt like I was alone.
[00:17:43]  And you're sure that that object was traveling to the east?
[00:17:46]  You know the lay of the land in your area, don't you?
[00:17:48]  Yes, I do.
[00:17:51]  It was going from your left to right if you were looking to the north.
[00:17:53]  Is that correct, Brixon?
[00:17:54]  Yes.
[00:17:55]  Brixon, do you want to know if you were abducted?
[00:17:58]  Yeah, I would.
[00:18:01]  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.
[00:18:14]  Well, that's what I thought about.
[00:18:17]  I'd really like to know.
[00:18:19]  And what time did your sighting occur, to the best of your knowledge, Brixon?

=== Owen Mitchell Takes the Stage (04:17) ===

[00:18:23]  I'd say somewhere around quarter after 11.
[00:18:25]  So 11:15 Saturday night, Mountains Daylight Time, I guess it is, huh?
[00:18:30]  It was Sunday night.
[00:18:32]  Sunday night.
[00:18:32]  Father's Day.
[00:18:33]  Yes.
[00:18:34]  Okay.
[00:18:34]  All right.
[00:18:36]  We appreciate it.
[00:18:37]  Would you please, Brixon, thank your mom for what she just had the courage to say.
[00:18:42]  And I want to thank you for what you just had the courage to say, all right?
[00:18:46]  Hey, well, thank you very much, Arch.
[00:18:47]  All right.
[00:18:48]  Having us on your show.
[00:18:48]  All right.
[00:18:49]  Take care.
[00:18:50]  And when we come back, we have Mr. Owen Mitchell who will kind of pick up the thread of what you just heard.
[00:18:57]  My guest is Peter Davenport.
[00:18:59]  He deals, as do I, in these kind of strange, inexplicable things.
[00:19:05]  You tell me what happened to mother and son in Idaho.
[00:19:09]  We'll be right back.
[00:19:11]  This is Premier Networks.
[00:19:12]  That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
[00:19:33]  If I could read your mind, love, what it is.
[00:19:37]  You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[00:19:41]  Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from June 24th, 1999.
[00:19:46]  That is such pretty music, isn't it?
[00:19:49]  Gordon Lightfoot.
[00:19:50]  Just here in Las Vegas, too, by the way.
[00:20:11]  Once again, my webmaster Keith Rowland is auctioning off two of the most infamous domain names ever conceived.
[00:20:21]  And it's going on tonight, right now.
[00:20:23]  It may not be going on long because we're coming down the home stretch.
[00:20:27]  The infamous domain name auction underway at www.artbell.com.
[00:20:34]  Now, back to Peter Davenport.
[00:20:37]  Peter.
[00:20:38]  Yep.
[00:20:39]  And, of course, out now to Mr. Owen Mitchell.
[00:20:43]  What can you tell us, Peter, about Mr. Owen Mitchell?
[00:20:46]  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.
[00:20:52]  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.
[00:21:01]  Two, because there were multiple witnesses at about the same time.
[00:21:06]  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.
[00:21:20]  They sure did.
[00:21:21]  In fact, the prices, I thought, were priceless, if you'll excuse the pun, Peter, in the sense that they described it in so much detail.
[00:21:29]  I mean, there was everything there, but the mailboxes going back and forth.
[00:21:33]  Yeah.
[00:21:33]  That was not only right.
[00:21:35]  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.
[00:21:45]  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.
[00:22:02]  Are you there, Owen?
[00:22:03]  Owen?
[00:22:04]  Sure, I am.
[00:22:04]  Welcome to the program.
[00:22:05]  Well, thank you.
[00:22:06]  Well, okay, let's do it.
[00:22:07]  Tell us a little bit about yourself.
[00:22:09]  You've got even some aviation background, huh?
[00:22:12]  Yes, sir.
[00:22:12]  I'm retired Air Force.
[00:22:14]  I retired a few years ago after about 26 years as a pilot.
[00:22:19]  Okay.
[00:22:19]  And I've flown all over the world, actually.
[00:22:22]  Well, that's a lot of experience, actually.

=== Cabin Lights and Fireballs (15:43) ===

[00:22:28]  A lot of time in the air.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:29]  I have probably close to 20,000 hours log time.
[00:22:33]  What'd you mostly fly?
[00:22:35]  The C-141 is the last, a four-engine jet.
[00:22:39]  Right.
[00:22:40]  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.
[00:22:52]  Both cabins are.
[00:22:55]  My cabin is about a half a mile almost due north and down the hill slightly from where the prices cabin is.
[00:23:04]  Okay.
[00:23:06]  What happened was Sunday night, I had just gone to bed.
[00:23:09]  It was about 11.15.
[00:23:12]  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.
[00:23:23]  And I was looking, the direction I was looking was a northerly direction.
[00:23:29]  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.
[00:23:37]  And anyway, I laid there for a few seconds and then I closed my eyes to go to sleep.
[00:23:42]  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.
[00:23:56]  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.
[00:24:17]  Oh, and I've got to just quickly stop you and ask you.
[00:24:20]  The prices seem to see it only as, you know, close encounters of the third kind light.
[00:24:25]  I mean, really strong light.
[00:24:27]  Right.
[00:24:27]  You just said object.
[00:24:30]  Yes, I saw the entire object.
[00:24:31]  It was above the trees, and it was very, very bright.
[00:24:36]  It was, like Janice said, it was like an arc from an arc welder or an arc light.
[00:24:42]  It was just a white platinum light.
[00:24:46]  It was soft.
[00:24:47]  Not like an aviation light.
[00:24:48]  You wouldn't.
[00:24:49]  No, much brighter.
[00:24:50]  Much brighter.
[00:24:51]  You could hardly look at it.
[00:24:52]  It was so intense, you could just scarcely look at it.
[00:24:57]  And if it hadn't disappeared so quick, I probably would have looked away.
[00:25:02]  But I was so intensified myself with it that I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
[00:25:08]  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.
[00:25:23]  I'd say on a heading of about 280.
[00:25:28]  It was very bright.
[00:25:29]  It lit up the whole canyon.
[00:25:32]  The whole cabin, the side of the hills, the trees and everything was just like one continuous flash of lightning.
[00:25:39]  Only it wasn't a flash.
[00:25:42]  It was steady light.
[00:25:45]  How far do you think it was from you?
[00:25:48]  I would say it was probably within a half a mile.
[00:25:51]  Is there any way it could have been a helicopter that you would not have heard?
[00:25:54]  No way at all.
[00:25:57]  It was going much too fast.
[00:25:59]  When I first saw it, like I said, it was passing through a heading of about 030.
[00:26:06]  And I thought for about two seconds at the most.
[00:26:10]  No sound.
[00:26:11]  Absolutely no sound.
[00:26:13]  In fact, I lay there for a second or two.
[00:26:15]  I was kind of dumbfounded.
[00:26:17]  I thought it was a meteor.
[00:26:19]  And I thought, well, a meteor that closed is going to leave a sonic boom.
[00:26:22]  And I listened real intently for any kind of a sound.
[00:26:25]  And there was no sound before, during, or after the sighting.
[00:26:29]  It was just a bright light.
[00:26:32]  It was a round, ball-shaped object.
[00:26:34]  The center of the object was the brightest, well, white, or a brilliant white light.
[00:26:41]  So not a disc, but you could actually discern what you're saying as a ball.
[00:26:47]  Well, it was it could have been a disc, but if it was a disc, it would have been up on a sharp left-hand turn to me.
[00:26:54]  Gotcha.
[00:26:55]  In other words, it must have been a circle.
[00:26:59]  It was circular.
[00:27:00]  That's right.
[00:27:01]  It was circular, and the light emanating from the center was a brilliant white, and as it went out towards the edges, it got kind of a bluish color.
[00:27:11]  And when it reached the edge of the object, it was a bluish tinge to the light itself.
[00:27:18]  And it was the same color all over.
[00:27:23]  I mean, it wasn't...
[00:27:24]  Could you guess the altitude based on the distance?
[00:27:29]  Oh, I would say probably.
[00:27:31]  It may have been 2,000 to 3,000 feet in the air.
[00:27:36]  Possibly.
[00:27:37]  Pretty low.
[00:27:37]  It was hard to see hard to tell because there's really no nothing relative to to compare it to as far as time as far as distance or elevation.
[00:27:49]  Gotcha.
[00:27:50]  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.
[00:28:01]  It was about a little bit larger than a silver dollar at all.
[00:28:04]  That's a pretty good size.
[00:28:06]  It was definitely big large size.
[00:28:09]  And like I said, I would estimate it was about half a mile away.
[00:28:16]  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.
[00:28:35]  They were looking up and to the east, and they said they thought they saw lightning, steady flashes of lightning.
[00:28:43]  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.
[00:28:52]  Could it have been lightning?
[00:28:54]  Definitely not.
[00:28:55]  Not lightning.
[00:28:56]  All right.
[00:28:57]  Well, you've got a lot of years of aviation experience, Owen.
[00:29:02]  So a good direct question to you is, what do you think you saw?
[00:29:08]  I have the foggiest idea.
[00:29:11]  It was a solid object.
[00:29:13]  It it appeared to be very solid and emitting an awful strong light.
[00:29:19]  I don't really know what it was.
[00:29:23]  Ever see anything like that when you were flying?
[00:29:25]  Never.
[00:29:25]  I have seen objects.
[00:29:27]  I've seen a lot of phenomenon in my 26 years of flying.
[00:29:31]  And I've seen similar objects wavy from zillion miles away, high altitude and very far distance.
[00:29:39]  Oh, and of those objects that you saw during the years you flew, how many did you report officially?
[00:29:46]  None.
[00:29:47]  I didn't report any.
[00:29:49]  None, huh?
[00:29:51]  We weren't too encouraged to report it.
[00:29:54]  As an Air Force officer, they kind of frowned on you reporting stuff like that.
[00:29:59]  It wasn't considered to be a career-enhancing movement.
[00:30:02]  That's true.
[00:30:03]  Definitely.
[00:30:03]  Peter?
[00:30:05]  Yeah, you don't get witnesses better than the ones we just heard tonight.
[00:30:11]  I agree.
[00:30:12]  Very sincere.
[00:30:14]  They know what they saw.
[00:30:16]  What they saw is anomalous.
[00:30:19]  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.
[00:30:30]  Owen Brixon Price said that he had a disorienting experience in one place and then another.
[00:30:38]  Anything like that for you?
[00:30:40]  Nothing like that at all.
[00:30:41]  And like I said, I viewed the object in its entirety for about two seconds is about as much as I saw.
[00:30:48]  With the speed it was going, it was going like a bat.
[00:30:51]  And it just didn't last very it didn't stay very long.
[00:30:58]  But I had no sensations whatsoever outside of being shocked.
[00:31:02]  What time did you see this, do you estimate, please?
[00:31:05]  After I saw it, I looked at the clock in the bedroom wall and it was 11.18.
[00:31:10]  So your sighting was shortly after, a few minutes after, the Price's sighting up north of you.
[00:31:18]  Yes, right.
[00:31:19]  And you're sure that the object you were looking at was going from the east to the west, is that correct?
[00:31:24]  That's correct.
[00:31:24]  Very.
[00:31:25]  Right to your left.
[00:31:26]  Yes.
[00:31:27]  Whereas a few minutes earlier, one or two or three minutes earlier, it was going from the west to the east.
[00:31:33]  That's true.
[00:31:34]  So it must have changed its direction.
[00:31:36]  Very unusual for a meteor.
[00:31:38]  Definitely.
[00:31:41]  It came down around the Price's cabin evidently and down the hill to us, around our cabin, and then turned to the west and went back to the west.
[00:31:53]  Was there a period of shock for you?
[00:31:57]  Disbelief, shock.
[00:31:58]  I don't know what you would call it, but yes, definitely.
[00:32:01]  And then sort of a period after it occurred when you began to dissect your own memory of the event that just occurred, reconstructing it.
[00:32:10]  Right.
[00:32:11]  Of that and trying to find out, you know, in my mind, what exactly it was, what it could have been.
[00:32:20]  And like I said, I don't know what it was, but I know what it wasn't.
[00:32:27]  It was not an airplane.
[00:32:29]  It was not swamp gas.
[00:32:31]  It wasn't a helicopter or their landing lights.
[00:32:36]  It was not a weather balloon.
[00:32:38]  Any of the other phenomenon that has been blamed on it.
[00:32:42]  But in my 26 years of flying, it's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
[00:32:50]  And, of course, I'm not flying anymore.
[00:32:52]  If you were flying, could you be talking now?
[00:32:57]  Carefully, maybe.
[00:33:00]  But you really didn't, even with the anomalies you saw during all those years.
[00:33:05]  Can I ask an insider question, Owen, since you're retired and seem to be talking?
[00:33:13]  Having flown 26 years, you had to have spent a lot of time sitting down shooting the bull with other pilots.
[00:33:22]  Yes?
[00:33:23]  Yes, that's true.
[00:33:24]  How many of them had seen things they wouldn't talk about publicly, officially?
[00:33:32]  I don't remember of ever talking to anybody, any other pilot, that admitted to seeing any objects.
[00:33:38]  So, in other words, either they didn't see anything or even the pilots do not converse among themselves about this kind of thing for the same reasons.
[00:33:48]  That's right.
[00:33:49]  And I have airlines friends or people that fly for airlines, and it's the same with them.
[00:33:56]  They are discouraged from talking about them.
[00:34:02]  Well, it took a lot of courage for you to do it, even retired.
[00:34:07]  And I, you know, if anything more comes to you, Owen, I sure would like to know about it.
[00:34:14]  All right.
[00:34:14]  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.
[00:34:26]  I won't bother them.
[00:34:27]  Monday morning, I called the Sheriff's Department.
[00:34:30]  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.
[00:34:44]  Yes, that's not so unusual, actually.
[00:34:48]  No, it's not, I guess, in a situation like this.
[00:34:52]  Owen, I want to thank you for being on the air with us.
[00:34:54]  It was my pleasure.
[00:34:55]  Remarkable witness.
[00:34:56]  Good night, sir.
[00:34:57]  Good night.
[00:34:57]  Thank you very much.
[00:34:58]  Thank you.
[00:35:00]  Remarkable witness.
[00:35:02]  Remarkable, Peter.
[00:35:03]  Yeah, you can't get them any better than that.
[00:35:05]  No, you can't.
[00:35:06]  And it's yet another, what we've been talking about for months, even years now, Art.
[00:35:12]  These objects are not meteors.
[00:35:16]  They may fall under the category of fireballs, but they're fireballs with an intelligence, it seems.
[00:35:22]  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.
[00:35:50]  Right.
[00:35:51]  Excuse me, ten minutes after midnight, that is.
[00:35:55]  Oh, okay.
[00:35:55]  That is Central Daylight Time.
[00:35:58]  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.
[00:36:14]  And it did not generate a sonic boom that has been reported to us in any event.
[00:36:19]  That's pretty respectable, if it's the same object.
[00:36:22]  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.
[00:36:36]  He called it a turbofan.
[00:36:39]  I don't know what a turbo fan is.
[00:36:41]  It's a type of engine.
[00:36:42]  It's not a type of craft, to the best of my knowledge.
[00:36:44]  Right.
[00:36:45]  And he said it was very anomalous.
[00:36:47]  He's a UFO investigator with MUFON.
[00:36:49]  He doesn't know what it was, but there was a lot of activity that night.
[00:36:55]  And interestingly, there was also a very interesting incident up in Port Townsend, Washington.
[00:37:01]  Listen, my friend, our hour is gone.
[00:37:03]  Yeah.
[00:37:04]  We've got another program to do.
[00:37:06]  When you get back, we're going to do another program right away, okay?
[00:37:09]  I would love to know.
[00:37:10]  I know you've got a lot of material.
[00:37:12]  I do indeed.
[00:37:12]  The National UFO Reporting Center, ladies and gentlemen, doesn't operate on swamp gas.
[00:37:19]  It could use a donation from you.
[00:37:22]  Peter, I'm proud to be able to give you the opportunity to give out the address.
[00:37:25]  Please give it out.
[00:37:26]  You've been a big help.
[00:37:27]  The address of the National UFO Reporting Center is P.O. Box 45623 University Station, Seattle, Washington.
[00:37:38]  And the zip code is 98145.
[00:37:42]  That address again is National UFO Reporting Center, P.O. Box 45623.
[00:37:48]  Next line is University Station.
[00:37:51]  And the last line is Seattle, Washington.

=== Asteroids Talk Near (15:35) ===

[00:37:54]  Zip code is 98145.
[00:37:57]  All right.
[00:37:57]  Good night, Peter.
[00:37:58]  Good night, Art.
[00:37:58]  Thanks very much.
[00:37:59]  You bet.
[00:38:00]  The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
[00:38:05]  More Somewhere in Time coming up.
[00:38:18]  You won't have to think twice.
[00:38:30]  Premier Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[00:38:34]  Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from June 24th, 1999.
[00:38:39]  Good morning, everybody.
[00:38:40]  Coming up in a moment, we're going to talk about near Earth asteroids.
[00:38:47]  So far, they've been near.
[00:38:49]  Roy A. Tucker is going to be here, and he knows what he's talking about.
[00:38:55]  As a matter of fact, he has discovered three near-Earth asteroids, which we will catalog for you.
[00:39:00]  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.
[00:39:18]  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.
[00:39:31]  And we've got a place on the web where you can see his full bio.
[00:39:37]  So, and by the way, his observatory is the Goodrick, and I'm going to say Pejong Observatory.
[00:39:46]  If an American pronounced it, it had come out Piggott.
[00:39:51]  We will ask him which is right in a moment.
[00:39:54]  So, we're going to talk about near-Earth asteroids, and we're going to talk about the Sun.
[00:40:01]  Now, somebody really raked me over the coals in email for something I said the other day.
[00:40:05]  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.
[00:40:17]  And I said that, and they raked me over the coals.
[00:40:20]  In a moment, we'll ask the right person that question, Roy Tucker.
[00:40:44]  Roy A. Tucker is on the air.
[00:40:48]  Good evening, Art.
[00:40:49]  How are you tonight?
[00:40:50]  Hi, Roy.
[00:40:50]  I'm just fine.
[00:40:51]  Great.
[00:40:52]  With a million questions.
[00:40:53]  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.
[00:41:10]  Well, let's see here.
[00:41:11]  I got in so much trouble.
[00:41:12]  Could that possibly be true?
[00:41:15]  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.
[00:41:28]  That's how they develop their actuarial tables.
[00:41:30]  To give you an idea, the current population of the Earth is 6 billion people.
[00:41:37]  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.
[00:41:49]  And so that'll kill everybody.
[00:41:51]  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.
[00:42:03]  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.
[00:42:14]  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.
[00:42:27]  Well, then it's true.
[00:42:29]  So then my being 54 right now, should an asteroid hit me, why I beat the odds.
[00:42:39]  Yeah, you'd be ahead of the game.
[00:42:41]  Well, yeah, the way it works, the smaller impacts are more likely.
[00:42:46]  To give you an idea, the so-called Tunguska event that occurred back in 1908.
[00:42:52]  That's a small one?
[00:42:53]  Yeah, that was approximately a 60-meter diameter object, a big rock, basically.
[00:43:00]  And the likelihood that's going to hit, those will hit about once every 200 years, approximately, let's say.
[00:43:07]  Oh, really?
[00:43:08]  And it produced an energy equivalent to about between 10 and 20 megatons, if you think of like nuclear weapons or something.
[00:43:15]  Not kilotons, but megatons.
[00:43:16]  Megatons, yeah.
[00:43:17]  In fact, the way it works, an object, say, that would yield about one megaton will not penetrate all the way through the Earth's atmosphere.
[00:43:25]  So the Tunguska event was almost sort of like a threshold event.
[00:43:28]  But anyway, that was equivalent to about 10 or 20 megatons of energy.
[00:43:33]  And it actually didn't quite strike the Earth.
[00:43:35]  It actually produced an airburst about two kilometers up.
[00:43:40]  And of course, had it struck some city like, for example, St. Petersburg, it might have killed a couple of million people.
[00:43:48]  So you can figure numbers like, well, gee, it's that sort of a regional thing.
[00:43:55]  You're not going to kill everybody on Earth.
[00:43:56]  You might only kill a couple of million people.
[00:43:58]  But something like that might happen every 200 years or something like that.
[00:44:02]  So you can just divide 2 million by, say, 200, and you get that risk of something like 10,000 people a year or something like that.
[00:44:12]  I think that number is too high.
[00:44:13]  So if one of these were to hit Chicago.
[00:44:16]  Oh, well, you know, drop a 20-megaton weapon on Chicago.
[00:44:20]  You can figure it.
[00:44:23]  It's going to be a rare event, though.
[00:44:24]  Those sort of things only happen about, oh, let's see, about every 100,000 years or so.
[00:44:31]  Well, I thought you just said...
[00:44:32]  Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry.
[00:44:33]  I'm thinking of, yeah, you're right.
[00:44:35]  Tunguska events, that's right, they're about 200 years.
[00:44:39]  Every 200 years.
[00:44:40]  That's right.
[00:44:40]  I was thinking of a larger impact.
[00:44:46]  You have found several asteroids.
[00:44:50]  And I have a stupid layman's question, but I have a telescope.
[00:44:54]  Yep.
[00:44:55]  Now, I can't fathom.
[00:44:58]  I mean, after all, a rock is a rock, is a rock, and it's dark.
[00:45:02]  It's not emitting any light as it courses across whatever path it's on.
[00:45:06]  How the hell do you find them using a telescope?
[00:45:09]  How?
[00:45:10]  Ah, well, much of it is attributable to modern CCD technology.
[00:45:17]  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.
[00:45:28]  In my backyard, I've got a little observatory.
[00:45:31]  It's got a 14-inch aperture telescope, the Celestron 14, which is commercially available.
[00:45:37]  It's an amateur-sized telescope.
[00:45:39]  And the CCD imaging devices are terribly sensitive to light.
[00:45:45]  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.
[00:45:56]  And with this telescope, I'm able to see things as faint as the 200-inch telescope used to see 20 years ago.
[00:46:02]  My mind.
[00:46:03]  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.
[00:46:19]  The brightest thing you can see in the sky right now is the planet Venus over in the western sky after sunset.
[00:46:26]  Oh, it's really bright here.
[00:46:28]  Yeah.
[00:46:28]  That is considered to be minus 4 or thereabouts.
[00:46:32]  And the way it works, each step of a magnitude corresponds to the fifth root of 100, or about 2.514, as I recall.
[00:46:40]  So every five magnitudes corresponds to a factor of 100.
[00:46:44]  Now there's about 10 magnitudes between the very faintest thing you can see, sixth magnitude, and Venus, which is minus four.
[00:46:53]  So we can say that Venus is about 10,000 times brighter than the very faintest thing you can see with the unaided eye.
[00:47:00]  So then, from point to point, it's a tougher, much larger magnitude scale than, say, the Richter scale for earthquakes.
[00:47:09]  Yeah, I think the I'm not an expert in seismology.
[00:47:11]  I think the way the Richter scale works is that Every number on the magnitude scale corresponds approximately to a factor of ten.
[00:47:20]  The eye responds to light logarithm logarithmically, sort of like.
[00:47:26]  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.
[00:47:34]  And he was sort of trying to get an idea of, you know, star star A is approximately twice as bright as star B.
[00:47:41]  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.
[00:47:53]  So to make the mathematics work out nice and neatly, they just call it fifth root of 100 or 2.514.
[00:48:00]  Okay.
[00:48:01]  All right, so how how do you see these things?
[00:48:04]  Well, my telescope has a camera attached to it, a C C D camera.
[00:48:10]  And basically I just open up the shutter for a period of time.
[00:48:15]  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.
[00:48:27]  You can imagine it.
[00:48:28]  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.
[00:48:39]  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.
[00:48:50]  And then you can, in the computer, build that up into a displayable image on the computer monitor.
[00:48:56]  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.
[00:49:11]  Holy moly.
[00:49:12]  Yep.
[00:49:13]  And so basically to look for asteroids, you make two or more exposures of an area of sky and separate it in time by 10 or 15 minutes or so.
[00:49:25]  And if there's an asteroid there, it will have moved.
[00:49:28]  You basically are looking for things that are moving.
[00:49:30]  So an asteroid then is reflected as some light source.
[00:49:35]  There is some reflection somehow.
[00:49:37]  Yep.
[00:49:37]  It's basically imagine taking the moon, breaking off a small piece of it and putting it out further away from the Earth.
[00:49:44]  It's a rock just reflecting sunlight.
[00:49:47]  And when we discuss asteroids, we talk about their reflectivity or albedo.
[00:49:53]  And this varies considerably.
[00:49:55]  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.
[00:50:03]  So they're harder to see?
[00:50:04]  Yeah, or they have to be bigger to see.
[00:50:07]  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.
[00:50:23]  What's it like when you discover one?
[00:50:25]  I mean, when you realize that you have discovered an asteroid, it must always occur to you that you don't yet know exactly where she's going.
[00:50:38]  Well, let's see here.
[00:50:41]  A near-Earth asteroid can be quite easy to distinguish because it's moving typically quite rapidly when you see it.
[00:50:50]  Normally these are small objects.
[00:50:54]  You only see them typically when they're close to the Earth and they're moving quite quickly.
[00:51:00]  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.
[00:51:10]  Is that right?
[00:51:10]  It's quite a thrill.
[00:51:11]  Every pleasure center.
[00:51:13]  That's the way I'd describe it anyway.
[00:51:19]  Here's another question.
[00:51:20]  Would we see one arroy that was coming directly at us?
[00:51:26]  Well, you wouldn't immediately know it.
[00:51:29]  Well, the way it works...
[00:51:30]  In other words, let me guess, and you correct me.
[00:51:33]  Okay.
[00:51:34]  If it's coming directly at us, you don't see a lateral speed.
[00:51:38]  You don't perceive a lateral speed, do you?
[00:51:41]  Because it's a point of light that, though it may be getting brighter quickly, is not going to show any lateral movement on your image.
[00:51:49]  Not necessarily.
[00:51:50]  Let me explain.
[00:51:51]  Let's say you're driving along in a car and you're approaching a crossroads, basically a 90-degree crossroads.
[00:51:59]  And there's another car on the crossroad that's approaching the same intersection.
[00:52:04]  Now, you look off to the side and you can look at this motion of this car against the background scenery.
[00:52:10]  I've got you already.
[00:52:12]  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.
[00:52:21]  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.
[00:52:29]  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.
[00:52:39]  How many have we categorized that we're watching and tracking thus far?
[00:52:45]  Well, let's see here.
[00:52:46]  If we're talking to near-Earth asteroids, there are currently 750 total what we would call near-Earth objects.
[00:52:54]  There's three categories.
[00:52:58]  There are Otens, Apollos, and AMORS.
[00:53:01]  And AMORS are basically objects that approach the Earth, but they don't actually cross the Earth's orbit.
[00:53:09]  Amors are asteroids that have closest approaches to the Sun of less than 1.3 astronomical units.

=== Earth Crossers: The Worrisome Ones (02:11) ===

[00:53:17]  And an astronomical unit is equivalent to the average distance between the Sun and the Earth, 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.
[00:53:26]  And they don't actually cross the Earth's orbit.
[00:53:28]  They just sort of get up close and then go back out to the outer reaches again.
[00:53:32]  So we're not really worried about those, are we?
[00:53:33]  We're not terribly worried about those now.
[00:53:35]  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.
[00:53:45]  I'm more concerned with the ones that cross our orbit.
[00:53:48]  Yeah, that's the Apollos.
[00:53:50]  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.
[00:54:00]  But the near point of their orbit to the Sun lies within the orbit of the Earth.
[00:54:06]  Those are Earth crossers.
[00:54:07]  They can pose a hazard.
[00:54:08]  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.
[00:54:22]  So they'll cross our orbit also.
[00:54:28]  Are there really big ones out there?
[00:54:30]  I mean, by our standards, ELE events, something that big?
[00:54:35]  Well, the ones we worry about are those objects that are bigger than one kilometer in size approximately.
[00:54:40]  It's at that point that the energies become quite extraordinary.
[00:54:45]  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.
[00:54:56]  100,000 megatons.
[00:54:58]  All right, hold on, Roy.
[00:55:01]  We're at the bottom of the hour and approaching 12 o'clock in more ways than one.
[00:55:07]  Woof!

=== Asteroid Close Calls (15:50) ===

[00:55:09]  Getting back together.
[00:55:13]  I'll tell you, that'd be one big bang.
[00:55:16]  Agong.
[00:55:17]  And this is Premier Networks.
[00:55:19]  That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
[00:55:25]  We take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[00:55:45]  Remember 2001?
[00:55:47]  Remember how silent everything was?
[00:55:51]  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.
[00:56:13]  No air, just rocks coming quick.
[00:56:17]  Roy A. Tucker is my guest.
[00:56:19]  We're discussing near-Earth asteroids, and we'll get right back to them.
[00:56:23]  All right, once again, here is Roy A. Tucker.
[00:56:46]  Roy, welcome back.
[00:56:48]  Hi there.
[00:56:48]  Yep.
[00:56:49]  All right.
[00:56:49]  You also have discovered a comet, right?
[00:56:52]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:56:53]  It's kind of an interesting story.
[00:56:57]  We have a monsoon season here during the summers.
[00:57:01]  Just start getting started now, as a matter of fact.
[00:57:03]  And observing basically comes to an end for about two or three months.
[00:57:07]  And September of last year, September 13th, was the very first night after the end of the monsoon season.
[00:57:16]  And the very first sequence of observations I made that evening revealed a fuzzy moving object.
[00:57:23]  And I thought, oh, boy, it looks like a comet.
[00:57:25]  And basically needed to check, first of all, to see if it was a known object.
[00:57:30]  I checked the list of comets that were observable at that time.
[00:57:34]  It didn't show up on the list.
[00:57:35]  So I'll tell you, looks like I've got something here.
[00:57:38]  Sent off an email message to the Minor Planet Center and reported it.
[00:57:42]  And found out the next day that it looks like I'd found myself a comet.
[00:57:46]  Wow.
[00:57:46]  The object had been reported about two weeks before by the Lowell Observatory's Near-Earth Object Search Program.
[00:57:54]  They had reported it as a minor planet.
[00:57:56]  They didn't realize that it was a comet.
[00:57:59]  So the name is a joint name.
[00:58:04]  It's referred to as Periodic Comet 1998 QP54.
[00:58:10]  That's the minor planet designation.
[00:58:13]  Parentheses Lonios Tucker.
[00:58:17]  So it's sort of named in honor of their program and my discovery.
[00:58:22]  Do they name asteroids as well?
[00:58:24]  Well, let's see.
[00:58:25]  The naming procedure is quite different.
[00:58:29]  Whereas comets are named after the discoverers, minor planets are given names by their discoverers, or names are suggested by the discoverers.
[00:58:41]  And it's not considered correct to propose your own name for an asteroid.
[00:58:47]  It's sort of an honor that...
[00:58:49]  Why not?
[00:58:49]  I mean, if you discover it, then why don't you get to name it something like M80 or, you know, something.
[00:58:55]  Well, you can propose a name.
[00:58:58]  People propose.
[00:58:59]  There's an asteroid named Spock for the character Mr. Spock.
[00:59:04]  The earliest asteroids were given names from classical mythology.
[00:59:09]  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.
[00:59:23]  And that basically means it's never going to get lost.
[00:59:27]  It might only have an error accumulate a few seconds of arc every decade or something like that.
[00:59:32]  Do we ever lose them?
[00:59:33]  Yes, we do.
[00:59:34]  We do?
[00:59:35]  Yes, indeed.
[00:59:36]  Well, usually there are some stories from the early days of asteroid discoveries.
[00:59:42]  For example, there is a numbered object, 719 Albert, which was discovered, as I recall, back in 1911.
[00:59:51]  And at that time, it was pretty easy to get an asteroid numbered.
[00:59:55]  And so they went ahead and numbered this thing after only a short series of observations, but it was lost.
[01:00:02]  Nowadays, the procedure for getting objects numbered is much, much tighter.
[01:00:06]  So before an object is officially numbered, it has to be observed for many years, and the orbit has to be known quite precisely.
[01:00:13]  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.
[01:00:26]  And that provisional designation is used until the object finally becomes numbered.
[01:00:31]  I see.
[01:00:32]  Well, listen, Paul, you know, Roy, I've been doing this show now for, oh boy, going on 14 years or something.
[01:00:43]  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.
[01:00:52]  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.
[01:01:08]  And when I read a story like that, I go, hmm, yesterday we had a close call.
[01:01:14]  Well, they didn't tell us about that yesterday, nor the day before.
[01:01:18]  They're telling us about that today.
[01:01:20]  And that always worried me a little bit because, you know, this means they didn't see it until it actually passed.
[01:01:29]  Does that happen frequently?
[01:01:31]  I'm sure it does.
[01:01:33]  For example, one of the closest approaches on record that didn't actually enter the atmosphere was perhaps, I think it's 1992 JA1.
[01:01:46]  I may be mistaken about the designation, but it passed by some years ago at a distance of, as I recall, about 60,000 miles.
[01:01:55]  That's what I'm remembering, too.
[01:01:57]  And they're about once every year or two you'll get some close approacher like that.
[01:02:04]  And perhaps it's disturbing to contemplate, but that's only the ones we actually see.
[01:02:11]  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.
[01:02:24]  It's operated by some folks at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
[01:02:31]  They've been in operation since about 1981 or 82, as I recall.
[01:02:36]  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.
[01:02:48]  Bearing in mind that the sky consists of something like 27,000 square degrees or something like that.
[01:02:52]  They're only looking at a tiny fraction of the sky.
[01:02:56]  And so a lot of the sky gets unmonitored.
[01:02:59]  The other search operations, for example, NEAT Near Earth Asteroid Tracking, that's run by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as I recall.
[01:03:09]  So you're saying we don't even see the majority of them.
[01:03:13]  About a year and a half ago, another program was started in New Mexico, Socorro, New Mexico.
[01:03:19]  That's what's called LINER, the Lincoln Laboratory's Near-Earth Asteroid Research Program.
[01:03:28]  And what they are doing is operating an Air Force telescope.
[01:03:33]  It's a one-meter aperture telescope, lots of light-gathering ability.
[01:03:37]  And they have engineered an extraordinary camera to go on that telescope.
[01:03:41]  It covers a lot of sky every night, something like 1,200 square degrees per night.
[01:03:48]  It's a huge area of sky.
[01:03:50]  And they do this for a good portion of the month.
[01:03:54]  And the idea being to look at as much of the opposition region of the sky and the region surrounding it as again.
[01:04:04]  Asteroids are brightest when they're opposite the sun in the sky.
[01:04:08]  That's when they're closest to the Earth.
[01:04:10]  That's when they're directly opposite the Sun.
[01:04:14]  The reflectivity is geometrically most ideal for making them appear bright.
[01:04:20]  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.
[01:04:43]  Did you see the movie Armageddon?
[01:04:45]  Oh, yeah.
[01:04:46]  I'm sure you would have.
[01:04:47]  And Deep Impact.
[01:04:48]  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.
[01:05:02]  Is that a very probable?
[01:05:08]  That portrayed a different hazard.
[01:05:10]  Both of those movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, the threat was posed by a long-period comet or basically just suddenly appeared.
[01:05:19]  And that's quite plausible.
[01:05:23]  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.
[01:05:39]  It got as close as about 10 million miles, which is one of the closer approaches in history.
[01:05:46]  And we only had perhaps three months' warning.
[01:05:49]  If, for example, Comet Hale Bop had been on an intercept orbit with the Earth, we might have had perhaps three years' warning.
[01:05:58]  Three years' warning.
[01:06:00]  But the deal is, you don't know that initially.
[01:06:03]  In other words, you have to watch these objects for a while to get a good idea of what their orbit is.
[01:06:08]  There was some speculation about what if Hyakate had been on a collision course with Earth.
[01:06:14]  We might not have even known for certain it was going to hit until within perhaps a week before closest approach.
[01:06:22]  You're kidding.
[01:06:23]  Yes, basically, when you first discover an object, an asteroid or a comet, your knowledge of the orbit is very poorly known.
[01:06:32]  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.
[01:06:41]  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.
[01:06:58]  And this ellipse is much bigger than the Earth.
[01:07:01]  The ellipse essentially represents the probable range of possible orbital elements, possible missed distances, if you will, statistically.
[01:07:15]  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.
[01:07:28]  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?
[01:07:42]  Oh, as far as trying to, if we identified that it was definitely a threat to us and a threat, yes.
[01:07:49]  In other words, you couldn't say for sure it was going to hit yet, but here she comes.
[01:07:53]  Oh, gee.
[01:07:54]  Well, if it was Hail Bop, quite honestly, there's not a heck of a lot we could have done with our current technology.
[01:08:01]  You see, people think that we can send up a nuclear weapon and knock it off course.
[01:08:07]  And I've got a story in front of me that says destroying asteroids may be a lot harder than it looks when you see the movies.
[01:08:15]  And it was pretty hard in the movies.
[01:08:17]  In other words, the scientists are saying even with a pretty good yield nuclear weapon, we might not even budget.
[01:08:25]  Yeah, that's pretty much correct.
[01:08:27]  It is?
[01:08:28]  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.
[01:08:46]  On the beach.
[01:08:48]  Yeah, as a matter of fact, I'm just, you know, it's a funny thing.
[01:08:50]  I'm rereading On the Beach, one of the best books, in my opinion, ever written.
[01:08:54]  Yeah, Neville Sheaf did a great job.
[01:08:56]  Right now.
[01:08:56]  I'm rereading it right now.
[01:08:58]  It's on my bedside right now.
[01:09:01]  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.
[01:09:19]  You're telling me your scenario would be more like that?
[01:09:22]  Yeah, I'm afraid so.
[01:09:24]  Basically, let's talk about trying to divert a relatively small object, perhaps a couple of hundred meters in size.
[01:09:32]  Such an object would not be a global catastrophe.
[01:09:36]  It would be more of a regional type thing.
[01:09:39]  And perhaps it's a more likely type of object to worry about.
[01:09:43]  That's the sort of thing you might have hit once every thousand years or so.
[01:09:48]  And it's the sort of thing that would wipe out a region like a good part of Europe or something like that.
[01:09:56]  You might try to divert it enough to where it would strike in the middle of the ocean.
[01:10:03]  Sure, you'd have tsunamis and such, but it might not be so dreadful as having it hit a heavily populated area.
[01:10:10]  So you're saying you really couldn't divert it from hitting altogether.
[01:10:13]  You might be able to shape.
[01:10:15]  Boy, that would be a pretty dicey gamble, wouldn't it?
[01:10:19]  Yeah, there's a lot of unknowns.
[01:10:21]  The problems are essentially our poor current state of knowledge of what asteroids are really like.
[01:10:31]  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.
[01:10:42]  Enormous, huge nuclear weapons.

=== Long Trail Left By Space Object (04:21) ===

[01:10:46]  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.
[01:10:54]  In other words, you're making a very small change that over a long period results in a pretty big change in where it's going.
[01:11:00]  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.
[01:11:17]  Now, the problem, there's a problem there also.
[01:11:20]  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.
[01:11:32]  Well, I'd go for that.
[01:11:34]  Yeah, it gives you more time to do something about it later.
[01:11:37]  Versus the obvious talking about something that would be a regional disaster, as in what, the northeast part of the country, for example?
[01:11:52]  Something like that.
[01:11:54]  For example, a 100-meter object would be equivalent to about, oh, 100 megatons approximately.
[01:12:03]  You could wipe out a good part of New York or something like that.
[01:12:07]  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.
[01:12:17]  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?
[01:12:42]  Oh, I believe so.
[01:12:44]  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.
[01:12:57]  As long as it didn't hit a nuclear power plant, right?
[01:13:00]  Oops.
[01:13:02]  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.
[01:13:20]  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.
[01:13:30]  Yeah, well, an object penetrating the atmosphere would leave a long trail.
[01:13:35]  That would be another bit of evidence, too.
[01:13:37]  People would see this thing flying along.
[01:13:39]  It'd be extraordinarily bright, far brighter than the sun.
[01:13:42]  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.
[01:13:54]  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.
[01:14:08]  Oh, I know all about that one.
[01:14:11]  As a matter of fact, we saw satellite photographs showing its trail as it went apparently across the snow in Greenland.
[01:14:20]  I remember seeing that photograph.
[01:14:22]  Listen, we're at the top of the hour.
[01:14:23]  We'll pick up on that when we come back.
[01:14:26]  My guest, Roy A. Tucker, is an expert on near-Earth objects, asteroids, those dark, silent, big rocks that cross our path.
[01:14:43]  Some we know about, most we don't have the slightest idea about.
[01:14:49]  Some we find out after they passed.

=== Public Controversy Over Earth Impact (15:48) ===

[01:14:53]  And then, of course, there's the obvious.
[01:14:55]  I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
[01:14:58]  The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
[01:15:04]  More Somewhere in Time coming up.
[01:15:08]  You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[01:15:22]  Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from June 24th, 1999.
[01:15:27]  And we have with us a man, Roy A. Tucker, who has discovered quite a number of near-Earth asteroids as well as a comet.
[01:15:35]  Plus, he's a ham operator, too.
[01:15:37]  He's really interesting.
[01:15:38]  We're discussing comets, asteroids, the sun, and things generally planetary.
[01:15:44]  Earth, asteroids, and other stuff we're talking about with Roy A. Tucker.
[01:16:09]  Some of the other stuff directly had...
[01:16:11]  Roy, welcome back.
[01:16:12]  Hello there.
[01:16:13]  Hi.
[01:16:13]  All right.
[01:16:16]  So how many of these things are really out there altogether?
[01:16:21]  We can compute, can we not, based on what we see, what we don't see?
[01:16:26]  Yeah, basically, we've been studying asteroids for a couple hundred years almost now.
[01:16:32]  And statistically, you can kind of look at the population and you can sort of recognize how the trend goes of size versus number.
[01:16:44]  And we expect that in the vicinity of the Earth, for a size of about one kilometer, we expect there should be about 2,000 approximately objects.
[01:16:57]  2,000?
[01:16:58]  Approximately, yep.
[01:16:59]  And we know about 200?
[01:17:02]  Well, let's see.
[01:17:03]  The total, including the AMORS, is about 750.
[01:17:07]  That's total known right now.
[01:17:09]  That's all sizes.
[01:17:11]  But the ones that are one kilometer and brighter, we know 76 right now.
[01:17:17]  Oh.
[01:17:20]  There should be a total of about 2,000, but the correction, let me correct that.
[01:17:26]  That's potentially hazardous asteroids.
[01:17:28]  I need to introduce another concept here.
[01:17:32]  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.
[01:17:46]  Now, the total number of asteroids, near-Earth asteroids, that are larger than 1 kilometer is 377.
[01:17:52]  But of those, only 76 are recognized as potentially hazardous asteroids.
[01:17:58]  So we have a population of approximately 2,000 objects larger than a kilometer or thereabouts.
[01:18:06]  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.
[01:18:20]  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.
[01:18:31]  So anywhere from hundreds of thousands.
[01:18:34]  Yep, to as many as over a million if you go down to about 100 meters in size.
[01:18:39]  Boy, that's a lot.
[01:18:40]  Yes, it is.
[01:18:42]  And that would be Tunguska size and a little bigger yet.
[01:18:46]  Tunguska size and larger, yeah.
[01:18:48]  Now, the main thing is that the Earth is just a tiny little target when you consider the vastness of the solar system.
[01:18:54]  So the numbers work out.
[01:18:56]  The only problem is it's a continuous shooting range.
[01:19:00]  Yep.
[01:19:00]  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.
[01:19:08]  And a lot of the objects that we're going to hit have already hit, so we've exhausted that supply.
[01:19:14]  But there's nevertheless a continuing supply of new objects being provided by the main asteroid belt.
[01:19:21]  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.
[01:19:30]  They're safe out there, but over time, perturbations from the major planets will cause the orbits of objects to evolve or change.
[01:19:44]  And there's a continuing supply of small objects, and they have to be fairly small for various reasons.
[01:19:50]  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.
[01:20:00]  And not all of them will impact the planets.
[01:20:03]  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.
[01:20:11]  The planets really are small targets, so we don't often get hit.
[01:20:18]  Most of the asteroids that are moved into the inner solar system, like I say, will strike the sun or be ejected.
[01:20:24]  It's just the one you've got to worry about.
[01:20:26]  Just the one.
[01:20:26]  It only takes one, basically.
[01:20:31]  If such let's say that we go to the movies for a second.
[01:20:36]  Okay.
[01:20:36]  Either one of them.
[01:20:37]  And something that was going to destroy Earth, an extinction-level event, they called it, was on the way.
[01:20:47]  What is your view of how society and our government would handle that situation?
[01:20:54]  Oh, my.
[01:20:55]  Well, to some extent, it depends upon how far in advance we can determine what's going to happen.
[01:21:02]  Let's say 18 months.
[01:21:03]  18 months.
[01:21:04]  Sure.
[01:21:05]  Oh, gee, whiz.
[01:21:06]  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.
[01:21:21]  If we've got a couple of decades, maybe we can do something about it.
[01:21:24]  But 18 months, yeah, basically you want to put your final affairs in order or something like that.
[01:21:31]  But bear in mind that it's difficult to discern the risk that well.
[01:21:38]  There's always a slight chance it'll be off a decimal place or something like that.
[01:21:41]  It could still whiz by.
[01:21:43]  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.
[01:21:57]  And of course there are folks that will leap upon it and say the end of the world is coming.
[01:22:02]  So there's going to be a I would imagine there'd be quite a broad spectrum of responses.
[01:22:06]  Well I guess I'm asking would the public likely be told right away and here's why I'm asking.
[01:22:15]  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.
[01:22:28]  Yeah there have been three instances in recent times.
[01:22:32]  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.
[01:22:51]  These are objects that could pose serious risk.
[01:22:55]  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.
[01:23:12]  And the orbit is sort of chaotic.
[01:23:15]  You can't really tell into the indefinite future exactly what it's going to do.
[01:23:19]  Well, we got one report that said very possibly a collision.
[01:23:25]  24 hours later, they changed that and said, no, collision.
[01:23:31]  Remember?
[01:23:32]  That was, I think, 1997 XF-11, the first one.
[01:23:35]  Yeah, initially, it looked like there was a minute, but compared to the usual risk, significant risk of possible impact, like 30 years away.
[01:23:44]  Right.
[01:23:45]  That's the one.
[01:23:46]  Now, that was announced.
[01:23:47]  The public was aware of it.
[01:23:50]  But then I remember after that happened, there were certain guidelines that were issued about the way the reporting would be done from there forward.
[01:24:01]  Yeah, there was quite a controversy.
[01:24:04]  NASA got into it.
[01:24:05]  The folks at the Minor Planet Center were embroiled in a controversy about having mentioned it in such a public forum and such.
[01:24:14]  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.
[01:24:26]  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.
[01:24:39]  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.
[01:24:52]  Okay, yes, but there would be lots of spinning going on.
[01:24:56]  I mean, if this object were 18 months out, they would be taking your position, wouldn't they, in the very calming announcements that look.
[01:25:05]  Yes, there is a danger, they might say, but the odds are far against it actually hitting us.
[01:25:12]  They would attempt to calm the public for as long as they could, wouldn't they?
[01:25:17]  It's difficult to say.
[01:25:18]  I might suggest what we do is look at history.
[01:25:22]  For example, around the 1912, I guess it was, on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean, there was the city of La Pierre, as I recall.
[01:25:34]  They were sitting underneath a volcano, and the volcano was starting to make all sorts of nasty columns of smoke and erupting and such.
[01:25:42]  And the government, the city government, was trying to allay everyone's fears.
[01:25:49]  In fact, at one point, they actually forbid people from leaving the city.
[01:25:54]  Finally, of course, it erupted, and everybody was killed.
[01:25:57]  So you might speculate something like that.
[01:26:00]  Or alternatively, you could say, well, maybe we've learned from that, and we would try to disseminate information about the risk.
[01:26:08]  Now, there's not a whole lot of support for human beings learning from history.
[01:26:14]  Yeah, I guess that's quite true.
[01:26:20]  You also, before I go on, I was kind to the name of your observatory.
[01:26:28]  Oh, yeah.
[01:26:29]  Would you please pronounce that for me?
[01:26:31]  Yeah, the gentleman's name was Edward Piggott.
[01:26:33]  He's an English astronomer.
[01:26:35]  It is Piggott.
[01:26:36]  Yeah.
[01:26:37]  I was trying to be kind.
[01:26:38]  I was trying to make it French.
[01:26:40]  Yeah, it could have been French or something like that.
[01:26:42]  He was an English astronomer.
[01:26:45]  Okay.
[01:26:46]  And so the full name of your observatory is Gudric Piggott Observatory.
[01:26:55]  The story is kind of explained on my website, but for those who don't do much web surfing, basically the story is a bit inspirational.
[01:27:04]  John Goodrich was an amateur astronomer in the late 1700s.
[01:27:11]  He was born at a time when I have to explain that he was deaf.
[01:27:17]  And at that time, deafness was equated with mental retardation.
[01:27:22]  And not much was expected of people who couldn't hear.
[01:27:26]  But this was the beginning of a period of enlightenment with regard to such shortcomings.
[01:27:31]  And he was educated and taught how to speak and to lip-read.
[01:27:38]  And he actually made some notable discoveries in astronomy, notably about variable stars.
[01:27:45]  And it's a little bit tragic.
[01:27:48]  He actually accomplished some notable things, but he died at the age of 21.
[01:27:52]  Oh, my.
[01:27:53]  And one can only speculate what kind of great career he might have had had he lived.
[01:27:59]  But Edward Piggott was a friend who collaborated with him on his observations.
[01:28:05]  And so the observatory commemorates these two amateurs and their accomplishments and their friendship.
[01:28:11]  Oh, that's quite a story.
[01:28:13]  How long have you been have you been doing this all your life?
[01:28:17]  Oh, I got started in astronomy back in 1966.
[01:28:22]  I was still in high school at the time.
[01:28:25]  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.
[01:28:31]  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.
[01:28:43]  Basically produces a sort of twilight glow after the sunset and before sunrise when the true twilight in the atmosphere has faded.
[01:28:52]  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.
[01:29:00]  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.
[01:29:08]  And I just happened in November of that year when I got up.
[01:29:14]  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.
[01:29:22]  And I looked up and the sky was just filled with meteors.
[01:29:24]  It was the 1966 Leonid meteor storm.
[01:29:29]  That must have been something to see.
[01:29:30]  Oh, it was quite astonishing.
[01:29:31]  The sky was just filled with meteors.
[01:29:34]  Was it frightening?
[01:29:36]  No, I knew what was going on, or I recognized it as a meteor storm.
[01:29:42]  I didn't realize how lucky I was at the time.
[01:29:44]  I thought, gee, this sort of thing, I guess, happens every once in a while.
[01:29:48]  But I didn't know that it's the sort of thing that only happens perhaps once or twice in your lifetime.
[01:29:54]  So it was really quite remarkable coincidence.
[01:29:57]  I just happened to be getting up and just happened to see it that morning.
[01:30:00]  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.
[01:30:12]  What do you think?
[01:30:13]  Well, I hope so.
[01:30:16]  Again, this is the Leonid shower.
[01:30:19]  And I was up, of course, watching the shower, and it was quite nice.

=== Neutrinos and Northern Lights Mystery (15:29) ===

[01:30:25]  As to whether it'll be last year or this year, it's really hard to say.
[01:30:31]  The projections that I've read about in the literature suggest that neither year will be as good as 1966.
[01:30:41]  The debris that was left the comet, the parent comet, to produce these particles that produce the meteors Produce streamers, if you will.
[01:30:57]  And to actually see a meteor storm like that, the Earth has to actually pass through one of these streamers of particles.
[01:31:05]  And people have analyzed the circumstances of the 1966 shower and what we might expect this year and last year.
[01:31:16]  And the circumstances in either instance were as good as 1966.
[01:31:20]  But it's notable that they didn't anticipate what happened last year.
[01:31:24]  They were off by several hours in predicting the maximum strength, and they didn't know about this particular streamer of particles.
[01:31:32]  That was going to be my next question.
[01:31:33]  Why are they so frequently either surprised or disappointed or put another way wrong?
[01:31:43]  Basically, it's a complicated world we live in, and the universe, there's so many very subtle effects.
[01:31:52]  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.
[01:32:08]  Through a small telescope, you can see some features like the Cassini's division and such.
[01:32:12]  But they look through a telescope like fairly smoothly structured.
[01:32:17]  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.
[01:32:28]  Yeah, I remember the photographs.
[01:32:30]  Terribly complicated.
[01:32:30]  It's an extraordinary complicated type of thing.
[01:32:34]  And it's just that there's all sorts of little subtle effects going on.
[01:32:37]  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.
[01:32:52]  And our knowledge of nature in the universe is imperfect.
[01:32:59]  And so, in other words, they're wrong sometimes.
[01:33:02]  Yeah, bottom line is, yeah.
[01:33:04]  All right, Roy, hold on.
[01:33:06]  We're at the bottom of the hour.
[01:33:07]  We're going to break here.
[01:33:08]  We're talking about near-Earth asteroids, some very near.
[01:33:14]  And in a moment, we're going to touch on the sun because that's another thing Roy talks about.
[01:33:19]  Don't touch that dot.
[01:33:20]  This is Premier Networks.
[01:33:22]  That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this somewhere in time.
[01:33:29]  We've been traveling far.
[01:33:42]  Premier Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[01:33:46]  Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from June 24th, 1999.
[01:33:51]  For an LE, you don't have to worry.
[01:33:55]  That's an extinction-level event if you didn't see the movie.
[01:33:59]  No worry, no need for stored food or anything else.
[01:34:03]  Just a little introspection, I imagine, would be the order of the day.
[01:34:28]  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.
[01:34:42]  was a graduate student in the planetary sciences for three years.
[01:34:48]  And we're talking about lots of things.
[01:34:50]  Right now, I want to ask him a little bit about the sun.
[01:34:54]  Roy, I understand you're a ham operator.
[01:34:56]  That I am.
[01:34:57]  That's correct.
[01:34:57]  And so am I. Big HF station right here.
[01:35:01]  Yep.
[01:35:02]  Got a 100-foot tower outside now.
[01:35:05]  I'm into it big time.
[01:35:06]  And I prepared myself, Roy, for cycle 23, which we're in right now.
[01:35:13]  Yep.
[01:35:14]  You know, I could finally afford it, so I got the equipment and the antennas I wanted, and I said, by God, this time I'm going to be ready.
[01:35:21]  And now, so far.
[01:35:22]  It's been pretty mild so far, huh?
[01:35:25]  Pathetic is the word I would use.
[01:35:27]  Now, I'm looking right now at conditions, and I notice we have a solar flux index of 185, which is pretty good.
[01:35:35]  It jumped on up there all of a sudden.
[01:35:37]  Yeah, I was looking at the sun today with our instrumentation, and there's a pretty good scattering of spots.
[01:35:43]  You might be seeing things pick up a little bit there.
[01:35:46]  The minute she rounds about 200, it begins to get pretty interesting on the HF bands.
[01:35:52]  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.
[01:36:08]  And really weird things are going on in the media.
[01:36:11]  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.
[01:36:20]  What's going to happen with our Sun right around January of 2000 may be more of an impact than Y2K.
[01:36:30]  I'm not really quite sure of the reports.
[01:36:34]  I'm aware that they've come up with some techniques of recognizing when there's going to be a fairly major coronal mass ejection.
[01:36:43]  Some sort of S-like?
[01:36:44]  That's correct.
[01:36:46]  They've recognized that in ultraviolet imaging, they can recognize an S-shaped arrangement of magnetic fields on the surface of the sun.
[01:36:54]  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.
[01:37:11]  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.
[01:37:32]  And they referred to it in the article as a planet buster.
[01:37:37]  Now, that may have been a little overkill with rhetoric, but that's what they called it, a planet buster.
[01:37:44]  Oh, my.
[01:37:45]  Well, I think they may have been taking some liberties there.
[01:37:48]  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.
[01:38:02]  Communications might be disrupted.
[01:38:04]  And you could get some extraordinarily wonderful northern lights and such, too.
[01:38:11]  But as far as anything really death-dealing or anything like that, I think that'd be a bit of an exaggeration.
[01:38:22]  Also, scientists lately have seen suns that they had thought to be stable suns suddenly brighten unaccountably.
[01:38:35]  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.
[01:38:54]  Well, let's see.
[01:38:56]  There are very uh there's a pretty large number of mechanisms that uh cause stars to vary in brightness.
[01:39:05]  But generally speaking uh these are stars that are more evolved uh than our sun.
[01:39:11]  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.
[01:39:27]  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.
[01:39:43]  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.
[01:39:53]  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.
[01:40:04]  I think I can pretty safely state our sun's going to be pretty stable.
[01:40:08]  There's interesting questions about, for example, why are there so few neutrinos being observed coming from the core of our star?
[01:40:18]  Apparently our understanding of how our sun produces its energy is not totally understood.
[01:40:26]  There's basically only two ways you can see what's going on inside of a star.
[01:40:31]  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.
[01:40:42]  In other words, the number of neutrinos being observed now does not serve up satisfaction to currently a conventional wisdom in physics, correct?
[01:40:56]  Yeah, they were very puzzled because initially there were too few neutrinos being observed.
[01:41:03]  These neutrinos are produced by these nuclear reactions at the center of the sun.
[01:41:08]  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.
[01:41:16]  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.
[01:41:28]  And they recently found out that there is indeed apparently a very tiny rest mass.
[01:41:33]  So our understanding of the neutrino is not perfect.
[01:41:36]  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.
[01:41:44]  And we've just been looking at the wrong kind.
[01:41:47]  And that seems to be looking that there's a very close examination of that hypothesis right now.
[01:41:56]  If there was a really big coronal mass ejection, a real monster, and they do occur occasionally, right?
[01:42:02]  Yep.
[01:42:03]  And it was headed directly for Earth, how much warning of that would we have?
[01:42:08]  About approximately two days, two or three days.
[01:42:12]  It takes these particles are traveling one or two million miles per hour.
[01:42:17]  Distance to the Sun is 93 million miles.
[01:42:20]  So it's basically a couple, three days.
[01:42:23]  That's not a lot of warning, but at least it's something.
[01:42:26]  Yeah, you can batten down the hatches, I guess.
[01:42:28]  You could put your satellites in a safe configuration.
[01:42:31]  You could warn the power distribution grid that they might expect some kind of power outages or something like that.
[01:42:38]  There are particles that would reach us nearly instantly, aren't there?
[01:42:42]  Well, it'd have to be electromagnetic radiation.
[01:42:45]  X-rays would be produced.
[01:42:48]  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.
[01:43:00]  That's right, yes.
[01:43:01]  If there had been a very large CME, they could have been in terminal trouble, couldn't they?
[01:43:07]  Yeah, I'm not really quite sure how much dose they would get, but it was a significant concern.
[01:43:11]  Consider, for example, just flying across the Atlantic in a transcontinental aircraft.
[01:43:19]  You're flying at about, say, 30,000 feet or so.
[01:43:22]  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.
[01:43:35]  Oh, now it is very interesting you should mention that, for I have two short stories to tell you.
[01:43:40]  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.
[01:43:53]  Okay.
[01:43:54]  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.
[01:44:05]  We were getting some real buttes.
[01:44:07]  And they said that the entire sky was lit.
[01:44:11]  And they were used to seeing northern lights, and I've seen them many times.
[01:44:14]  I used to live in Alaska, you know, the shimmering northern lights you get.
[01:44:18]  But in this case, the sky was almost completely artificially lit, it seemed.
[01:44:24]  And they began to feel, both the first officer and pilot, a disorientation of some sort.
[01:44:32]  Queasy, funny feeling.
[01:44:35]  And they sent me a fax, and it was followed by another pilot flying nearly the same route.
[01:44:43]  Now, check this out, who, when he landed, going through the same disorientation and strange feeling with a lighted sky.
[01:44:53]  But when he landed, his face was sunburned.
[01:44:58]  Oh, my.
[01:44:58]  And so much so that you could see where the headphones were on his head.
[01:45:03]  You could see the outline.
[01:45:06]  How is that possible?
[01:45:08]  That's quite intriguing.
[01:45:11]  To actually have a sunburn-type effect like that, you would expect that there would have been some sort of ultraviolet radiation exposure.
[01:45:19]  Yes.
[01:45:21]  Whether it would be X-radiation, I think it's pretty unlikely that the X-rays would penetrate the atmosphere that deeply.
[01:45:28]  These are generally pretty soft X-rays and don't really penetrate the air very well.
[01:45:33]  So that would suggest some sort of ultraviolet exposure.
[01:45:38]  Gee, I really can't speculate too much about the mechanism for producing that type of exposure.

=== Water Vapor on Mars (08:20) ===

[01:45:44]  But that certainly is very intriguing.
[01:45:46]  Okay, and then one more question about the sun, and that is we seem to be undergoing a weather change right now.
[01:45:54]  Something profound.
[01:45:55]  It may be permanent.
[01:45:57]  It may be some sort of cyclical thing.
[01:46:01]  As human beings, we live too short a life to know these sorts of things.
[01:46:04]  But, you know, the weather does seem to be changing.
[01:46:08]  Greenhouse gases, some people say, others say maybe the sun.
[01:46:13]  A very minor change on the sun or its radiation could produce a rather significant effect on Earth, couldn't it?
[01:46:20]  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.
[01:46:36]  Satellites will tend to spiral in faster because of the increased drag on their orbits and such.
[01:46:41]  Really?
[01:46:43]  This could perhaps cause some change in the upper atmosphere, the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.
[01:46:50]  As far as effects on the climate, though, I'm afraid that's kind of beyond my expertise.
[01:46:57]  But one of the things that people have wondered about is the output of sunlight by the sun constant, the so-called solar constant.
[01:47:06]  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.
[01:47:20]  Is there?
[01:47:22]  The effects that I've encountered in the literature seem to be too small.
[01:47:26]  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.
[01:47:35]  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.
[01:48:01]  And you might expect then the summers will be hotter at that time.
[01:48:04]  These types of variations are pretty well known for, for example, Mars.
[01:48:10]  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.
[01:48:25]  And by carefully studying these features, they were able to determine that this was water ice that had been deposited over thousands of years.
[01:48:35]  And the variations in these terraces appeared to correspond to changes in the orbit of Mars.
[01:48:43]  They seem to be closely correlated.
[01:48:45]  And so it would appear that the water ice had been deposited on the Martian poles.
[01:48:52]  The deposition was affected by the orbital characteristics of Mars at various times in the past.
[01:49:00]  A record of how its orbit had changed.
[01:49:02]  Two wild questions for you.
[01:49:04]  One, it is generally thought Mars once had an atmosphere and water, quite a bit of water, actually.
[01:49:12]  What happened to Mars?
[01:49:13]  Oh, well, it would seem that a lot of the water that used to be there isn't there anymore.
[01:49:22]  You can speculate that either it's been escaped into space or has percolated down into the soil of Mars.
[01:49:30]  The craters, a lot of the craters on Mars, when you look at them, they have sort of a splashy appearance like you'd throw a rock into some mud.
[01:49:38]  That's right.
[01:49:39]  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.
[01:49:49]  Although it's quite possible that a lot of the water has been simply lost.
[01:49:52]  Mars is a small plant.
[01:49:54]  The gravity isn't terribly strong.
[01:49:56]  And water vapor would be lost.
[01:50:00]  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.
[01:50:12]  Although it's quite apparent there used to be an awful lot of water there.
[01:50:14]  You can see all sorts of canyons and such from the distant past.
[01:50:17]  There are others who speculate something very violent might have occurred to Mars.
[01:50:21]  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.
[01:50:36]  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.
[01:50:49]  For example, they recently determined that there's very likely water on the poles of Mars.
[01:50:54]  Correction, the Moon.
[01:50:56]  Oh, that's right, yes.
[01:50:57]  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.
[01:51:08]  And this would produce a very tenuous transient atmosphere around the moon.
[01:51:13]  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.
[01:51:24]  So as far as removing the water from Mars, I think that that's probably not a very plausible hypothesis.
[01:51:31]  So you like the idea that it sort of just got absorbed?
[01:51:35]  Basically, the numbers, you know, you can calculate the numbers and they look very plausible.
[01:51:40]  You know, it's been four and a half billion years since the solar system formed.
[01:51:45]  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.
[01:51:59]  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.
[01:52:25]  So it would just leak away essentially.
[01:52:27]  Leak away.
[01:52:28]  All right.
[01:52:29]  One more question.
[01:52:29]  The moon is about a quarter million miles away, isn't it?
[01:52:32]  Approximately, yeah, about turn 36 or thereabouts.
[01:52:35]  Okay.
[01:52:36]  We always talk about what would happen if something big hit the Earth.
[01:52:40]  Just out of curiosity, what would happen if something big, we rarely think about this, hit the moon?
[01:52:47]  Well, let's see.
[01:52:50]  It probably wouldn't be all that dreadful.
[01:52:53]  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.
[01:53:06]  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.
[01:53:22]  But the Moon wouldn't get kicked away like in a billiard game or something.
[01:53:26]  Oh, like Space 1999, huh?
[01:53:28]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:53:29]  No, the Moon is a very massive object.
[01:53:32]  It would have to be an extraordinary impact.
[01:53:35]  And, gee, I don't know if I'd want to be in the same solar system if the moon is.
[01:53:39]  If that were to occur.
[01:53:41]  I do understand.
[01:53:42]  All right, stay right there.
[01:53:43]  Yes, the release of energy of something nearly as large as the moon hitting the moon, you don't want to be in that room.

=== Ground Phenomena Exploded (10:14) ===

[01:53:50]  We'll be right back.
[01:53:52]  You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[01:53:55]  Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from June 24th, 1999.
[01:54:18]  We take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
[01:54:24]  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.
[01:54:38]  Pretty cool stuff, actually, when you think about it.
[01:54:41]  If you have a question for them, we're open for it.
[01:54:44]  We're going to lay heavily into the lines this hour.
[01:54:47]  Hey, how are you hanging in?
[01:55:08]  I'm here.
[01:55:08]  All right, good.
[01:55:09]  You sound very awake.
[01:55:10]  Oh, yeah.
[01:55:11]  Hey, I'm a night person, you know.
[01:55:12]  Oh, you are?
[01:55:13]  Well, of course you would be, wouldn't you?
[01:55:14]  Certainly.
[01:55:15]  All right.
[01:55:16]  Here we go.
[01:55:16]  Wildcard line, you're on the air with Roy A. Tucker.
[01:55:19]  Good morning.
[01:55:20]  Good morning.
[01:55:21]  This is Larry Cohen from Nashville.
[01:55:23]  Yes, sir.
[01:55:24]  How y'all doing?
[01:55:25]  Very well.
[01:55:26]  Roy, I've got a question.
[01:55:28]  Last year, there were two comets that I guess they slammed into the sun June of last year.
[01:55:34]  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.
[01:55:47]  Was there any other follow-ups from that collision?
[01:55:52]  And also, did anybody from Earth see these two comets coming towards the sun before SOHO picked them up?
[01:55:59]  Well, let's see here.
[01:56:00]  Soho has been doing some remarkable stuff as far as discovering these sun-grazing and sun-impacting comets.
[01:56:10]  In fact, I think they just announced the Minor Planet Center announced two or three more sun grazers.
[01:56:17]  I guess I should mention that there is a website, the Minor Planet Center's website, where they post these discoveries and such.
[01:56:25]  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.
[01:56:32]  And SOHO has been finding quite a string of these objects.
[01:56:37]  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.
[01:56:51]  But generally speaking, these are faint objects, and they only get observable because they get close to the sun.
[01:56:58]  They're small objects.
[01:56:59]  And they get close to the sun, they become quite bright because the sunlight's very strong there.
[01:57:04]  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.
[01:57:13]  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.
[01:57:23]  For one thing, there's a tremendous amount of kinetic energy when one of these comets impacts the Sun.
[01:57:30]  And of course, you have all the volatile material.
[01:57:32]  It suddenly gets evaporated.
[01:57:35]  And I imagine it would affect the Sun's atmosphere perhaps in an observable fashion.
[01:57:40]  Although, of course, you have to recognize the Sun is an enormous thing.
[01:57:43]  It's 865,000 miles across.
[01:57:47]  It's almost a million miles across.
[01:57:48]  And of course, it has a powerful gravity and things like that.
[01:57:51]  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.
[01:58:03]  You didn't see this movie clip that they released on the web.
[01:58:07]  Oh, I didn't look at that.
[01:58:08]  I regret, sorry.
[01:58:10]  It is true, though.
[01:58:12]  A couple of things slammed in to the sun.
[01:58:15]  And it appears or it appeared that there was some sort of ejecta following that or coincident with it.
[01:58:22]  Yeah, and I think this sort of thing has been observed before.
[01:58:24]  Before SOHO, there was another satellite, something, something P5.
[01:58:29]  It had some obscure name, and it also is monitoring the sun's corona.
[01:58:35]  And it started seeing these comets back in the late 70s, I recall.
[01:58:41]  And I seem to recall seeing some sort of, again, some transient phenomena in the sun's atmosphere related to the impact of one of those objects.
[01:58:50]  Mm-hmm.
[01:58:50]  All right.
[01:58:51]  East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Roy A. Tucker.
[01:58:54]  Hi.
[01:58:55]  Hello.
[01:58:56]  Hello.
[01:58:56]  Yes, sir.
[01:58:57]  Yes.
[01:58:57]  How are you doing?
[01:58:58]  I'm fine.
[01:58:59]  Where are you?
[01:59:00]  El Paso, Texas.
[01:59:01]  El Paso.
[01:59:02]  All right.
[01:59:02]  You brought back some scary memories for us.
[01:59:05]  Not a while back, we had a meteorite that exploded in the atmosphere over the eastern section of the city.
[01:59:12]  That's true.
[01:59:13]  I remember that.
[01:59:15]  It occurred not too far distant from the one that exploded in Greenland.
[01:59:21]  Yeah.
[01:59:22]  It really woke us up.
[01:59:23]  We were on the far west side of the city, and we thought something exploded down the street.
[01:59:28]  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.
[01:59:37]  Roy, do you recall that?
[01:59:39]  Yes, I do.
[01:59:39]  That was kind of interesting.
[01:59:40]  Again, as you noted, it was sort of close in time to the Greenland event.
[01:59:44]  It happens that such events occur fairly often for these small impactors.
[01:59:51]  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.
[02:00:07]  But unless they're made of iron, they're basically going to produce an explosion high in the Earth's atmosphere.
[02:00:15]  It's very rare for something like that to penetrate the atmosphere.
[02:00:19]  It would have to be essentially made out of iron to actually penetrate the atmosphere and reach the ground.
[02:00:23]  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?
[02:00:38]  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.
[02:01:06]  Again, I don't have that web address, but I think a web search could lead one there pretty quickly.
[02:01:11]  I was wondering what would have happened if it touched down.
[02:01:14]  Oh, well.
[02:01:16]  Yeah, because this one cracked some ceilings.
[02:01:20]  Yeah, I'm sure the shockwave probably rattled quite a few dishes and such.
[02:01:26]  Oh, it did it.
[02:01:28]  It cracked quite a few resident ceilings, and it came out on the news that we're all wondering what happened if it had to reach the ground.
[02:01:35]  Yeah, that's interesting.
[02:01:37]  I have never spoken with anybody who was under one of these events before.
[02:01:41]  You are the first.
[02:01:43]  It was pretty scared.
[02:01:44]  Well, we aren't right under it.
[02:01:45]  We were on the other side of the mountain.
[02:01:46]  We had a whole mountain between us, Franklin.
[02:01:48]  And it sounded like something exploded right down the road.
[02:01:51]  But I have some relatives in the area, and they were scared out of their skin.
[02:01:57]  They were sitting at the kitchen table, and it went off, and they looked up only because they saw something coming down from the ceiling.
[02:02:04]  And that's when they saw the crack on the ceiling, and they said it was terrible.
[02:02:08]  Yeah, that'll do it all right.
[02:02:10]  As a matter of fact, Roy, I've seen a couple of pieces of video of objects in past years that have skipped into and then out of our atmosphere.
[02:02:23]  Yeah, 1972, there was an object came in over Utah and Montana, as I recall.
[02:02:30]  It got as low as about 30 kilometers and bounced off and went back out into space.
[02:02:34]  And I think somebody caught that on video, and it was the damnedest thing to see.
[02:02:39]  Yep, yep, there were at least two home movies of that.
[02:02:44]  That's again, it's some of these objects.
[02:02:46]  I think that thing was about 20 meters in size, according to the literature I've read.
[02:02:52]  And had it struck the Earth, you could have expected something like a small nuclear weapon on the order of, say, 10 or 20 kilotons energy.
[02:03:00]  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.
[02:03:13]  Your perspective from the ground would be you really wouldn't know, would you?
[02:03:20]  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.
[02:03:37]  They often note that it was totally silent.
[02:03:40]  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.

=== Jupiter Strikes: Cosmic Collisions (15:52) ===

[02:03:49]  And it's not likely you're going to hear some kind of a report.
[02:03:52]  For example, that event I saw back in February, there was no sound.
[02:03:56]  I listened for quite a while.
[02:03:57]  There never was any kind of report.
[02:03:59]  And people will estimate these things as being perhaps half a mile away or something like that.
[02:04:08]  Even airline pilots and such will mistakenly report it as being closer than it actually is.
[02:04:13]  In reality, they're very high up in the atmosphere, tens of kilometers up.
[02:04:17]  But they are so incredibly bright that we misjudge.
[02:04:21]  Yeah, I guess people tend to rely on other cues, perhaps a perceived physical size of the object or something like that.
[02:04:31]  All right.
[02:04:32]  West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Roy Tucker.
[02:04:34]  Hi.
[02:04:35]  Hello, good evening, gentlemen.
[02:04:36]  How are you doing?
[02:04:37]  Yeah, I had a question.
[02:04:38]  Jupiter itself, I was to understand its gravitational pull keeps a lot of asteroids from coming into our area and wiping us out, basically.
[02:04:48]  And I've also heard another theory that perhaps there are aliens actually keeping asteroids from messing up their experiment, per se.
[02:04:59]  Well, all right.
[02:05:00]  One at a time here.
[02:05:01]  Now, Jupiter is interesting.
[02:05:04]  And of course, some rather impressive things occurred not too long ago with Jupiter, quite a series piled in Jupiter, one after the other.
[02:05:19]  And it does have a gigantic field, doesn't it?
[02:05:24]  Oh, yeah, it's fully one-thousandth the mass of the sun.
[02:05:30]  And in fact, the solar system has occasionally been described as the sun, Jupiter, and debris.
[02:05:38]  The solar system is predominantly, as far as gravitational influences and such, the solar system is primarily the sun and Jupiter.
[02:05:45]  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.
[02:05:56]  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.
[02:06:12]  Otherwise, we might have there we might have a much higher rate of impact or flux than we do now.
[02:06:21]  If the objects that impacted Jupiter, 21 of them, was it?
[02:06:26]  On that order, yes, approximately.
[02:06:28]  Had not hit Jupiter, but rather had hit the Earth, the result would have been one.
[02:06:33]  Oh, well, yeah.
[02:06:35]  These objects were quite spectacular when they hit Jupiter, but they were striking at an extraordinarily high velocity.
[02:06:44]  Jupiter's gravity is very powerful.
[02:06:47]  I think these objects were striking Jupiter at velocities on the order of something like 100, 150,000 kilometers per hour.
[02:06:56]  So the energies were extraordinary.
[02:06:58]  The kinetic energy of a moving object goes up as the square of its velocity.
[02:07:04]  So had these objects struck the Earth, they wouldn't be moving quite so fast.
[02:07:10]  We typically estimate energies for back-of-the-envelope type computations.
[02:07:16]  We sort of assume velocities on the order of 20 kilometers per second on the Earth.
[02:07:20]  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.
[02:07:34]  Oh, yeah, I looked at Jupiter with a small telescope at that time.
[02:07:38]  These marks were plainly obvious, even through a small telescope.
[02:07:43]  One wonders about the actual nature of the coloring matter.
[02:07:48]  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?
[02:08:02]  The exact nature of the coloring matter was debated quite a bit.
[02:08:07]  Yeah, it was quite notable in leaving these marks.
[02:08:11]  It was quite impressive.
[02:08:13]  It was Shoemaker 119, right?
[02:08:14]  Yep, that's right.
[02:08:15]  What was the largest of the objects?
[02:08:18]  Do you know?
[02:08:18]  Did they estimate?
[02:08:19]  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.
[02:08:31]  All right.
[02:08:32]  First time caller line, you're on the air with Roy A. Tucker.
[02:08:35]  Hi.
[02:08:36]  Hi.
[02:08:36]  Art.
[02:08:37]  Hello, Roy.
[02:08:38]  Hi.
[02:08:39]  Art, can I say, first of all, that I appreciate the fact that your website allows us to link your banner on our websites?
[02:08:48]  Sure.
[02:08:48]  I appreciate that.
[02:08:50]  Roy, there's been more than one occasion that we've had these, I don't know what you, asteroids?
[02:09:02]  Smaller than a baseball that have hit in our area in the last few years.
[02:09:12]  And I was concerned, well, no, I was wondering how many times the how many times does this happen that they're not reported?
[02:09:24]  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.
[02:09:39]  I wouldn't be surprised.
[02:09:42]  Yeah, there's all sorts of a constant inflow of small objects in the Earth's atmosphere.
[02:09:50]  The stony type objects are sufficiently weak in their mechanical strength that they usually break up in the atmosphere.
[02:09:58]  And the small objects smaller than, say, 10 meters or so essentially lose all of their energy in their passage through the atmosphere.
[02:10:07]  So they'll essentially slow down almost to a stop and just fall the rest of the way.
[02:10:12]  And so you'll finally oftentimes have a phenomenon where you'll produce a strewn field from the entry of some stony object.
[02:10:22]  It'll enter the Earth's atmosphere.
[02:10:24]  It might be some meters in size.
[02:10:26]  And the aerodynamic forces will cause it to break into a large number of very small pieces.
[02:10:31]  And these will be deposited in a large elliptical region, perhaps a few miles in dimension.
[02:10:38]  And people will find pieces ranging from pieces, say, some pounds in weight down to tiny little dust particles and such.
[02:10:48]  Have you ever found one?
[02:10:49]  A meteor?
[02:10:50]  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.
[02:11:01]  And this is an area where Australasian tectites are found.
[02:11:10]  Essentially, about 600,000 years ago, an object impacted somewhere in that region and produced a spray of ejecta, glassy stones essentially called tectites.
[02:11:22]  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.
[02:11:29]  And I actually brought back 110 pounds of them with me.
[02:11:33]  Really?
[02:11:33]  I didn't find them all myself.
[02:11:35]  I had a lot of help from some of the Thai locals.
[02:11:38]  I basically offered a bounty for them, and they provided, like I say, about 110 pounds of them.
[02:11:45]  So I can't say I've actually collected a meteorite, but I had an experience not too dissimilar from that.
[02:11:52]  So you might have had parts of a meteorite in the ejecta.
[02:11:55]  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.
[02:12:04]  Roy, you're going to have to hold on.
[02:12:05]  We're at another breakpoint.
[02:12:06]  We'll be right back.
[02:12:07]  The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
[02:12:13]  More somewhere in time coming up.
[02:12:28]  Please remember that I had me in time.
[02:12:32]  I want to get rid of a thing.
[02:12:35]  A little bit of gambling.
[02:12:38]  It's right here where I am.
[02:12:39]  I know a lot about that.
[02:12:41]  Good morning, everybody.
[02:12:42]  Roy Tucker is here.
[02:12:44]  And we're talking about things in space and hoping they stay there, actually.
[02:12:50]  And as a matter of fact, tonight you can listen and learn.
[02:13:12]  Roy A. Tucker is my guest.
[02:13:14]  He has discovered three of those nasty little near-Earth asteroids, the ones that get close.
[02:13:22]  He has discovered a Mars-crossing asteroid, and he has discovered a comet.
[02:13:29]  And he's got quite an educational background.
[02:13:33]  So if you have a question in his field, then feel free to come ahead.
[02:13:38]  I have one, Roy, that will take you out on a limb.
[02:13:41]  Okay.
[02:13:41]  Frequently on this program, we discuss UFOs.
[02:13:49]  Okay.
[02:13:50]  We discuss things that we get very valid reports on.
[02:13:55]  I mean, things that go streaking across the North Atlantic that are monitored by radar at speeds that, well, 25,000 miles an hour, typically.
[02:14:07]  There have been a lot of reports of these.
[02:14:09]  And, of course, the more pedestrian, if there is such thing, UFO reports.
[02:14:14]  So somebody like yourself who is watching the skies, we have to ask, have you ever seen anything of that sort that you simply flat cannot account for?
[02:14:26]  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.
[02:14:45]  And I pointed my telescope at it and immediately recognized that it was a railroad flare hanging underneath a bunch of balloons.
[02:14:52]  So I'm afraid that's the closest brush I've ever had with anything like that.
[02:14:57]  They have figured out some way.
[02:14:59]  It's just breaking news that SOHO will be able to see the far side of the sun.
[02:15:06]  Something that I guess we haven't had much of a look at before.
[02:15:10]  That's interesting.
[02:15:11]  And I don't know how they're going to do it, but that is breaking at this hour.
[02:15:15]  Soho, they say, will get a look at the far side of the sun.
[02:15:18]  Can you imagine how that would occur?
[02:15:21]  Let me see now.
[02:15:22]  Soho right now is in one of the vibrational points.
[02:15:28]  I think it's at some vibration point that's between us, on the line between us and the sun.
[02:15:34]  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.
[02:15:43]  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.
[02:15:53]  Could it possibly be they were referring to the Ulysses spacecraft by chance?
[02:15:58]  No, no, it's Soho.
[02:16:00]  It's Soho.
[02:16:01]  Oh, goodness.
[02:16:02]  Soho has also had a rather interesting life and death and life and death and life.
[02:16:09]  It was resurrected.
[02:16:10]  Yeah, that's an interesting story, huh?
[02:16:13]  Any comments?
[02:16:14]  Oh, yeah, it's just basically the flight controllers apparently goofed and let the thing get out of control and lost contact with it.
[02:16:25]  Yeah, the joke running around was, oh, my God, they've killed Soho.
[02:16:29]  Well, I'm sort of reminded of the Chernobyl disaster some years ago.
[02:16:36]  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.
[02:16:54]  And one of the reporters asked, oh, what happened to those engineers?
[02:17:00]  And the Russian official kind of chuckled.
[02:17:03]  Oh, I am not a specialist in that field.
[02:17:09]  But nobody's seen them around since.
[02:17:12]  Yeah, I don't know what the ultimate I think they're going to be just real careful with Soho now, as you might expect.
[02:17:21]  First time caller line, you're on the air with Roy A. Tucker.
[02:17:23]  Hi.
[02:17:24]  Good morning, gentlemen.
[02:17:26]  How are you doing?
[02:17:26]  Just fine.
[02:17:28]  This is Rob Colleen from San Jose, California.
[02:17:30]  Yes, sir.
[02:17:31]  And I've got a question regarding the relative velocity of these different asteroid objects that might be out there.
[02:17:39]  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?
[02:17:55]  Are there some physical limitations as to how fast an object might be able to enter our solar system?
[02:18:03]  Well, let's see.
[02:18:04]  Generally speaking, when we discuss the asteroid and comet threat, we more or less confine our considerations to solar system objects.
[02:18:16]  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.
[02:18:31]  Essentially, all the comets that have been observed can be explained plausibly by stipulating that they were solar system objects.
[02:18:39]  So as far as a maximum possible speed, the comets are the most serious threat.
[02:18:48]  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.
[02:18:58]  And in such an instance, the maximum possible velocity would be on the order of about 75 kilometers per second.
[02:19:06]  That's pretty fast.
[02:19:07]  You betcha.
[02:19:10]  The amount of energy is just incredible at that rate.
[02:19:13]  Remember that the energy goes up as the square of the velocity.
[02:19:17]  Wow.
[02:19:18]  And these long-period comets are one of the aspects of the impact threat that you really can't do much about.

=== Long-Period Comets? (08:06) ===

[02:19:27]  As far as trying to prevent the impact, we more or less confine those considerations to near-Earth objects because we'd have a chance with those.
[02:19:37]  But if we were threatened by a long-period comet, our chances of successfully interceding in something like that is pretty slight.
[02:19:44]  Pretty small.
[02:19:45]  That's really interesting.
[02:19:46]  Now, when you say long-period comet, is it possible that a comet would begin coming toward us, a comet that we have never seen before?
[02:19:55]  It doesn't mean it hadn't been around before, but maybe the last time around was, I don't know, a million years ago.
[02:20:03]  That's not implausible.
[02:20:05]  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.
[02:20:16]  It's not implausible to discuss orbital periods that are tens, hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps even as much as a million years.
[02:20:25]  That would be a bit extreme.
[02:20:26]  But yeah, these long-period comets, they show up.
[02:20:31]  You've never seen them before.
[02:20:32]  They're going to be gone.
[02:20:32]  You'll never see them again.
[02:20:34]  The next question is scientists don't really seem altogether certain what comets are comprised of.
[02:20:44]  You know, there is the dirty snowball theory.
[02:20:47]  Yep.
[02:20:47]  And then there are others who think that it has a rather solid center, something to worry about.
[02:20:53]  If it was just a snowball, would we still worry?
[02:20:57]  Or would that disperse readily in the atmosphere?
[02:21:01]  Oh, no, it wouldn't disperse.
[02:21:02]  No.
[02:21:05]  If it's basically a comet, you figure it's going to have a density pretty similar to ice.
[02:21:13]  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.
[02:21:31]  Right.
[02:21:32]  And some of the near-Earth asteroids are thought to be pretty fluffy things, perhaps with densities less than water.
[02:21:37]  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.
[02:21:47]  If you're talking about objects that are on the order of a kilometer in size.
[02:21:52]  So almost no matter what it's made of, if it's that big, it's trouble.
[02:21:57]  Yeah, that's pretty much the story.
[02:21:59]  Okay.
[02:22:00]  Wildcard line, you're on the air with Roy Tucker.
[02:22:02]  Hi.
[02:22:03]  Yes, good morning, Art.
[02:22:04]  Good morning, Roy.
[02:22:05]  This is Eric from Sacramento.
[02:22:06]  Howdy.
[02:22:07]  Howdy.
[02:22:08]  I've got one little question for your guest.
[02:22:12]  And also, I've got just a bit of an antidote for you.
[02:22:17]  All right, the question first.
[02:22:19]  Okay.
[02:22:20]  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?
[02:22:35]  Well, let's see.
[02:22:36]  Long-period comets spend most of their time out a great distance away from the sun where it's really dark.
[02:22:42]  The sun is very faint out there, and you're really not going to be able to find them.
[02:22:49]  The resolution really isn't high enough.
[02:22:51]  And it's really the light-gathering capability.
[02:22:55]  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.
[02:23:05]  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.
[02:23:15]  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.
[02:23:23]  You can still see a silhouette of your hand because the sky is not really dark.
[02:23:27]  The atmosphere glows.
[02:23:28]  In fact, it's reddish in color if your eyes were sensitive enough.
[02:23:31]  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.
[02:23:40]  So to make a serious search for long-period comets, you'd have to have a really big telescope, much bigger than Hubble.
[02:23:47]  You'd have to be, almost have to be above the Earth's atmosphere.
[02:23:50]  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.
[02:24:03]  Right, I know Hubble is more geared more to just specific objects.
[02:24:08]  Yeah, it's almost like you've got a microscope looking at the sky.
[02:24:10]  Right, exactly.
[02:24:12]  And you're looking at just a tiny amount of sky.
[02:24:14]  So the sort of instrumentation that you would have to have to look for long-period comets really is not within our technological capability right yet.
[02:24:23]  Great.
[02:24:24]  Okay, great.
[02:24:25]  And then I had something for you, Art.
[02:24:26]  Yes, sir.
[02:24:27]  Well, you know, I noticed, well, I heard you earlier, I was saying earlier, when you read the story about the ice clouds over Colorado.
[02:24:33]  Yes.
[02:24:35]  And I don't know if you were on the air today at all, but 10 meters was acting really strange.
[02:24:43]  Was it?
[02:24:44]  Very strange.
[02:24:45]  It was almost like short skip propagation conditions.
[02:24:49]  Yes.
[02:24:50]  And it was rotating from north to east to south and then back again.
[02:24:55]  Oh, my.
[02:24:57]  Something very unusual would happen.
[02:25:05]  But what was really strange is, I mean, the first contact I made was in Scotland.
[02:25:09]  Well, that, oh, really?
[02:25:11]  Yeah.
[02:25:11]  I was going to say it sounds like sporadic E.
[02:25:13]  Well, it wasn't quite like that because the sporadic E, it's positioned right over one area.
[02:25:21]  But I would be able to hear Oregon, Washington, D.C., all the way up into Northwest Territories.
[02:25:28]  And I talked to a guy in Scotland.
[02:25:30]  And then not three minutes after that, I was talking to somebody in Australia.
[02:25:34]  Okay, well that that could be sporadic E mixed with F layer.
[02:25:38]  Right.
[02:25:38]  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.
[02:25:55]  And then it was really strange that one from Scotland got...
[02:25:59]  Well, you know, I guess we can't rule out the possibility that this cloud of ice crystals at that kind of altitude could have some sort of...
[02:26:07]  I looked at the weather map in the jet stream.
[02:26:09]  If you look at the jet stream, and if those high-altitude clouds are at that altitude, they're going to be affected.
[02:26:17]  They almost have to follow the jet stream.
[02:26:19]  And it would be in that particular pattern from the north dropping down to the south a little bit and then going back.
[02:26:28]  It's a point well made.
[02:26:30]  I can't rule it out.
[02:26:31]  Roy, any comments?
[02:26:33]  Yeah, let's see.
[02:26:34]  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.
[02:26:44]  And also, you'd have to speculate about whether there is some sort of ionization associated with them.
[02:26:52]  At that altitude, I can imagine that that's in the lower reaches of the ionosphere.
[02:27:00]  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.
[02:27:08]  Well, I'm going to go light up the rig here quickly when I get off and see what's on 10.

=== Crescent Shadows Cast (03:00) ===

[02:27:13]  East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Roy A. Tucker.
[02:27:16]  Hi.
[02:27:17]  Hello there.
[02:27:18]  Hello.
[02:27:19]  Yes, sir.
[02:27:20]  Yes.
[02:27:21]  I'm Frank from Knoxville, Tennessee.
[02:27:24]  Yes, Frank.
[02:27:24]  And I'd like to ask your guest a question.
[02:27:28]  Sure.
[02:27:29]  Concerning a crescent moon, which is caused, of course, by a round Earth casting a shadow on the moon, and then it starts getting fatter and fatter.
[02:27:45]  Yes.
[02:27:46]  And then suddenly, in about ten days, you've got a perfectly straight line on one side of the moon and rounded on the other.
[02:27:59]  What happened to the crescent?
[02:28:01]  In other words, the Earth is still round, so why shouldn't it cast a crescent shape all the way until it gets to a full moon?
[02:28:15]  Oh, well, the only time you see the shadow of the Earth on the moon is during a lunar eclipse.
[02:28:22]  And you will see that the shadow of the Earth is round.
[02:28:26]  It will be sort of always round under those circumstances.
[02:28:31]  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.
[02:28:38]  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.
[02:28:45]  Geometrically, the division between light and dark on the moon is half of an ellipse.
[02:28:53]  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.
[02:29:02]  We'll only see the lit-up crescent part.
[02:29:04]  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.
[02:29:20]  And then as it goes around us, and it's opposite in the sky from the sun, we'll see it entirely illuminated.
[02:29:26]  We'll see all the fully illuminated part of the moon.
[02:29:29]  Roy, you have been great.
[02:29:30]  We are literally out of time, so I would like to simply ask, do you have anything you have written you would like to plug?
[02:29:38]  Do you have any email address you would like to give out?
[02:29:40]  Would you like contact from people?
[02:29:42]  Is there a way to contact you?
[02:29:44]  Oh, I've thoroughly enjoyed the evening.
[02:29:47]  If you've got my observatory website link on your website, folks are quite welcome to visit the site, find out the sort of things I'm doing.

=== Mike Murphy's Curiosities (01:07) ===

[02:30:01]  And I guess there's a link or two from there to other interesting sites.
[02:30:06]  I would say that's probably the best thing to do.
[02:30:09]  All right.
[02:30:09]  Well, what a pleasure it has been to have you, and you can bet we'll have you back on again.
[02:30:13]  I thoroughly enjoyed it.
[02:30:14]  Thank you very much.
[02:30:15]  Good night, Roy.
[02:30:16]  Bye-bye.
[02:30:16]  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.
[02:30:31]  It's been a fascinating evening.
[02:30:34]  So we'll have him back.
[02:30:35]  In the meantime, tomorrow night, KCMO's Mike Murphy is going to be here.
[02:30:41]  And I think you're going to find it very interesting.
[02:30:44]  Mike is a man after my own intellectual curiosities.
[02:30:53]  We'll leave it at that.
[02:30:54]  He's quite a guy.
[02:30:55]  So that'll be tomorrow night, and I'll be back on Tuesday night.
[02:31:00]  So for now, from the high desert to you all, you know, keep your eyes on the skies.