fierball

27 Jul 91  02:30:09
By: Don Allen
Re: Fireball of 1972
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This came off Usenet tonight:
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Newsgroups: soc.history,misc.headlines
Subject: Calibrating the press -- astronomical fireball of 1972
Date: 26 Jul 91 12:09:02 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Independence


The news media are known for magnifying events out of proportion to their
actual significance. I found an instance where they made a truly spectacular
occurence sound to most Americans as if it were nothing special.

A recent article in the Science section of the NY Times (June 18), mentioned
that an "asteroid" had grazed the atmosphere in 1972, leaving a trail in the
sky that was "witnessed by thousands of people." But I had never heard of this
and couldn't find anything about it in the Times Index for 1972. This seemed
odd, because the Times covers science news extensively. Eventually I learned
of a reference to this event in an astronomy magazine.

On August 10, 1972, a phenomenon known in astronomy as a "fireball" occurred
at 2:30 Pm Central Time over the Rocky Mountain states and was indeed
witnessed by thousands of people under its path, which went from Utah almost
exactly straight north all the way into Canada. Fireballs are large meteors
and those bright enough to be seen in daylight are very rare. This one not
only was extremely bright, it also left a trail across the sky that lasted for
tens of minutes. (See my concurrent posting to sci.astro,sci.space, "Fireball
of 1972 -- latest word?")

Knowing the date of the event, I was able to check newspapers other than the
Times to see how they covered it. The morning papers of August 11 from the
area where the fireball was most visible, Utah and Idaho, had the longest
stories on it, written by local reporters and quoting local spectators, though
they used an AP photograph of the object's trail. The West Coast and
Midwestern papers carried various versions of an AP dispatch.  The Eastern
press had no stories at all. From the Television News Abstracts, I learned
that on the evening of August 10, only one television network, NBC, mentioned
the event in an item citing the FAA as saying that an airliner pilot had seen
a flaming object, probably a meteor, pass under his plane.

The AP dispatch that most papers carried had no dateline, that is, a specific
city from which it was filed. A few had it datelined Denver. It stated that
"one or more" objects had been sighted over a wide area of the Mountain states
and contained contradictory reports of their direction of travel as well as
their altitude. It cited an FAA official as saying that an object was at
80,000 feet over Missoula, but it also included the item about the object
passing under an airliner flying "in Utah." It quoted NORAD, which keeps track
of all orbiting objects, as passing along a second-hand report of an object
over Boise going from west to east, rather than speaking authoritatively about
it. It quoted astronomer Sidney Hacher of Washington State University in
Pullman as saying that whatever was seen was probably part of the annual
Perseid meteor shower, due to reach its maximum in the next few days. And it
quoted Mrs. Thomas Williams of Mead, Washington as declaring that what she saw
was "about four feet in diameter."

In contrast to the AP dispatch, newspapers from the area where the fireball
was actually seen published coherent accounts.  In particular, there was no
doubt that there was only one object and that it was moving from south to
north. And, according Patty Minton of the Idaho Statesman of Boise, "Most
observers, laymen and experts, agreed that the object was traveling fast and
at great height." These papers raised the question of whether the object might
be manmade.(See Note 1) The Deseret News of Salt Lake City cited a NORAD
statement issued late in the day that "it is either a space vehicle re-
entering the earth's atmosphere or a meteor." The scientist whom these papers
quoted, Mark Littman of the planetarium in Salt Lake City, said that the
object was probably =not= part of the Perseid shower, but rather from the
asteroid belt. Minton, in her Statesman article, noted that experts differed
on the object's origin without citing Hacher explicitly, but she had obviously
read the AP dispatch -- she handled the object-under-the-airliner report this
way:

  "Associated Press reports from Denver said a Frontier Airlines
   pilot allegedly saw it pass underneath his plane
   while it was in flight over Utah."


It seems to me that this fireball has as much significance for the student of
the news media as it has for an astronomer. It's rare for a spectacular event
to have no material consequences.  Nobody was killed and no property was
damaged. It had no political value, only news value. As such, it was a "pure"
stimulus, like the sharp blow to your knee that the doctor administers to
check your reflexes.

In the case of the anonymous hacks of AP, it looks like their reflexes are to
rely on official pronouncements. They swallowed the FAA and NORAD statements
without examining their contradictions.(See Note 2) For the one eyewitness
report they included, they ignored all the people on the street in Salt Lake
City and Boise, where AP presumably has reporters, in favor of somebody from a
town I couldn't even find in a 1980 road atlas.  Her certainty that it was
"four feet in diameter" just adds to the confusion conveyed by the dispatch,
and leaves the impression that people in the Mountain States had been
hallucinating that afternoon.

The confusing situation portrayed by the AP dispatch suggests that it was
compiled hastily soon after the fireball and never updated.(See Note 3) Yet it
was apparently released very late in the day because it didn't make it into
the Eastern newspapers or the network TV news shows.


FOOTNOTES

Note 1:
The Spokane Spokesman-Review, appropriately enough for a location near the
edge of the viewing area, had a mixture of AP material and local reportage in
its story. Most interesting was the extensive quoting of an unidentified
person the paper referred to as a spokesman (seems like a contradiction right
there, doesn't it?) for Fairchild Air Force Base. This individual was of the
strong opinion that the object "was a manmade satellite that broke away from
its orbit." Among the more dubious statements attributed to this spokesman was
"A meteor would look like a rock and generally would not be flaming." He also
said the object might have "rejoined its orbit," the only expression anywhere
of the notion that the object might have left the atmosphere.



Note 2:
The San Francisco Chronicle tried to resolve the contradiction of and object
at 80,000 over Montana and one that flew under an airliner in Utah. In the
small space it allocated to the fireball report, they wrote

  "A fireball, possibly a deteriorating meteor, flashed
  across the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains yesterday
  afternoon, dipped beneath an airliner and vanished,
  observers said."



Note 3:
I found a couple of evening papers whose August 11 editions carried an updated
AP dispatch. Gone was the story of anonymous pilot seeing an object flying
underneath his airliner. Instead there was a quote from a Frontier pilot
identifed as Bob Bagshaw, whose description was more in line with those cited
by the Utah and Idaho papers. Also, oddly enough, these papers stated that
Fairchild AFB had tracked the object on radar, but there were no other
details.