© Wally Lee Parker
Reprint from the August, 2015, issue of the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society's "Mortarboard."
First
of all, let me disclose that when it comes to flying saucers, your editor has
always wanted to believe. Unfortunately,
having spent the majority of my working life dealing with people, I’ve learned
that humans often embellish things just a little bit beyond the merely
factual. So even though I do want to
believe that unidentified flying objects are extraterrestrial craft, I’ll need
to see some credible scientific evidence first — meaning eyewitness accounts
alone are never enough.
That
said, most anyone with any number of years behind them has seen at least a few
unusual things in the sky. For example,
late one afternoon in the mid-1950s, we were out in the west field of the
family’s Williams Valley farm turning hay bales to speed their drying (they were baled just a little too
green)
when we noticed an intense pinpoint of green light falling out of the northeastern
sky. The light fell for what seemed five
or six seconds, then disappeared behind the timberline — that being perhaps a
half mile away. As for what it looked
like, imagine a green aerial flare being dropped from an aircraft — though what
kind of muddled aviator might drop something like that into a tinder dry woods
is beyond me.
It’s
interesting to note that objects dubbed “green fireballs” were very popular among UFO devotees in the early
1950s. And to also note — when reading
about the fantastic maneuvers these objects engaged in — that estimating the
distance, size, and speed of airborne UFOs without fixed references is
notoriously difficult if not impossible even for trained observers. As for my sighting, all I can honestly report
was a descending point of intense green light.
If what I saw was one of those notorious “green fireballs,” I wasn’t particularly impressed
by it. But if it were a tailless meteor
falling several dozen or more miles away, that would have been impressive.
The
above is preamble to the fact that about ten years later I saw something
incredibly impressive — and initially unidentified.
The
event occurred on the evening of March 31st,
1965, at exactly 47 minutes after 9 — Pacific Standard Time. That, at least, is the time published in the
November, 1965, bulletin of “The Permanent Commission on Meteorites of the International
Union of Geological Science.” And with a name like that, I’m going to
assume their data is accurate.
A lady
friend and I were parked and “talking”
in a sparsely wooded rural area not far from Spokane when the entire landscape
— both inside and outside the vehicle — turned a vivid orange. And I do mean the entire landscape, including
the mountains in the distance. Looking
around, the obvious source of the light was what appeared to be a single
boiling orange fireball just a short distance above the horizon to the
north. If I had to hazard a guess as to
size, I’d say at least as big as a clenched fist at arm’s length. Within a few seconds — perhaps five — it had
faded away.
My
only hint as to distance was that I heard absolutely nothing I could associate
with the explosion — then, or in the following minutes. What I didn’t realize at the time was that
our area was only seeing the final dazzling flashes of what would prove to be
one of the 20th century’s legendary meteor falls.
As for
other local reports, the April 1st,
1965, edition of the Ellensburg, Washington, Daily Record quoted the pilot of a DC-3 flying in the Ephrata area as
saying the event lit the cockpit of his aircraft “as bright as day.”
So at least I wasn’t having a singular hallucination — even though my
date for the evening only recalled seeing a “confusing” flash of light.
Eyewitness
reports of this event were received from as far north as Peace River, Alberta,
and Dawson Creek, British Columbia. As
far east as Edmonton, Alberta. And as
far south as Lewiston, Idaho. The final
official report stated the explosion, or explosions, I saw occurred at an
altitude of approximately 18 miles, some 38 miles northwest of Revelstoke,
British Columbia — which is to say, about 270 miles north of Spokane.
Over
the next several years a fairly good understanding of what actually happened
that evening was pieced together. The
evidence suggested that the source of the explosions was a roughly 10,000 pound
chondrite meteor. (Chondrites being rocky meteors
composed of smaller, non-metallic pebbles, the bulk of which usually “burn up”
before impact.) Subsequent analysis indicates that
the meteor, leaving a glowing 60 plus mile long trail, detonated in a
blue-white fireball that then broke into at least two smaller chunks which
subsequently exploded as red fireballs — one or both of those smaller
explosions likely what witnesses in our area saw.
Data extracted from instruments
measuring atmospheric pressure changes were used to estimate the force released
by the entire series of explosions. Said
calculations suggested that an amount of energy equivalent to at least 20,000
tons of TNT — or a small nuclear device — had been liberated in just a few
seconds. And when something that large
detonates over Canadian airspace, agencies from both sides of the border, both
civilian and military, are interested in sifting through the details just to
make sure there isn’t anything — shall we say — unnatural going on.
Most
of those directly under the series of blasts described the event as very bright
and very loud. In fact, the April Fool’s
Day issue of the Revelstoke
Times Review
wrote, “windows
rattled and doors shook”
with “thunder-like
bangs”
that “lasted
fully 10 minutes,”
the above sounds preceded by “brilliant flashes of light all over the sky.”
Only
two small fragments of the object were recovered from the ground. The rest of the physical evidence was
collected directly from the air shortly after the event by United States Air
Force jets fitted with special dust collecting filters — which, as chance would
have it, were also very good at gathering radioactive airborne residuals from
Russia’s ongoing series of aboveground nuclear tests.
So —
setting aside the conspiracy theories suggesting that the “Revelstoke Fireball” was actually a flying saucer’s
anti-matter drive malfunctioning and then exploding — I’m pretty happy with
having seen the last glow of this perfectly spectacular meteor. Of course, if it had been an exploding flying
saucer, that would have been pretty cool too.
——— end ———
