"On this episode of "Strange Science,"" "what are these strange UFO flying through the daytime skies?" "The moon - how was it formed, what mysteries does it hold?" "Surprising new discoveries about lightning, nature's most awesome force." "They fall to Earth from outer space - meteorites, visitors from another world." "Spectacular rainbows, sun halos, and mirages - the heavenly light show explained." "There's been another strange sighting in the skies of Roswell, New Mexico, but this time, there are no little green men, no abductions, and no government cover-up." "What are these strange objects, that travel at speeds and patterns unlike any known insect, bird, or aircraft, emerging from nowhere and disappearing just as fast?" "They've been tagged "sky serpents," "unidentified flying organisms,"" ""critters in the sky," "air snakes," and, more simply, rods." "Rods are cigar-shaped objects that we discovered flying over" "Roswell and Midway, New Mexico in 1984, and since then, we have ac that these things have been appearing in over 20 states across the US, in Canada, Mexico, Norway, and Sweden." "And some of them are anywhere from 12 inches up to 1 00 feet or more in length, that we estimate." "They're extremely fast, travel at extremely high velocities, and they appear to be alive." "For the last four years, film editor and rods investigator Jose Escamilla has championed the notion that a previously undiscovered organism is streaking around our skies." "Jose first noticed this phenomenon while editing his own home video." "Rods are UFOs - unidentified flying objects - until we identify what they are or are not." "According to Jose, there is no evidence that rods are alien spacecraft or mechanical in any way." "There was an insect, here was a bird, and there was this anomalous object coming direct towards the camera." "It looked like a serpent in the sky." "By observing the movements and activities of birds and fish," "Jose is convinced that rods must be a living entity of some kind." "His first priority was to convince skeptics and the scientific community that the camera had not merely captured insects." "Physicist Jack Kasher, from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, comments." "I think he's done an extraordinary job of proving that they're not bugs, that they really are something themselves." "And he can slow it down and show you what a bug is." "In his research, Jose turned up this footage, from a Swedish army rapid-fire tank test." "The videographer noticed that flying through the rapidly ejecting shells was a rod, traveling at tremendous speed." "This incident raised the question, what other footage could be gathered?" "Thanks to specific videotaping instructions, which Jose calls "Sky Fishing Protocol,"" "rods followers have been able to capture rods footage from all over the world." "To sky fish, using a video camera, look at the scene through the viewfinder." "Set the focal length to match what is seen with the naked eye." "Then, move the camera at an angle, keeping trees, telephone poles, or other points of reference in the scene." "I feel they're everywhere." "And it's a matter of you going in your backyard, setting up your camera, using our protocol, the Sky Fishing Protocol, and letting it roll." "And if there is rod activity in your area, you'll be able to detect them." "This sky fishing strategy paid off for Jose when a group of adventurers from Extreme Video Productions came back with this footage." "Woo hoo!" "The Solano de Las Golondrinas in Mexico is essentially a 2,000-foot deep hole in the ground, and a world-famous base-jumping site." "This video, shot at the cave, not only captures birds, bugs, and the jumpers, but also rods, twisting, swerving, and entering the shadows." "Unbelievably, our own "Strange Science" camera crew accidentally captured a rod on videotape while shooting at the Oregon Vortex, a popular tourist attraction." "Watch carefully, as a rod soars by this tour guide and visitors, completely unnoticed." "In slow motion, you can see the distinctive detail." "Curious, we took our video to MIT- and Cornell-educated astrophysicist" "Tom McDonough, who dismissed the video anomaly as what he referred to as forward scattering of light." "In some of these experiments, people put the camera close to the sun, and that's a perfect condition for seeing all kinds of flying debris in the air that you don't normally notice." "I also think that this could possibly be a piece of debris inside the camera." "Dr. Jack Kasher, however, is convinced otherwise." "To me, it's gotten to the point where" "I'm not trying to figure out whether they're real." "I am thinking "Are they alive?" "What do they eat?" "How do they propel?" "What are the... how far away?" "How fast are they going?" - things like that." "This is something we really need to start taking a serious look at." "It makes very, very interesting science." "We really don't have a definitive answer for how they may fly, but we have made some breakthroughs in the possibility of their propulsion systems." "We have discovered a fish that has an undulatory wave fin, it's called an anal fin." "It's called the black ghost knife fish." "We feel that they've propelled themselves using an undulating wave fin, along the torsos." "It's believed the undulating wave action, combined with a lightweight torso, could create enough thrust for a rod to appear to swim in the air, much like a black knife ghost fish swims in water." "Although rods are not considered to be UFOs in the traditional sense" "Jose was invited to introduce his rods video at the Annua" "UFO Network Symposium in Denver, Colorado." "MUFON is dedicated to closing the great divide between science and UFOlogy." "According to MUSON state director Michael Curta," "MUFON's job is to study the rods investigation and follow it to its logical end." "MUFON is the world's oldest and largest research organization for the scientific study of unknown aerial phenomena." "What we try to do is get like-minded researchers that really want to know what's going on and get out there and do the hard work and collect the scientific data to back up or disprove the subject." "And everybody loves a good mystery, and that's what we're trying to do, is get to the bottom of a mystery here." "In particular, Jose came to get the reaction of one man - technical journalist and the world's leading skeptical authority in unidentified flying objects, Phillip Klass." "He's the grand daddy of the skeptics." "I just hope that he has the vision to see the evidence as we've presented as it is." "We feel that we have discovered a species of some kind that exists among us, and we don't know what the heck it is." "We don't know if they're extraterrestrial, inter-terrestrial, inter-dimensional or manmade or spiritual." "We don't know what they are." "Jose hopes his collection of rods video from all over the world will make believers out of Phil Klass and this captive audience." "After dedicating much of the last four years to rods investigation, for Jose, the moment of truth had arrived." "I think I'm aware of how electronics can temporarily briefly malfunction." "If it is a hoax, which I doubt, he has certainly fooled me." "I was slightly impressed by the more significant white object, but there was something that did not quite ring home." "I would hope that when he returns to that cave in New Mexico, he not only takes along a video camera, but also takes along an old-fashioned movie film camera." "But if the unusual rod shows up on both the conventional film and the video cam simultaneously, I will be impressed." "In theory, shooting with conventional film and video would rule out the possibility of an anomaly caused by video electronics." "After speaking to Klass," "Jose was disappointed, but not defeated." "This is a real deal." "What it is, whether it's an artifact caused by a camera or geological, meteorological or nay kind of artifact caused by anything natural, he knows that we have to get to the bottom of it." "Jose plans to return to the cave in Mexico, in hopes of physically catching a rod specimen." "We want to go all the way with it." "We want to find out what it is or isn't." "Then we'll have full closure." "Unidentified flying organism or strange camera anomaly?" "Until more conclusive evidence is capture, just keep watching the skies." "Coming up, the moon - how was it formed, what mysteries does it hold?" "On "Strange Science."" "In nearly every culture, the moon has been the source of unceasing mystery, myth, and lore." "So close is the moon, yet so little is known about it." "Since human beings first looked up into the night sky and pondered the mysteries of the moon, they have seen images engraved on its face." "Some see a hare, a frog, a woman, or, most common, the Man in the Moon." "Science has brought a greater understanding of the moon, its nature and its origin." "The discoveries have been amazing, unusual, and unexpected - beginning with its very existence." "Probably the most unusual thing about the moon is that it exists." "It's the sort of thing that we've taken for granted all our lives, and we're actually very lucky to have it." "The moon was not guaranteed." "John Mosley is an astronomer at Southern California's" "Griffith Observatory, and presenter of"No Moon,"" "a planetarium show that credits the moon for making the Earth livable and explains how life on Earth might be different if there were no moon." "If we had no moon, tides would be radically different, we wouldn't have moonlight at night, and we wouldn't have the changing moon." "We wouldn't have the moon to regulate our calendar." "But we've come to realize, recently, that the moon was an accident, a freak accident." "This freak accident known as the Impact Theory is the explanation most scientists now subscribe to." "When the Earth was only about 50 million years old, so we're talking four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was struck by another planet several times the size of Mars." "That planet struck a glancing blow that knocked material off of the Earth and destroyed itself, and some of that material formed the moon." "So the circumstances that led up to the formation of the moon are very unlikely to happen twice." "Without the moon, the Earth's climate would be dramatically different, according to Mosley." "The Earth is tilted in its orbit by 23 and a half degrees." "The reason we're tilted is because of the impact that formed the moon." "Since then, the moon has stabilized the mount of tilt." "Its gravitational pull on the equatorial bulge of the equator acts to stabilize and keep the tilt." "The consistent tilt in the Earth's axis causes one hemisphere to receive more daylight than the other as the Earth orbits the sun." "This creates the four seasons." "Early scientists were remarkably accurate in approximating the moon's distance from Earth, but were incorrect in assuming that the sun and planets orbited around the Earth and the moon." "Centuries later, with the confidence of the Industrial Age, people dreamed of the possibility of traveling to this faraway world, as depicted in Frenchman George Meliet's 1902 film" ""Voyage to the Moon," the biggest box office success of its day." "Three, two, one, zero." "All engines running." "Liftoff." "We have a liftoff." "In 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged the imagination of the scientific world, not only to establish technology to meet America's growing interest in space, but to beat the Russians in the race to the moon." "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." "The Eagle has landed." "Roger, tranquility." "We copy you on the ground." "You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue." "Eight years later, on July 20th, 1969, after traveling 238,000 miles in just over four days, Neil Armstrong's groundbreaking step onto the surface of the moon not only made history, but put to rest thousands of years of speculation." "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." "One of the long-standing mysteries about the moon was solved the moment Neil Armstrong took this historic step, much to the relief of NASA scientists." "Although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained, as you get close to it, it's almost like a powder." "We did not even know what the nature of the lunar surface was like." "There were people who speculated that there was a dust layer, that the Apollo spacecraft was going to sink out of sight, into a dust layer." "There were other people who thought "No, that can't be." "We see too many hard rocks in the photographs that we have of the moon."" "And fortunately, that group was right." "Gary Lofgren is the Lunar Sample Curator at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston." "Lofgren is credited with teaching the Apollo X V crew the lunar geology that aided the collection of additional lunar samples." "In all, 842 pounds of precious moon rocks were collected from six Apollo missions." "It's really not legal to possess a lunar sample collected on the Apollo missions." "A few samples were given to heads of state by President Nixon, back in the early 70's, and those are the only samples, actually, that re outside of our collection." "The study of lunar samples has proven invaluable to Earth, space, and medical science." "But immediate findings were discouraging." "Well, there were two things that were particularly surprising." "One was the total lack of water, which goes together with the second thing, which was the total lack of life, of any form of organic life or organic molecules on the moon." "If the Impact Theory explains that the moon came from the outer layers of the Earth, then why would the rocks collected on the moon be so different from those found on Earth?" "The Earth rocks all show evidence of water either altering them as they erode, as they are changed on the Earth." "On the moon, there's absolutely no water and the rocks are incredibly fresh, and very spectacular in that way." "Because there is no atmosphere on the moon, its geology is incredibly well-preserved." "This has given scientists new clues about the origins of our solar system and beyond." "The moon is a time capsule." "It contains a history of what happened in the very early part of our solar system." "There may be no water, but recent exciting discoveries from imagery gathered by unmanned spacecraft indicate evidence of what may be large lakes of ice on the moon's poles." "We know that there's hydrogen concentrations in the permanently-shaded parts of the polar regions of the moon." "We are still trying to understand what these deposits of hydrogen are." "They could be water." "The idea is that if there is water there, it came from cometary impacts." "Comets are known to contain ice and if ice impacted near the permanently shaded parts of the moon, some of that ice might be preserved." "Unlike the Earth, which has an atmosphere that regulates our climate, temperatures on the moon can range from 260 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun to -273 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade." "You're either directly in shade or you're directly in sun, and you can have one side of your body get very warm, if it's in the sun, the other side's in the shade and it can be very cold." "And this was obviously a problem when the Apollo astronauts were on the moon, and that's why their spacesuits had sort of a water circulating through, to keep their temperatures even." "From the Earth, we can tell that the surface of the moon is uneven." "1 6th Century astronomer Galileo named the dark areas Maria, or "seas,"" "as he interpreted their appearance through his primitive telescope." "The other main features of the moon's surface are the craters, varying in size from just a few inches to several miles in diameter." "Craters are believed to be the result of not only inactive volcanoes, but meteor impacts." "But if they are the result of meteor activity, why are there no meteorites on the moon?" "Because of all the craters, we know that lots of meteorites had to hit the moon." "But it's been puzzling for us, because we've never been able to find any actual samples of meteorite." "And we can tell by the chemistry of the materials that meteorites were involved." "I guess they were vaporized." "For as much as is known about the moon, we may never know all its secrets." "One of the big remaining mysteries of the moon is whether or not it has an iron core, how much of a core, because that will tell us a lot about the impact that formed the moon." "Our heavenly counterpart seems closer today than ever before." "Yet as we continue to explore, ponder, and observe the moon, we realize how little we know." "Scientists reveal amazing new discoveries about lightning, nature's most awesome force, on "Strange Science."" "Lightning - it is one of nature's most awesome forces, yet much remains to be understood." "It is still one of nature's great mysteries." "Just how are these magnificent electrical discharges created inside clouds?" "And can their deadly strikes be predicted or controlled?" "There is much at stake." "Each year, lightning causes millions of dollars and damage and accounts, on average, for more loss of life than hurricanes and tornadoes put together." "Often seen as the anger of the gods, lightning has humbled humanity for millennia." "The gods Zeus and Jupiter were said to demonstrate their displeasure by throwing lightning bolts at the Earth." "So odd were the Romans that temples were often built on the sites of past lightning strikes." "During the flowering of modern science in the 1 700's," "American founding father Benjamin Franklin pioneered lightning research." "Today, many questions remain unanswered." "We're still not sure how it is that lightning begins in the cloud, or exactly what factors control whether the discharge stays in the cloud or goes from the cloud to the ground." "Dr. Philip Krider is one of the world's foremost authorities on lightning." "Basically, you have a thunder cloud with a positive charge sitting in the upper region, negative charge at lower altitude, in the central region of the cloud." "And the separation of those two charges creates a potential voltage of several hundred million volts." "These oppositely-charged regions of the cloud are highly unstable and very attracted to each other." "A lightning discharge is, in some ways, like a gigantic version of a common static electrical shock." "When these sparks occur within the cloud, they are called intra-cloud lightning." "When the negative charge in one cloud flows to the positive charge in another, the result is cloud-to-cloud discharge." "Sometimes, the negative charge in the ground, especially in tall structures, will jump directly to the positive charge in the top of the cloud." "But the deadliest discharges are cloud-to-ground strikes." "The Earth has a slightly negative charge." "But the powerful negative charges at the base of the storm clouds repel the negative charge, causing the ground to become positive." "When the attraction between these charges becomes strong enough, there is a spark." "The peak impulse power being dissipated at the very beginning of a lightning stroke is about 1 0,000 megawatts, compared to what the entire city of Los Angeles would consume continually on a daily basis." "Thunderstorms are very remarkable, very dramatic, hostile environments." "They occur when the atmosphere is unstable." "When the atmosphere gets cold real fast, as you go up in altitude, the updraft speeds can approach or even exceed 1 00 miles an hour." "Out of this hostile environment of changing temperature, electrical charge, and air currents come some remarkable types of discharges." "One of them is dendrite lightning, also known as finger or spider lightning, because of its delicate discharge pattern." "Why this mysterious form of lightning travels along the base of the storm, sometimes for hundreds of miles, instead of striking down to the ground, is not understood." "For decades, scientists struggled to tame the unpredictable and destructive forces of lightning in order to study it in a controllable manner." "The result was an entirely new kind of discharge - triggered lightning." "Langmuir Labs, high above Socorro, New Mexico, is a lightning lab in the clouds, a place uniquely suited for triggering lightning." "Here, Professor Charles Moore has been studying lightning phenomena for almost 40 years." "We have students here that have gotten to be quite proficient in triggering lightning, initiating lightning, by firing these small rockets that we have here up into the air beneath the cloud, pulling a wire, a grounded wire." "And this intensifies the electric field at the tip of the wire so much that lightning actually initiates off the tip of the wire and races on up into the cloud." "It's just..." "we call it triggered lightning, but really, it's initiated lightning." "The lightning is triggered when a toy rocket pulls the positive ground charge up into a cloud at just the right moment - seconds before the cloud is ready to unleash a lightning bolt." "The rockets that we used are very small and inexpensive, and they're essentially expended whenever they're flown." "The wire that is pulled up first gets melted and then it gets vaporized, and so there's a very strong bar of light." "It looks, for all the world, like the bar of light from "Star Wars"." "By triggering strikes above sophisticated sensing devices," "Moore and his colleagues hope to increase our knowledge about lightning currents, temperatures, and discharge patterns." "Lightning itself is a very dangerous phenomenon." "They're energy equivalent to about two tons of TNT released in a discharge." "But here, on the mountaintop, we have an underground steel room, we call it the Iron Kiva, and which we constructed to study lightning." "And inside it, we're quite safe when we have lightning strike." "Because of the danger to passing aircraft, triggered lightning is exclusively a daytime investigation." "But at night, other researchers at Langmuir Labs seek out some of the most surprising and elusive storm discharges." "As seen above this violent Arkansas storm system in this video from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, a strange new class of lightning was confirmed, in the early 1990's, that had been reported for years by pilots and ships' captains." "Called jets and sprites because of their fleeting nature, these extraordinary lightning phenomena are visible only from high altitude or far above distant storms." "The blue jet is a very faint blue surge of light that comes out of the top of the thundercloud and propagates up to a height of 30 or 40 miles." "We really don't understand blue jets very well." "Sprites are much larger events, taking place at even higher altitudes, sometimes 50 or 60 miles above the storm deck." "Mark Stanley is a Langmuir Labs researcher who spends his summers on the mountain, documenting sprites." "These events are quite large." "You could take one of these sprites, lay it on its side, and it would cover all of New York City." "So they are large discharges, and it's quite amazing that this thing was not even discovered until 1990, mainly because they're pretty faint and you need visibility to see them." "This particular sprite here is a rather energetic sprite, and you'll see it here in real time." "Bang." "And then, you'll see it slowed down, on a normal speed." "You see, the development occurs mostly in one frame of the sprite." "And the high-speed video is really interesting, because you'll see it start out as a whole bunch of columns, and then you'll see the downward development of the, essentially, streamers or lightning streamers propagating downwards." "Sprites and jets are just part of the puzzle in understanding lightning." "Whether on the ground, in the air, or high above a storm system, lightning is not something to be trifled with." "Yet the awesome power and beauty that our ancestors saw as the anger of the gods continues to captivate scientists in an attempt to solve its many mysteries." "Coming up, meteorites - fiery visitors from outer space." "What can they tell us about our universe?" "On "Strange Science."" "A fireball streaks across the sky over Peekskill, New York." "Is it a UFO?" "A shooting star?" "It's a meteor, a bona fide visitor from outer space." "Unlike a shooting star, this ball of burning rock will hit Earth, but not before careening through the trunk of a car." "This eight-pound stony meteorite came from the Asteroid Belt, a floating sea of metal and rock, located over 300 million miles away, between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars." "Scientists theorize these chunks of debris were unable to form into a planet of their own because of Jupiter's massive gravity." "90 percent of them are made of stone." "The rest are comprised of metals like iron and nickel." "Space debris hurls into the Earth's atmosphere at velocities often exceeding 25 miles per second." "The speeding body collides with millions of air particles, which causes it to heat to temperatures of 2,000 degrees or more." "The flash of light in the sky as the object enters the Earth's atmosphere is a meteor." "A meteorite is the solid object that strikes the ground." "Alan Harris is a senior research analyst at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California." "The chance of being hit by a meteorite is extremely small." "There's, to my knowledge, only one recorded instance in the United States." "The woman was laying in bed when a meteor came crashing through the ceiling." "Civilizations like the ancient Greeks revered meteorites as messengers from the heavens or fragments of fallen stars." "Meteorites provided the ancient Hittites, Egyptians, and Arabs with an early source of iron for tools and weapons, long before humans knew how to extract and smelt iron ore." "This drawing of a Roman coin commemorates the death of Caesar." "The back of a coin displays an image of a meteorite fall that preceded Caesar's demise." "The Romans later linked the two events and interpreted the fall as a harbinger of impending tragedy." "Later European civilizations, however, were not convinced that meteorites were extraterrestrial." "Even in the 1 8th Century, meteorites were thought to be regular stones carried into the sky by water spouts and then released during thunderstorms." "Then, in 1 794, a German physicist named Chladni theorized that meteorites came from space." "But Chladni's idea would not gain acceptance until 1 803, when a member of the French Academy witnessed a meteorite fall without thunder and validated Chladni's theory." "Today, Bob Haag, a professional meteorite hunter, travels the world looking for new additions to his collection." "This material just..." "if it just fell out of the sky five minutes ago or a thousand years ago, it's another sample from outer space that we've never been able to examine." "The best places to find meteorites are in unmolested desert areas, where there is less ground cover and fewer terrestrial rocks." "Haag has one of the most valuable meteorite collections in the world." "Some of his specimens are valued at over a million dollars." "Although meteorites come in all shapes and sizes," "Haag explains some of the differences between a meteorite and a meteor-wrong." "I saw this meteorite because, of course, the metal detector went off because of the iron in it." "But it's heavy, it's steel, and it's rusty." "Is this latest Haag find the real thing?" "The true test is a mild nitric acid wash, which Haag prepares back at his workshop." "A real iron meteorite will exhibit a unique pattern in the metal." "What you see there is a pyramid-on- a-pyramid-shaped crystal, called a octahedral." "It's only found in meteorites." "Anything like that." "That's proof" "That's a real meteorite." "And meteorites are very important, because they are sometimes our only samples of other planetary bodies in the solar system." "And by studying these objects, we can unravel, if you will, the entire history of the solar system." "David Kring is a geologist and planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson." "This meteorite is one of the oldest samples that we have in our collections." "This is nearly 4.6 billion years old." "In fact, it's older than our own planet." "What I've done is I've taken a slice of this meteorite and I've polished it so that it's paper-thin and so that we can shine light through it." "That allows us to study it on this petrographic microscope." "This meteorite contains particles of what was once molten or fiery rain in the solar nebula that orbited the sun before the planets accreted." "These droplets then solidified and bumped into each other, sticking together to form rocks which bumped into larger rocks, which eventually formed planet-sized bodies." "While meteorites may give scientists clues into cosmic history, their importance can seem remote to the general public." "But in 1996, a meteorite, reportedly from Mars, brought news that shocked the world." "NASA scientists theorized that this meteorite contained tiny worm-like structures representing fossilized microbes." "David McKay, a geochemist from NASA's Johnson Space Center, explains." "The evidence is pointing toward biologic activity in early Mars." "And then our last bit of evidence are pictures of strange structures within this rock and within the carbon-8, some of which we have interpreted as micro-fossil forms." "But David Kring disagrees." "Now, we've studied those pockets in our own laboratory, and so far, all of the evidence that we have gathered suggests that, in fact, the features in these objects are produced instead by geologic processes that are quite common, even on Earth." "Whether or not the controversial rock is evidence of Martian life forms, meteorites have a lot to tell us about our past." "And they may have some impact on our future, as well." "We estimate that there are approximately a thousand objects crossing the Earth's orbit that re a mile or so across." "If something that size were to hit the Earth, it would cause a catastrophe, perhaps killing as many as a billion people." "We estimate that something that size would hit the Earth about every several hundred thousand years." "Some scientists believe a large object collided with Earth 65 million years ago, creating a huge dust cloud that eventually wiped out the dinosaurs and half of all living things." "How long will it be before another giant object crashes into our planet?" "Civilization-altering events, this one-kilometer diameter things happen once in a few hundred thousand years." "Smaller events that would cause some local damage occur every century or two." "But we can't take any comfort from when the last one did or did not occur as far as when the next one will occur." "There are so many questions that we can answer with these meteorites." "We car going to learn much more about the origin of our solar system - how climates evolved, whether life could have originated elsewhere." "There's just a whole host of questions that are fascinating and we'll be able to address with these objects." "Depending on their size, meteorites can bring death and destruction or information about the distant realms of our solar system." "Until we can venture out into the galaxy ourselves, we'll have to wait for it to come to us, in tiny pieces." "Next up, rainbows, haloes, and mirages - how do scientists explain these striking visual phenomenon?" "On "Strange Science."" "Since the dawn of time, people have looked to the sky and seen omens and miracles in the extraordinary lights and colors." "Rainbows were seen as bridges to the world of the gods, sun haloes as the headgear of angels, and mirages as glimmering cities in the distance." "But with our modern scientific understanding, can they all be explained through known principles?" "As light passes through the Earth's atmosphere, it is affected by changes in temperatures, as well as particles in the air." "Contrary to our common understanding, sunlight does not always travel in straight lines." "It bends, bounces, and refracts, creating a host of dramatic atmospheric optical effects." "Everything our eye perceives is, in one way or another, a trick of the light." "For example, if the sun gives off white light, why is the sky blue?" "We posed the question to Robert Greenler, professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee." "We ought to start with not "Why is the sky blue?"" "but "Why is the sky bright?"" "for instance, the sun is up there, and you look in that direction and see brightness in the sky, it means there's light coming from that direction to your eye." "Now how does that happen if the sun's over there?" "And the answer is scattering." "Light waves, like the water waves in this pond, are scattered by obstacles in their path, sending wavelets off into new directions." "Air molecules are just large enough to scatter the light coming from the sun, sending it off in all directions." "But why is it blue?" "The answer is that when you get light scattered off particles, in this case molecules, that are small compared to the wavelength of light waves, you tend to scatter the blue end of the spectrum more than the red end." "White light is made up of light waves containing all the colors of the spectrum." "When these light waves hit air molecules in the atmosphere, the blue portion of the spectrum is then scattered or deflected toward the eye." "One of the most celebrated atmospheric optical effects is the rainbow." "When sunlight meets almost perfectly round raindrops in the atmosphere, the light is refracted or bent as it comes out." "As light of different wavelengths is bent to slightly differing degrees, the color spectrum is liberated, becoming a brilliant, multihued arc." "But why is the rainbow visible only when our back is to the sun?" "Is has to do with our position between the sun and the raindrops in the sky." "Now, there's a point in space which is exactly opposite the sun." "It would be marked by the shadow of your head on the ground." "I will call that the anti-solar point." "The rainbow lies on a circle, which is centered on the anti-solar point." "And so you see that portion of the rainbow circle which is above the horizon." "Unrestricted by the horizon, a dramatically different rainbow can be seen." "For instance, if you were in an airplane looking at the sun shining on a rain sheet, in principle you could see the whole circle." "Now, that's kind of a rare thing." "You have to be sitting in a pilot seat, not in a passenger seat to be able to see that wide angle." "But in theory, the rainbow can be a complete circle." "Astronomer Andrew Young of San Diego State University says that rainbows are a totally personal experience." "No two people ever see the same rainbow, because one person, standing here, sees the raindrops that are over here." "And the other person, standing here, sees the raindrops that are over here." "And all thee raindrops are illuminated by the same sun, but there's this fixed angular deviation of the sunlight, so each person sees a different set of raindrops illuminated by the sun." "Carole Fontaine, folklorist and professor of Biblical studies, has been cataloguing legends, myths, and beliefs about the rainbow." "It'd be difficult to find a culture that has not assigned some sort of meaning to the rainbow." "In fact, whether it's from Africa, for the Dahomey, for whom the rainbow is a serpent who has come to drink water in the sky, or whether it's the old Norsemen, who thought that the rainbow was" "a bridge from our Earth to Valhalla, the place where the gods live, or even the Bible itself, the rainbow has always been something that fascinates humans as they tell their stories." "With our knowledge of atmospheric optics, we can now find explanations for what people once saw as miracles." "In many ancient cultures, gods and deities were often surrounded by a halo of glowing light." "Today, we know that haloes are caused by millions of tiny ice crystals, high in the atmosphere." "Light rays exiting the crystals are bent away from the sun by a consistent angle, making it seem as if there is a brilliant circular halo around the sun." "a person standing in front of one of these haloes may have seemed, to our ancestors, like a heavenly deity." "Other miracle stories may also have scientific explanations." "When Jesus walked on water over the Sea of Galilee, his Disciples took it as proof of Jesus' divinity." "Oh, yes, the walking on water." "Well, that's, of course, an excellent example of the inferior mirage, where one sees a hot surface that apparently reflects the sky beyond it, and you interpret this reflection of the sky as a pool of water." "Inferior mirages are low-level atmospheric phenomenon that can happen over water or land." "When the airjust above the surface is hotter than the air a few meters high up, the conditions are ripe for this confounding optical illusion." "Light rays passing through the atmosphere bend with the variations of temperature and wavering double images appear near the surface." "Everything that you see in a mirage is a distorted image of something that's really out there, caused by the fact that light rays are not taking straight line paths through the atmosphere." "The human mind may interpret these images as reflections in water, yet the pavement in this scene is actually bone-dry." "A superior mirage causes things to appear higher than they actually are." "These ice walls, known to sailors as the Fata Morgana, are actually a reflection of the surface ice." "They don't really exist." "As the sun sets into a crystal clear twilight, one of the most mysterious types of mirage may appear - a pot of green that briefly and unexpectedly comes into view at the tops of the red sphere, or perhaps hovers for a second or two," "as the sun dips out of sight, below the horizon." "Jules Verne wrote of the green flash that one who witnessed the flash would be able to see into the hearts of others." "What happens is that the atmospheric refraction, which is responsible for mirages and other phenomena, is quite considerable at the horizon." "It actually is enough to raise the sun at the horizon by its own diameter." "But that raising of the image is not equal for all colors of light." "For the shorter wavelengths, like green and blue, their image is raised up a little bit more." "But the blue light waves are scattered by the air molecules, leaving a rare last glimpse of green - something extraordinary enough to be taken as an evil omen by sailors throughout the millennia." "Every day and night, there are bedazzling lights and colors in the sky." "We see these effects and are intrigued, but what are we seeing?" "Is it really there, or is it an illusion?" "Thousands of years ago, our ancestors saw gods and angels in the light show in the sky." "Wars were launched, famines predicted, and people inspired or paralyzed with fear by their interpretations of heavenly events." "Today, we see the same effects, and with scientific understanding, we can have a different appreciation." "All around, there is beauty and magic a spectacular light show open daily." "To enjoy it, you need no special equipment, no special training." "Just keep watching the skies."