UFOs and the Butt-Head Astronomer

It has been too many years, so I no longer remember why my brother and I were driving through San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park that night.  Since we were in a ‘57 MGA with the top down, it might have been just to enjoy the fun of riding around in a convertible on a warm summer night.  

Just as we passed the zoo, we saw it:  It was impossibly long, with red, white, and green lights in front and about a hundred yards farther back, it had a mass of flashing white lights, flying way too low over the park.  It was 1966 and just like about half of the country, we were seeing a UFO.  (No—I don’t really have a picture of it, since this happened decades before everyone carried a cell phone so they could take a picture of what they had for lunch.  The photo at left was generated by AI.)

Naturally, we chased it, trying to catch up with the UFO to get a better look at the mysterious object that didn’t seem to be moving very fast, but that seemed to make impossible turns, hovering at times, then speeding up.  I’m not sure about the statute of limitations but let me say that at one point, a white convertible may have driven across Olmos Basin Park in hot pursuit.  

Eventually, we managed to catch up with the tail end of our UFO, just close enough for that mass of flickering lights to spell out the message “GRAND OPENING SALE…”. About 100 feet in front of the flashing banner was the faint outline of a small Cessna.

We felt like idiots, of course!  I don’t remember us ever discussing the event again—we were too embarrassed to admit how foolish we had been.  It wasn’t really our fault, of course—we were preconditioned to expect to see a UFO.  All over the country, people went out every night looking for them and since they were looking for them, they found them.  Newspapers and television reported these sightings daily.

The UFO hysteria of the 1950s through the 1960s was a period marked by widespread fascination, fear, and speculation about UFOs, which were believed to be alien spacecraft. This phenomenon reached its height during the Cold War, as a combination of geopolitical tension, the rise of modern media, and the human inclination to explore the unknown coalesced into a weird cultural moment.  The hysteria was fueled by reports of strange sightings, government secrecy, and a growing fear of technological advances (particularly, the potential for extraterrestrial threats).

This period was also one of intense national and international paranoia, as Americans lived under the constant threat of nuclear war.  Our government, which needed to respond to this growing paranoia, first retreated behind a shield of silence or secrecy.  By the time the government finally did respond, there was widespread distrust of the government…a distrust fueled—in part by the Vietnam War.  The more the government said there were no UFOs, the more the public was convinced the government was lying.

Actually, there were Unidentified Flying Objects (with the emphasis on “unidentified”).  The fact that you can’t identify what someone saw doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial—it just means the government doesn’t know what it was or if you saw it.

The media played a central role in amplifying the UFO hysteria of the 1950s.  Newspapers and magazines, eager to sell stories and appeal to public interest, sensationalized UFO sightings, creating a narrative that UFOs were an imminent threat or a mysterious puzzle to be solved. This coverage often lacked skepticism and led many readers to believe in the reality of extraterrestrial visitors.

Hollywood also capitalized on the UFO craze. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953) tapped into public anxieties about alien life, portraying extraterrestrials as both potential saviors and terrifying invaders. These movies reflected and reinforced the conflicting emotions of wonder and fear that characterized the era.  On one hand, UFOs represented the possibility of contact with advanced civilizations, and on the other, they symbolized the unknown dangers of space and technology.

Television, which became more widespread in the 1950s, also played a significant role in spreading the UFO phenomenon. Shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits tapped into the growing cultural interest in the supernatural and the unknown, contributing to the atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia that surrounded the UFO hysteria.

This was a period of profound social change, with the women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, civil rights protests, and the protests against the war all occurring simultaneously.  Psychologists suggest that UFO sightings may have been a projection of collective anxieties about the future, particularly the fear of nuclear war and the unknown possibilities of space exploration.  The idea of seeing actual extraterrestrial visitors may have provided a way for people to externalize their fears, making the feared unknown more “manageable” and less threatening.

As more and more sightings were reported, an ever-growing number of people began searching the sky for something they didn’t understand, and naturally, they found what they were looking for (or thought they did).  

Lots of scientists (like Carl Sagan) came out and tried to calm the public by stating that the events needed to be looked at calmly, with logic and common sense.  These scientists were generally ignored.  The ability to use common sense and logic is so rare in society that we need a law requiring the few people still capable of rational thought to wear capes in public so they can be identified and consulted during an emergency.

By the end of the 1960s, UFO sightings began to decline, and the hysteria surrounding them started to subside.  Several factors contributed to this shift.  As the U.S. government continued to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life and further studies revealed more mundane explanations for many UFO reports, public interest began to wane.  Eventually, even the hysterical calm down.

That calm recently ended with hundreds of reports of drones flying over New Jersey.   Every night, people went out looking for the mysterious drones…and found them!  It didn’t matter that every damn photo or video taken of the “mystery drones” showed the FAA-mandated aircraft lighting pattern—they just had to be drones!  Probably Chinese drones!  Somebody should shoot them down!

Between 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM on any given night in New Jersey, there are over 1600 scheduled airline flights passing overhead.  Add to this the number of light aircraft, helicopters, and military aircraft and you will realize that at any given time anywhere in New Jersey, and there are a lot things moving in the sky.  

It didn’t take long before drones were sighted in other states across the country.  Politicians briefly stopped looking down their noses at their constituents long enough to look up in the night sky and notice there were “things” moving up there!  The former governor of Maryland announced that he had taken a photo of a formation of drones hovering over his house.  (An examination of his photo revealed an amateur photo of Orion’s Belt.)

Every aspect of the current drone hysteria matches the earlier UFO mania.  The government is being criticized for not “solving” the mystery even as their explanations are being ridiculed.  This seems to be a time of social change challenging long held beliefs.  The press is reporting even the wildest claims without any investigation or review.  And the hysteria seems to be spreading.

There is however, one big difference between today’s drone hysteria and the earlier UFO mania.  My brother and I could not have launched our own UFO—we probably couldn’t have put anything bigger than a rubber band powered balsa wood toy into the air.  But today, any teenage boy can buy a $10 drone from Temu, tape a glow-stick to it, and try to terrify his neighbor.  

This drone nonsense will eventually run its course, and the press will move on to the next sensation.  In the meantime, remember:  Fantastic claims require fantastic proof.

Biphasic What?

One of the great insights I gleaned from studying history was the realization that everyone throughout history, no matter when or where they lived, was basically the same as us if you learned enough about them.  This is probably fairly basic for most people but came as a great surprise to a poor dumb ol’ country boy.

That doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally be surprised by some alarming differences, however.  I just discovered something about the people of medieval Europe that is so strange it makes you want to rethink that first paragraph.  Those weirdos.

While we take it for granted that a perfect night’s sleep is eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, until about the late seventeenth century, people engaged in something called biphasic or segmented sleep.  Depending slightly on the time of the year, people went to bed around 9:00 PM, slept until about 11:00, then woke up for two hours before going back to sleep until dawn.  

The two periods of rest were commonly called first and second sleep.  During those two waking hours, people might finish chores, talk with their family, or—if they listened to the urgings of the church—engage in prayer.  And I suppose for some people, that holy suggestion was actually true.  For most married couples the most obvious activity was engaging in sex, particularly since it was widely believed that the healthiest children were conceived after first sleep.

People worked hard and usually came home too exhausted to make love, so a brief nap first made sense.  It also explains the high birth rate of Medieval Europe.   (Thirty-five years ago, when I was doing research in Tegucigalpa, the city turned off the water supply for more than twenty hours a day.   The water was turned back on at 4:00 AM, the air escaping from the pipes created a moaning sound all over town.  Locals said this resulted in an incredibly high birth rate because it was too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.)

This segmented sleep pattern was not just a social convention, it occurred naturally.  Long term experimental studies where people lived in environments without clocks and no access to natural lighting have been conducted.  The subjects slept or worked when they wanted to and were free to set their own schedules.  Over time, they developed a form of polyphasic schedule with some of the subjects developed a midday siesta and others developed the segmented schedule described above.  They also slowly evolved into a 25-hour day, a phenomenon for which I have no explanation.

While there are sufficient references to first and second sleep in medieval records for us to be certain about their sleeping patterns, whether this pattern extends to other cultures is still not clear.  When people set down to record the events of their daily lives, there is a tendency to only record the unique events, not the prosaic.  As an inveterate journal writer, I’ve filled countless Moleskin notebooks, but I doubt that I have ever described how I sleep at night.  We tend to only record the out of the ordinary, and nothing is more routine or boring than our bedtimes.

Pliny left us hints, so it is likely that the Romans had similar biphasic sleep patterns.  About the earlier Greeks—we don’t have a clue.  As for other cultures and times, it seems that some pattern of segmented sleep periods, such as divided nocturnal sleep or a daily siesta seems to be the norm.  Much more research is needed and I expect we will hear more about this in the years to come.

The biphasic sleep patterns of Medieval Europe came to end with the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of artificial lighting.  The invention and increasing availability of affordable candles, oil lamps, and later gas and electric lights allowed people to extend their evening activities, allowing people to stay up later and to slowly consolidate the first and second sleep periods into a single uninterrupted period.

Urbanization and industrial schedules required a more regimented approach to time, with fixed work hours making consolidated nighttime sleep more practical and necessary.  At the same time, the industrial revolution made clocks cheaper, which regimented daily routines further, eroding the natural segmented sleep habits.

The Industrial Revolution also changed society.  Evening activities such as theater, social gatherings, and reading gained popularity, leading people to stay awake later and skip the earlier phase of segmented sleep.  Over time, society came to believe that an interrupted eight-hour sleep period was the healthiest.  Even today, most people believe the single long period of sleep is the best choice, despite the lack of conclusive medical studies supporting that view.

This was all new information to me, and the evidence for biphasic sleeping during medieval times still seems to be making its way through the various academic disciplines.  This made me wonder if this relatively new information would made any changes in art history.  Have we interpreted medieval depictions of sleeping people correctly?  Should certain paintings be reinterpreted?

The painting at right is The Land of Cockaigne, by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder.  The painting shows a peasant, a soldier, and a clerk asleep under a tree.  I won’t bore you with all the competing—and totally contradictory—interpretations of the painting, but I can assure you that none of the competing theories take in the possibility that these are people in their first sleep period.  This was just the first medieval painting depicting sleep that occurred to me, there are countless others.

How will this realization change our interpretations of paintings like this?  How many paintings will need to be reexamined?  I’m looking forward to reading some new interpretations.

The Sinking of the San Telmo

A few weeks ago, I told half of the story about the loss of the Spanish ship San Telmo.  Now, I want to recount the other half of the story.

When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, it set off a chain reaction across Europe and the Americas.  The resulting Peninsular War lasted for six long years leading to the abdication of Napoleon and start of wars for independence for most of the Spanish colonies in the Americas.  Thought Spain would not formally admit the loss of their colonies for years, by the time the Spanish monarchy was restored to the throne, it was almost impossible for Spain to stop the revolutions in Venezuela, Argentina, and Mexico, but Spain was desperate to retain Peru and the silver mines that furnished a third of the royal Spanish income.

By 1819, the Spanish situation was critical.  In a desperate last-ditch effort to squash the revolutions in Chile and Peru, Spain sent a fleet of warships under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier to Peru with the mission of holding on to the mines and the important seaports in Chile and Peru.  While the flagship of the squadron was the San Fernando, among the ships of the convoy was the ill-fated San Telmo, a second-rate ship of the line.

This was the golden age of sailing ships, when warships were rated primarily by their size, how many gundecks, and the total number of cannons on those decks.  Large scale sea battles, like the Battle of Trafalgar were carried out by the largest ships, usually first and second rate ships of the line.  A first-rate ship of the line had three decks and might carry as many as 130 large cannons.  A second-rate ship of the line, the true workhorses of a navy, had two decks and carried 70-80 cannons.

If you are familiar with the movie Master and Commander, the ship used was the HMS Surprise, a frigate and 5th rate ship of the line.  If such a ship was to do battle with either a first- or second-rate ship, it would be roughly equivalent to a nine-year-old having a fist fight with the heavy weight champion of the world.  The child might be able to outmaneuver the boxer for a while, but the fight would be over as soon as soon as the boxer successfully landed his first blow.  Similarly, a single broadside from a second-rate ship of the line would destroy a smaller frigate.

Sailing southwestward from Spain, the ships had to sail around the southern tip of South America, the dreaded Drake Passage, where some of the most violent storms imaginable occur frequently, particularly in winter.  Even today, with modern steel ships and weather forecasts supplied by satellites, ships still suffer accidents in these water, though thankfully they are usually minor.

The San Telmo, a second-rate ship with 74 large guns on two decks was an older ship and was a poor choice to make the difficult voyage.  Launched in 1788, the San Telmo was reaching the end of her useful life.  While the ship had never been involved in a major fleet action, she had been sent several times to the ‘Spanish Main’, the Caribbean, where wooden ships quickly became damaged due to the warm humid climate and the sea worms that burrowed into the hull.  

The fleet arrived in the Drake Passage on September 1, just barely out of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.  In good weather, the San Telmo could have made it through the Drake Passage in nine days.  Unfortunately, the small fleet of ships found anything but good weather.  While ships of the early 19th century carried a weather glass (a crude form of barometer), they had no way of recording accurate weather conditions.  From the descriptions later given by sailors on the surviving ships, it is likely that the fleet sailed directly into full hurricane conditions.  

The San Telmo, fifty feet wide and two-thirds the length of a football field, carried a crew of 644 men.  On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer.   While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed.  The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.

I asked AI to generate a picture of the San Telmo in the Drake Passage and the best I could get was the incorrect image at right.  (AI flatly refused to do any better, falsely claiming that to do so would violate community standards!). There are several things wrong with the image, particularly that no sailing ship in a storm would have this much canvas flying.  Not only would steering the ship be impossible, but the high winds would have destroyed both the rigging and the sails, probably demasting the ship in the process, leaving the ship helpless and doomed.

More likely, the ship would have hauled in her main sails and unfurled smaller triangular storm staysails.  These sails were just large enough to enable the ship to head into the crashing waves, reported by other ships to be as high as 65 feet.  If the ship couldn’t maneuver and turned sideways to the waves, the ship would quickly founder.  At left, is an image of a ship with storm staysails set.

Though explorers would later find evidence that a few survivors might have made their way to Livingston Island, there is no proof that any of crew survived the storm.  Even if a few of the crew managed to land on the island, they either eventually starved to death or died of exposure.

Meanwhile, in Peru, when word of loss of the ship reached Peru, the revolutionaries quickly took advantage of the situation.  Lord Thomas Cochrane, the daring British sailor who would become the model for the Horatio Hornblower series of books and movies as well as the Jack Aubrey novels, had left England to offer his services to the revolutionaries of Chile and Peru.  (Actually, Cochrane was in disgrace, falsely accused of crimes that he would later, in a typically courageous style, receive a pardon and return to England as a hero.)

Valdivia was one of the most fortified locations in South America, with a series of heavily armed forts guarding its approach by sea.  Known as the "Key to the Pacific," it was vital for Spain's control of the region.  The fortress was considered impregnable, with strong natural defenses and a heavily armed garrison.  The long-range guns of the fort were capable of destroying an approaching vessel long before an enemy ship could enter the harbor and turn to fire a broadside.  If troops were landed on shore, there were a series of small defensive forts surrounding the fortress.  Any attacking forces, denied a dock to unload, would only be able to land small cannons, no match for the powerful cannons in both the forts and the main fortress.

Cochrane, leading the newly formed Chilean Navy, devised a bold plan to surprise the Spanish defenders, one that relied on stealth, speed, and deception.  With only 300 marines aboard his flagship, the O'Higgins, and a small support vessel, he decided to use the loss of the San Telmo to his advantage.

Cochrane approached the port in darkness, using captured Spanish flags to disguise his ships as friendly.  Using signal flags, Cochrane claimed his ship contained reinforcements from the San Telmo.   Under cover of night, he landed his small force of marines far from the main fortress, marching them overland to launch a surprise assault on the least-defended positions.

Cochrane's men attacked the outermost forts one by one, moving swiftly to overwhelm the defenders.  Their element of surprise and disciplined aggression allowed Marines to capture each of the small forts before the Spanish could organize a counterattack.  Once all the outer defenses fell, Cochrane’s forces moved on the central fortress, which surrendered after realizing resistance was futile.

The loss of Valdivia was a major loss to the Spanish government and helped pave the way for Chilean Independence, after which the forces in Chile moved northward to help secure Peruvian Independence.  Linking up with the army of Simon Bolivar as he moved southward from Columbia and Venezuela, Spain eventually would lose Peru, too.

Like dominoes falling one by one, the loss of the San Telmo led to the loss of the Valdivia, which led to the loss of Chile and later Peru.  With the loss of the silver mines of South America, Spain, once the most powerful nation in Europe, was no longer even a second-rate power.  Though it would take another 80 years for the United States to deliver the final blow, the Spanish Empire was over.