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When the World Almost Ended
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The end of the world. A topic largely reserved for sci-fi movies (such as Deep Impact and Armageddon – both excellent films, by the way) and Biblical prophecy (especially the Book of Revelation).
However, the end of the world has almost happened numerous times in
recent history, from the 1800s until the present – from close-call
asteroid fly-bys to near-nuclear war to the near-release of an
apocalyptic virus. These are humanity’s near-extinction events.
(Fun fact: the 1983 movie WarGames actually happened. Not
by a student, but it actually happened. In the ’70s. Think on that –
and the rest of these, for that matter – as you try to sleep tonight.)
In 1967, Cold War tensions were running high. Five
years earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis had kept the entire United
States on edge for 13 days straight, and in 1965 troops were sent to
Vietnam for the first time. Since 1957, one third of the US Air Force’s
bomber fleet was on alert (pdf)
at any given time, ready to fire up their engines and take off in 15
minutes or less. It was in this tense, paranoid atmosphere that one of
the largest solar storms of the 20th century erupted and nearly
triggered an unprovoked attack on Soviet Russia.
A new paper, published Tuesday
(Aug. 9) in the journal Space Weather, details the effects of that
solar storm and the confusion it caused among Air Force commanders.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, kicking off the space race,
the US Air Force decided to expand its Air Weather Service. Instead of
just forecasting terrestrial weather for the military, they also started
attempting to predict solar and geophysical events that could affect
space missions, like solar flares and disturbances in the Earth’s
magnetic field caused by the sun. Soon, a system was developed that
allowed the weather service to report its findings and concerns to
commanders at the North American Air Defense, more commonly known as
NORAD, which coordinated defense efforts between the US and Canada.
This system was critically important on May 23, 1967.
On the surface of the sun, a storm erupted over a sun spot, producing a
burst of white light on the sun’s surface that could be seen with the
naked eye all the way down on Earth. X-rays and extreme ultraviolet
light hit Earth’s ionosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere, affecting how radio waves were transmitted. Bursts of radio waves were emitted and the aurora borealis, an electric storm in the upper atmosphere caused by solar winds, was seen as far south as New Mexico.
Courtesy of National Solar Observatory historical archive
The sun on May 23, 1967. The bright spot in the middle near the top of the sun produced a dramatic solar flare.
All those radio waves emitted by the solar storm
reached Earth at midday in North America. Everywhere that sunlight
touched, radio waves bombarded the planet, including key radar sensors
in Alaska, Greenland, and England that were part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (pdf),
a network strung together to act as a warning system, alerting of
incoming missiles from Russia before they reached their targets.
To US military commanders, the radar readings looked
suspiciously like someone was jamming their signals with strategic radio
interference. And if the Russians were behind the radio interference,
it would be an act of war, worthy of calling the Air Force fleet into
action. With radio communication limited, calling back aircraft would
have been nearly impossible.
Fortunately, reason and caution prevailed. The space
weather forecasters were able to convince higher-ups that the sun was
the source of the interference, preventing a maneuver Russia surely
would have seen as a provocation.
This wasn’t the first time this had happened, actually. Back in the early days of radar during World War II, British radar operators noticed (paywall)
strong radio interference all over England. But the culprit turned out
to be solar radiation in that case, too: eventually, they figured out
that the interference only happened during the day and always came from
the direction of the sun.
While it’s certainly the most famous
example, 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis was not the only time the Cold War
between the United States and the Soviet Union almost went “hot.”
On October 27, 1962, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching
its boiling point, an American U-2 spy plane took off from Alaska en
route to a routine reconnaissance mission near the North Pole. Pilot
Charles Maultsby was supposed to use celestial navigation to find his
way, but halfway through the trip his view of the night sky became
hopelessly obscured by the glow of the aurora borealis, or “northern
lights.” With no visual markers to guide him, Maultsby soon drifted far
off course and inadvertently crossed the border into the Soviet Union.
Because the situation in Cuba still rested on a knife-edge,
Maultsby’s accidental detour carried possibly catastrophic consequences.
Worried the U-2 could be a nuclear bomber, the Soviets scrambled
several MiG fighter jets and sent them on a course to destroy the
intruding aircraft. The Air Force responded by dispatching two F-102
fighters armed with nuclear-tipped missiles to shepherd Maultsby back to
Alaska. Any confrontation between the two groups of aircraft could have
potentially ended in all-out war, but Maultsby managed to glide his
U-2—which had long since run out of fuel—out of Soviet airspace before
he could be intercepted. Having averted disaster on two fronts,
President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would find
a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis the following day.
2. The B-59 Submarine Incident
That same day, a minor incident aboard a Soviet submarine might stand
as the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war. On October 27,
1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the American destroyer
USS Beale began dropping depth charges on the nuclear-armed Soviet
submarine B-59, which was lurking near the U.S. blockade line around
Cuba. The charges were non-lethal warning shots intended to force B-59
to the surface, but the submarine’s captain mistook them for live
explosives. Convinced he was witnessing the opening salvo of World War
III, the captain angrily ordered his men to arm the sub’s lone
nuclear-tipped torpedo and prepare for attack.
The misunderstanding could have resulted in disaster if not for a
contingency measure that required all three of the submarine’s senior
officers to sign off on a nuclear launch. The Soviet captain was in
favor, but Vasili Arkhipov, B-59’s second in command, refused to give
his consent. After calming the captain down, Arkhipov coolly convinced
his fellow officers to bring B-59 to the surface and request new orders
from Moscow. The submarine eventually returned to Russia without
incident, but it was over 40 years before a full account of Arkhipov’s
life-saving decision finally came to light.
3. The 1979 NORAD Computer Glitch
By the late 1970s, both the United States and the Soviets relied on
computer systems to detect possible nuclear attacks. But while the new
technology was more sophisticated, it also came with a fresh set of
risks in the form of false alarms and glitches. Perhaps the most famous
of these errors occurred at Colorado’s North American Aerospace Defense
Command, or NORAD. On the morning of November 9, 1979, technicians at
the site received an urgent alert that the Soviets had launched a
barrage of missiles at North America. Convinced a nuclear attack was
imminent, the U.S. air defense program scrambled 10 interceptor fighter
planes, ordered the president’s “doomsday plane” to take off, and warned
launch control to prepare its missiles for a retaliatory attack.
The panic soon subsided after NORAD consulted its satellite data and
realized the nuclear warning was little more than a false alarm. Upon
further inspection, they discovered that a technician had accidentally
run a training program simulating a Soviet attack on the United States.
The incident sent shock waves through the international community—Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev even wrote President Jimmy Carter a letter
noting the “tremendous danger” caused by the error—but it was not the
last time a computer issue led to a nuclear scare. Computer chip
failures would later lead to three more false alarms at NORAD in the
following year.
4. The 1983 Nuclear False Alarm
On September 26, 1983, Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov was in command at
Serpukhov-15, a bunker where the Soviets monitored their
satellite-based detection systems. Shortly after midnight, panic broke
out when an alarm sounded signaling that the United States had fired
five Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, toward Russia. The
warning was a false alarm—one of the satellites had misinterpreted the
glint of sunlight off clouds near Montana as a missile launch—but to the
Soviets, it appeared the United States had started a nuclear war.
Protocol demanded that Serpukhov-15 report any signs of a missile
launch to the Soviet high command, but Petrov had a hunch the warning
was an error. He knew the new satellite system was mistake-prone, and he
also reasoned that any nuclear strike by the Americans would come in
the form of hundreds of missiles, not just five. With only minutes to
make a decision, Petrov chose to ignore the blaring warning alarms and
reported the launch as a false alarm—a move that may have averted a
nuclear holocaust. The incident remained classified until after the Cold
War ended, but Petrov later received several humanitarian awards for
his extraordinary actions, and was even honored by the United Nations.
5. The Able Archer 83 Exercise
Although it was not widely known at the time, declassified government
documents have since revealed that a November 1983 NATO war game nearly
saw the United States and the Soviet Union come to blows. The source of
the misunderstanding was an exercise known as Able Archer 83, which was
supposed to simulate how a conventional attack on Europe by the Soviet
Union could eventually be met by a U.S. nuclear strike. Such simulations
were not uncommon during the Cold War, but the Able Archer mission
differed from the usual protocol in both its scope and realism. In
preparation for the war game, the United States airlifted 19,000 troops
to Europe, changed its alert status to DEFCON 1 and moved certain
commands to alternate locations—all steps that typically would only be
taken in times of war.
For the Soviets, these maneuvers perfectly matched their own
predictions for how the Americans would set the table for a nuclear
offensive. While they knew a war game was taking place, they were also
wary that it could be a ruse to cover up preparations for a real world
attack. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the Soviets had soon gone into
high alert and readied their nuclear arsenal, with some units in East
Germany and Poland even preparing their fighter jets for takeoff. They
remained poised for a counterstrike until November 11, when the Able
Archer exercise ended without incident. Only later did NATO and the
United States realize that their realistic simulation of World War III
had very nearly led to the real thing.
Public DomainA nuclear missile parades before John F. Kennedy at his inauguration in 1961.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945
marked the end of the World War II, and the beginning of the age of
nuclear weapons.
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During the Cold War, the policy of mutually assured destruction
between the US and the Soviet Union – appropriately referred to as “MAD”
– meant that if one nation used nuclear weapons on another, then an
equal response would have been doled out as soon as possible.
Over the course of the Cold War, and several times after it, the
citizens of the world were forced to hold their breath as the
superpowers came close to nuclear war.
Here are nine times the world was at the brink of nuclear war – but pulled back:
October 5, 1960 – The moon is mistaken for missiles
Early warning radar quickly became one of the most important tools in
the nuclear age. American radar stations were built all around the
world with the hope that they would detect incoming Soviet missiles,
warning the homeland of a strike and allowing for the president to form a
response.
On October 5, 1960, one such warning
was issued from a newly constructed early warning radar station in
Thule, Greenland (now called Qaanaaq). Dozens of missiles were
reportedly detected, and at one point were said to reach the US in 20
minutes.
A panic ensued at the North American Aerospace Defence Command
(NORAD) HQ in Colorado, and NORAD was placed on its highest alert level.
The panic was put to rest when it was realised that Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev was visiting New York at the time. A later
investigation found that the radar had mistaken the moon rising over
Norway as Soviet missiles.
November 24, 1961 – A single switch causes a mechanical failure
Wikimedia commonsArtist impression of the Thule site J BMEWS station’s detection arcs.
Just over a year later, Strategic Air Command (SAC) HQ in Omaha, Nebraska lost contact with the Thule radar station. SAC officials then tried to contact NORAD HQ in Colorado, but the line was reportedly dead.
It was determined before that the probability that both Thule and
NORAD’s communications would shut down due to technical malfunction was
very low, making SAC believe that an attack was underway.
SAC’s entire alert force was ordered to prepare for takeoff, but
crisis was averted when a US bomber managed to make contact with Thule
and confirm no attack was underway.
It was later discovered that a single malfunctioning switch managed
to shut down all communications, even emergency hotlines, between SAC,
Thule, and NORAD.
October 25, 1962 – A bear almost turns the Cuban Missile Crisis hot
The Cuban Missile Crisis is perhaps the closest the world has ever
come to global nuclear war. Four instances over the 13-day event stand
out in particular, the first one happening on October 25, 1962.
Tensions were already high during the crisis, and the US military was placed on DEFCON 3, two steps away from nuclear war. Just after midnight
on October 25, a guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center in
Minnesota saw a figure attempting to climb the fence around the
facility. The guard, worried that the figure was a Soviet saboteur, shot
at the figure and activated the sabotage alarm.
This triggered air raid alarms to go off at all air bases in the
area. Pilots at Volk Field in neighbouring Wisconsin to panic, since
they knew that no tests or practices would happen while the military was
on DEFCON 3.
The pilots were ordered to their nuclear armed F-106A interceptors,
and were taxiing down the runway when it was determined the alarm was
false. They were stopped by a car that had raced to the airfield to tell
the pilots to stop.
The intruder turned out to be a bear. […]
October 28, 1962 – Radar operators get confused over an unknown satellite
One day after those events, radar operators in Moorestown, New Jersey
reported to NORAD HQ just before 9:00 AM that Soviet nuclear missiles
were on their way, and were expected to strike at exactly 9:02 near
Tampa, Florida.
All of NORAD was immediately alerted and scrambled to respond, but
the time passed without any detonations, causing NORAD to delay any
actions.
It was later discovered that the Moorestown radar operators were
confused because the facility was running a test tape that simulated a
missile launch from Cuba when a satellite unexpectedly appeared over the
horizon.
Additional radars were not operating at the time, and the Moorestown
operators were not informed that the satelite was inbound because the
facility that handled such operations was on other work related to the
situation in Cuba. […]
January 25, 1995 – Nuclear worries remain after the Soviet Union
Four years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, almost started a nuclear war.
Russian early warning radar detected a launch of a missile with
similar characteristics to a submarine-launched Trident missile off the
coast of Norway.
The detected missile was actually a Norwegian Black Brant scientific
rocket which was on a mission to study the aurora borealis. Norwegian
authorities had informed the Kremlin of the launch, but the radar
operators were not informed.
Yeltsin was given the Cheget,
Russia’s version of the nuclear briefcase (sometimes known as the
Football), and the launch codes for Russia’s missile arsenal. Russia’s
submarines were also placed on alert.
Fortunately, Yeltsin’s belief that it was a false alarm proved
correct, and Russian satellites confirmed that there was no activity
from US missile sites.
A truly terrifying list: 19 Horrifying Times the World Almost Ended
For Humankind! Sometimes us humans don’t quite realize just how fragile
our lives are. In fact, it’s quite shocking how often we come close to
wiping ourselves out.
Even today we struggle to deal with potentially catastrophic situations, such as the rapidly warming global temperatures caused by climate change, or the possibility of a second cold war between the United States and North Korea.
Despite this, humanity has prevailed time and time again, despite many setbacks. We’ve lived through wars, plagues, and natural disasters. For the most part, we’ve come out the other side mostly unscathed.
That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our fair share of extremely close calls.History shows us there were plenty of times the end of days
has come knocking on our door. So far we’ve been pretty lucky. However,
here are 19 times the world almost ended, and probably would have if
the situations were slightly different.
The Cold War
lasted from 1945 to 1990 and was a period of time during which it
seemed the whole world was on a hair trigger. Of course, nothing
exemplifies this more than the numerous nuclear scares that took place when tensions reached its peak.
One of these such nuclear scares took place on June 3rd, 1980. At 3
AM, the president’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brezezinski,
received an emergency phone call warning him that a large US-bound nuclear strike was imminent.
The entire country’s defenses were on red alert. In minutes, Air Force bombers were prepared for taking off and nuclear missiles were primed for launch.
Luckily the attack was quickly discovered to be a false alarm and the counterattack was called off before any serious damage was done. It was only a short while later that a culprit was discovered; a single malfunctioning 46 cent computer chip at the pentagon.
One of the largest volcanic events on Earth in recorded history was the Minoan Eruption. It took place near the Aegean island of Thera, during the mid-second millennium BCE.
The eruption was estimated to have had the destructive force of 40
atomic bombs exploding in unison. Interesting, the eruption was 100
times more powerful than the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that devastated Pompeii in 79 CE.
Needless to say, it became one of the defining catalysts in the demise of the early Bronze Age civilization of the Minoans.
The eruption of Thera obliterated the city of Akrotiri, present-day Santorini,
and caused earthquakes and tsunamis that nearly destroyed the
surrounding islands, including the widely populated island of Crete.
It also created a massive cloud of volcanic ash that settled across
Europe and altered global weather patterns in the years that followed.
The thought of a giant asteroid crashing into our little planet
and sending us the way of the dinosaurs is terrifying. What is even
more terrifying is that it nearly became a reality on April 14, 2018.
First noticed by the Catalina Sky Survey, Asteroid 2018 GE3 shot past Earth
only a few hours after its detection. At its the closest point, the
asteroid was only 192,317 kilometers from Earth, less than half the
distance between Earth and the Moon.
With an estimated diameter of 48–110 meters, this asteroid
is currently believed to be the largest known object to have past so
close to us. There is no doubt that had it made contact with the earth,
the devastation would have been astronomical.
In the 1800s, many telegraph
operators were familiar with telegraph lines going down due to
thunderstorms and other electromagnetic disturbances. However, one
killer storm took them completely by surprise!
Between August 28th to September 2nd, the earth experienced its wildest geomagnetic storms in recorded history. Communication around the world was wiped out causing numerous electrical failures and accidents.
These storms were discovered to be the cause of a huge solar
flare known as a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME. Fortunately, the world
bounced back after a couple of days without telegraphs and some weird weather.
Interestingly, if the same geomagnetic storm took place now, our
electrically dependent and interconnected society would suffer severe
and possibly apocalyptic repercussions.
The Ebola virus
continues to strike fear into all who hear about it, and with good
reason. This highly contagious disease is nearly impossible to contain,
and vaccines have been found to have varying levels of success. Unfortunately, those left untreated often wind up dead less than two weeks following the first symptoms.
So far, the worst outbreaks have yet to reach any major population
centers. However, that nearly changed in 1989 when a number of macaque monkeys imported from the Philippines to the US were found to have the virus.
The monkeys were sent to Reston, Virginia for lab testing and all of
them died suddenly from a suspiciously Ebola-like virus. To make matters
worse, blood samples from a number of researchers who had come in
contact with the monkeys also tested positive for the virus.
Luckily, after days of panic, it was concluded that the particular
strain of Ebola that killed the monkeys didn’t pose any harm to humans. However, the event did illustrate just how easily wide-scale outbreaks could happen, as well as demonstrate just how unprepared we were at the time to deal with such a pandemic.
As Jeff Goldblum once said; “your scientists were so preoccupied with
whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
While Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka wasn’t trying to bring back long extinct reptiles, his studies of the H5N1 bird flu in 2011 certainly raised some serious questions about how far some people are willing to go in the name of science.
By modifying strains of the avian influenza virus, Kawaoka attempted
to create a new hybrid strain of the virus that could bypass the human
immune system. The scariest part was just how close he had gotten before the study was shut down due to it being a threat to the health of the entire human race.
Kawaoka had managed to create a virus that could be transmitted via
the air between test animals held in separate cages and was believed to
be only a single mutation away from being so deadly to humans that the body literally had no way to combat it.
The mid-1990s was a time of many scientific advancements
around the world. That being said, for every new computer or more
eco-friendly car, there was a failure. One such failure could have had
astronomical effects on the world, and it came in one of the smallest
packages imaginable; bacteria. Genetically modified
bacteria, to be precise. Created by a German biotech company,
Klebsiella Planticola was a supposedly helpful microbe that would
convert dead plant matter into ethanol, which could then be used in
everything from powering our cars to creating drinkable alcohol.
The scientists
were quite pleased with the success of their project, and by 1994 they
had a working strain of the bacteria that was ready for field testing.
Fortunately, independent testing at Oregon State University found something that the company producing it had somehow missed.
They discovered that K. Planticola didn’t wait until plants had died to
begin fermenting them, and every plant it was tested on died soon after.
To make things worse, K. Planticola was based on a bacteria present in the decomposition of every type of terrestrial plant on Earth, meaning that it could potentially cause a mass plant extinction that could devastate farms and forests all over the world.
Needless to say, the field tests were called off and all plans to
unintentionally create a global plant super plague were put on hold
indefinitely.
One of the most devastating global epidemics in history was the Black
Death. It was the name of given to a massive outbreak of the bubonic plague that struck in Europe and Asia in the mid 14th century.
The outbreak was believed to have started in China before slowly making its way west via fleas and diseased rats, leaving death and suffering in its wake.
Europe had heard of the so-called “Great Pestilence” in the years leading up to its introduction to the western world, however, it didn’t prepare them for what was to come.
In 1347, a number of ships from the Black Sea
arrived in the Sicilian port of Messina with most of the sailors on
board dead. Those that survived were gravely ill and covered in oozing boils.
The ships were quickly sent out of the harbor, but the damage had already been done. The plague quickly washed over the rest of Europe, wiping out close to a third of its population by the year 1951.
By the time the Black Death finally subsided it was believed to have caused the deaths of as many as 75 million to 200 million people in Eurasia and the rest of the world.
Remember how we said that the Carrington Event
would have been catastrophic in today’s technology-dependent world?
Because that’s almost exactly what happened in 2012. On July 23rd, a
huge Coronal Mass Ejection easily as powerful as the 1859 solar superstorm came speeding in Earth’s direction.
Luckily for us, it missed, but only barely. The ejection passed Earth
by less than a week, and many scientists and economists estimate that
the cost of damages had it hit Earth could have exceeded 2 trillion
dollars and taken decades of recovery time.
Often cited as the single most intense 13 days of the cold war,
the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a nearly two-week-long period of time
during which a single misstep could have sent the entire world into
nuclear war.
Following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the missile crisis began when US surveillance discovered Soviet-sanctioned missiles in Cuba; only 90 miles from Florida.
This action violated a previous agreement between the two nuclear
superpowers, and over the next couple of days the situation ramped up
exponentially. The United States debated whether to send an air raid or perhaps an invasion of Cuba to destroy the missiles. Of course, the latter action would certainly spark a war.
After days of tense negotiation and a number of dangerously close
calls to all out war, the lengthy stalemate was brought to an end. President John Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were able to strike a last-second deal.
It stated that the Soviet Union would remove their WMDs from Cuba in return for the United State’s word that they would not invade the island.
The Spanish Flu is widely considered to be one of, if not the worst, global epidemics to strike the human race. Starting around January of 1918, the disease
quickly swept across the world, infecting over a third of the world’s
population in just over a year. In a matter of months, the virus had
caused the average life expectancy of Americans to drop by 12 years.
Aided by the first World War, the flu spread quickly across Europe. Fueled by close contact and unsanitary conditions, entire troops were taken down by it.
The flu was not limited to Europe and spread with vicious intent. When the pandemic had subsided, cases of the Spanish flu had been found even on isolated islands in the Arctic and South Pacific.
By the end of the epidemic,
an estimated 500 million individuals had been infected and more the 50
million killed. Roughly three to five percent of the world’s population perished.
Here is my Restored English Translation (RET) of Beresheet ( Genesis ) chapter 14. As usual, it contains the Hebrew names and a glossary for them. After that, at the very end, is a list of occurrences of the Aleph/ Tavs . Verse 5 is particularly interesting; it mentions that the confederacy that attacked Sodom and Gomorrah had previously struck the Rephaim, Zuzim, Emim and Horites. The Rephaim were a race of Nephilim , and the others may have been as well. Read the rest at https://jmshistorycorner.blogspot.com/2018/09/restored-english-translation-of-genesis_15.html
It's been 4 months since my A History of Marriage - Part 1 , but I've finally gotten around to the second part. In Part 1, I discussed marriage traditions of pagan/superstitious origin, and the origin and history of marriage licences. In Part 2, I'm looking at marriage age, cousin marriage, and avunculate marriage (marriage of a man to his niece, or a woman to her nephew). MARRIAGE AGE (Note: the following is intended purely as a neutral history lesson - I'm not endorsing or condemning anything.) Today, we become adults at 18, and for many that is (or should be) the minimum marriage age. Has that always been the case? In ancient times, minimum marriage/adult age (if there was one) varied. Among the Israelites/Jews, it was generally considered to be around 13, although even that wasn't standard - as evidenced by the following Biblical passages: In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah, Ahaz the son of Jotham, king of Judah, began to reign. ...
Ah, werewolves. Popular trope in horror movies and novels. Usually portrayed as a human who transforms into a humanoid wolf (or as a human-wolf hybrid). Sometimes the condition (known as lycanthropy) is genetic and hereditary, sometimes it’s the result of a werewolf bite, sometimes the result of a curse. It’s often (but not necessarily) related to the full moon. https://youtu.be/TKIbuXsN2F4 https://youtu.be/myjd4uoq6dY https://youtu.be/kzZcDHHNINk However, these nightmarish beasts are not limited to the world of fiction; they are a legendary creature, seen and encountered by many people up until the present day. What are they? Some are Nephilim – the hybrid products of fallen angels mixing with humans and animals (and possibly humans with animals) in centuries and millennia past. Others are demonically possessed humans, at least some of which got into “the dark arts”, to borrow Harry Potter ‘s term for ...
Public DomainA nuclear missile parades before John F. Kennedy at his inauguration in 1961.
Wikimedia commonsThule AN/FPS-50 detection reflectors
Wikimedia commonsArtist impression of the Thule site J BMEWS station’s detection arcs.
Wikimedia commonsF-106A Delta Darts
https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/how-could-a-failed-computer-chip-lead-to-nuclear-war
https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/greece/gr1040e.html
https://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2018-ge3-passed-earth-apr-15-2018
https://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm-the-1859-carrington-event
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/25-years-ago-in-virginia-a-very-different-ebola-outbreak/
https://www.nature.com/news/mutant-flu-paper-published-1.10551
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-mexican-astronomers-bonilla-sighting-comet.html
http://online.sfsu.edu/rone/GEessays/Klebsiellaplanticola.html
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis
https://www.cdc.gov/features/1918-flu-pandemic/index.html
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