Thomas Jefferson's report to the American Philosophical Society, regarding a UFO

If it was a meteor or astroid and it was the size of a house, I doubt anybody nearby who saw it would have survived. A space rock that big coming from space would be pretty devastating to say the least.

Clearing away the accumulated brush:

1. The printed item in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society is not a modern hoax; TAPS is a recognized early American journal, and this specific item is to be found printed in that number of the journal, which does date back to the date it says.

2. Dunbar — or anyone else — can always be accused of perpetrating a hoax; but as I mention in my footnote to the transcription on my site, he was a recognized observer of the time, from whom other contributions on various subjects, mostly in (greater) Louisiana, were received and published. His credibility would have been on the line, and his report is most unlikely to be a hoax. There is as much evidence (or, if we are skeptically inclined) as little evidence of a fact underlying the report as there is with any other happening witnessed by a single person.

3. "Color" for "colour" is common enough in America by that time; and in view of the wild diversity of spelling up to about 1840, nothing can be deduced from it one way or the other.

4. Similarly the units of measurement; it's Dunbar's report, not Jefferson's; Dunbar used the common units of his time and place; nothing much can be deduced from that. Note by the way that Dunbar never says that he himself witnessed the event; merely that "It was seen".

5. Meteorites were a subject of hot debate; scientific opinion, as I point out in one of my notes, didn't shift until Biot's careful report in 1803, three years after Dunbar's sighting. Dunbar's report is printed neutrally, without additions by the journal editors; naturally, the journal's readers would know just what current context it fit into, and it need not have been mentioned. Dunbar's report is itself neutral: it suggests no hypothesis, it just states what was seen.

As for what the object was, two good points have been made that I failed to think of in my quick annotation: (a) the noise heard may not have been a crash at all, but a sonic boom, and certainly, even at the relatively low speed I guess for it (very roughly, around 2200 mph, not above), there must have been one; and (b) it is probably naïve of us to assume any value to Dunbar's estimate of the object's size if it was on fire: the most we can say is that it was no larger than a house.

That speed is more reliable an estimate than the size of the object, and 2200 mph (or even triple that) is slower than a meteor fall, which, with the flat trajectory, is the only real argument in favor of the object being something else. On the other hand faced with such a startling phenomenon even a seasoned observer might well feel "a few seconds" when say only one second had elapsed, as do people in earthquakes, who report temblors lasting a minute or two when in fact instruments record only 20 seconds; if "15 seconds" — an estimate of mine based on Dunbar's "a few seconds" (see my note for why the extrapolation) — can be compressed to "3 seconds" then the object may have been traveling at the type of speed of a falling meteor. The flat trajectory is what bothers me most: meteors don't strike the earth at a 2° angle.

As pointed out, if it was a house-sized object coming in at a meteoric speed, it would have been a huge event, with no survivors for miles, flattened trees, etc. So of that one thing we can be sure: if it was the size of a house, it crashed at a low speed; if it was a meteor, it was not the size of a house.

If the object crashed, I don't know of any investigation to try and find a crater (similar to the exhaustive early Soviet investigation at Tunguska, in which no crater or apparent débris were ever found). I don't mean to suggest that none was made, just that I don't know of any. If it didn't vaporize but actually did crash, as it appears from the report, the indications of the Earth Impact Effects Program that I link to in my note are that the object should still be intact and roughly 3 meters below the surface of the ground (11.6 - 8.7 meters). Unfortunately, Dunbar or the original witness(es) had no GPS, and although someone seems to have known exactly where it fell, since "search has been made in the place where the burning body fell, and that a considerable portion of the surface of the earth was found broken up, and every vegetable body burned or greatly scorched", no detailed location has been passed on that I know of: it kinda puts a crimp on the investigation.

My own opinion, for what it's worth — I'm not an expert in any field related to this event — is that (a) some object did crash to earth; (b) we don't have enough information to determine what the object was. Occam's Razor suggests that it was a meteor after all, but the flat trajectory still bothers me, and I'm perfectly open to the usual alternatives, including spacecraft. This may be the 21st century, but we hardly know everything quite right yet.

BT

Originally posted by Jonas86
I realized immediately it's fake. The writing style is very modern. Another silly hoax.

"...of a colour resembling the sun near the horizon in a cold frosty evening"

your comment makes no sense.

Originally posted by Greensboro1978
If it was a meteor or astroid and it was the size of a house, I doubt anybody nearby who saw it would have survived. A space rock that big coming from space would be pretty devastating to say the least.

The glowing ball could have looked to be the size of a house, but that doesn't necessarily mean the object was that big. It could have been much smaller

I witnessed the Peekskill meteorite streaking across Pennsylvania back in 1992. The fireball looked huge (I guess I would say it was house-sized), but the meteor at the time was probably no bigger than maybe 100 cm in diameter. It did look very low in the sky to me, but it was actually a few miles up when I saw it, with a ball of ionized atmospheric gas around it.

The meteorite itself that was found later in Peekskill, NY was much smaller than that (about 15 cm). It had fallen onto the rear of a parked car.

I wonder how many meteorite sightings have ever been accompanied by the observer feeling a "considerable degree of heat" from the object and subsequently still being able (alive) to report that fact ?

reply to post by Juston


The letter mentions a figure 5 in plate 4. Could somebody post that image?