Open Veils · Answer
1913 Great Meteor Procession
The 1913 Procession defies every standard meteor model: no radiant, no steep entry angle, five-minute duration, and a ground track spanning continents. Clarence Chant's own analysis pointed to a temporary captured satellite — an object that had been orbiting Earth before it died. The event forces questions about what else may have been quietly orbiting our planet undetected, and why the phenomenon remains almost entirely absent from mainstream astronomical education.
Evidence
- On the night of February 9, 1913, between 40 and 60 luminous fireballs crossed the sky in stately procession — witnesses repeatedly reached for the same metaphor: a fleet of battleships with escorts.
- Astronomer C.C. Wylie dissented in the 1930s, arguing for a coincidental combination of a meteor shower and an exploding fireball.
- For the 2013 centennial, astronomers Don Olson and Steve Hutcheon conducted an archival search of ships' logbooks and uncovered seven previously unknown observation accounts, further extending the confirmed ground track and corroborating Chant's temporary-satellite hypothesis.
- Individual objects remained visible for 30–40 seconds each; the full procession lasted roughly five minutes.
- Critically, there was no radiant point whatsoever, which eliminates a conventional meteoroid stream origin.