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(meteorobs) Re: astronomy education+more

Astronomy should have been a required course in high school throughout this
century.  Then maybe a small dent could have been made in the vast public
ignorance about this subject.  Students only see it as a short unit in
general science, maybe at two or three different grade levels.  I got my
start in 4th grade with one such unit.

For the school years 1973-75 I was able to teach astronomy at the high
school level, then was displaced by a tenured teacher as shrinking budgets
were causing layoffs.  My successor did just book work, not knowing any
astronomy himself.  After another year the course was dropped.  The book was
grossly inadequate for what I wanted to do, so I made up my own course with
solid observational topics.  A good beginning treatment of meteors was
included : no textbook ever has more than a couple of pages on meteors with
an obsolete list of showers included for good measure.

Wayne's comment, 

>they had a "professional astronomer" on screen telling them it 
>could have been a Leonid.

was replicated by Art Bell in 1997 for the Nov reentry over Washington
State.  They were poking fun at this "professional"  from, I think, a
university in Vancouver BC.  That was the only time I have witnessed Art
being  correct : the reentry didn't come from the Leonids !

>However, when it comes to the vast public, when they saw a UFO, no fact 
>you can bring to light will change their mind...what they saw was 
>unidentified, even if you identify it!

How true that is !  I went to a local MUFON meeting several years ago just
for the hell of it.  Knowledgable people are not welcome there, as it turns
out.  They literally don't want you to identify anything and they summarily
dismiss anything you have to say.  The leader of the group was a lardaceous
motormouth that wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise ; she never even
found out who I am or what my background is.  She did tell me that I don't
see  "them"  because I don't  "believe."  I thus infer that these things are
real only in the spirit realm, not the physical.  The tendency in recent
years is in that direction.  Back in the 1950's they were considered to be
technological. 

I now attribute a fairly large majority of  "sightings"  to meteoric
fireballs.  Just hearing Art Bell stirring the pot convinces me that people
are seeing  bright meteors, but they desperately hope that some critter is
controlling a vehicle instead.

When Art has a real scientist or medical individual as a guest, Joan and I
listen.  But that has dwindled to only 3 nights a month.  Much of the time
he spends in conditioning the public to believe an eventual faked alien
invasion.  All of the media is involved in the conditioning, as one example
recall  the outburst of invasion movies recently. 

 As a serious student of geopolitical trends I can picture a staged event
happening in the near future to get us all to "unite as one."  The Orson
Welles affair in 1938 with the Martian invasion  was no accident ; it was a
deliberate plan to see how the public would react.  Needless to say, it
worked very well.  And yes, it will work well again.  Mars had a perihelic
opposition in 1939, so a year earlier it would have been nearly behind the
sun.  Implausibility doesn't matter with the public.

Norman



Norman W. McLeod III
Asst Visual Program Coordinator
American Meteor Society

Fort Myers, Florida
nmcleod@peganet.com

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