In December 1942, the Atomic Age began, in secret, in a racquetball court under the bleachers of an un-used football stadium in the middle of Chicago. It was here, as part of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, that a team of physicists put together the first nuclear reactor and produced the first self-sustained fission chain reaction.
Continue reading Dawn of the Atomic Age: The First Nuclear Reactor
The prehistoric-looking Great Blue Heron is one of the largest and most conspicuous of Florida’s wading waterbirds. Although it is often mistaken for a crane, it is actually a member of the heron family.
In 1909, two people, within a week of each other, declared to the world that they had been the first person to reach the location of the North Pole. Immediate controversy broke out, and the debate has raged ever since, revolving around charges and countercharges of fraud. So, who was really first to the North Pole?
“Broken Arrow” is the military’s code word for an accident involving a nuclear weapon. Since 1950, there have been almost three dozen acknowledged “Broken Arrow” incidents. Six times, the US has lost a nuclear weapon in an accident that it was unable to recover, including a Navy plane that crashed into Puget Sound with a nuclear depth charge, and an attack plane that rolled off a carrier near Japan and sank with its B43 nuclear bomb. Several times, nuclear weapons have been dropped or accidentally released near American cities. In many of these, the nuclear weapon’s conventional explosives actually detonated, and only the bomb’s safety precautions prevented a nuclear explosion.
Continue reading Broken Arrow: America’s Lost Nuclear Weapons
The Martin B-10 is considered to be the first “modern” military bomber. At the time it was introduced, the design, featuring retractable landing gear, turreted defensive machine guns, and an internal bomb bay, was considered revolutionary. Not only could it carry a full ton of bombs, but it was fast enough to outrun almost all existing fighter planes. On the eve of the Second World War, the B-10 changed the entire face of air combat.
In 1982, recording artist Billy Joel released a single titled “Allentown” The song painted a picture of a depressed American economy and the decline of the US as a world economic power, through the eyes of a single city crippled by the disappearance of its manufacturing industries.
In 1965, just a few weeks before Christmas, people in the little town of Kecksburg PA, not far from Pittsburgh, reported seeing something crash to earth from outer space. According to the stories, the US military then appeared and spirited the object away. Some whispered that it was a crashed Soviet intelligence satellite, or an American test of a secret Nazi project. Others declared it was an extraterrestrial spaceship. But what was it really….?
Continue reading Pennsylvania’s “Roswell”: The Kecksburg Flying Saucer
The B1-B Lancer nuclear bomber was perhaps the most controversial aircraft ever produced by the US, and was the subject of a Cold War political and military debate that lasted over 20 years.
With its flat face and tusks protruding from its beaked mouth, no one would ever have called Lystrosaurus “beautiful”. But Lystrosaurus was the ultimate survivor–it made it through the greatest mass extinction in the Earth’s history, and dominated the land for millions of years afterwards.
Hidden History 