Ironically, on the heels of my post about UFOs and Iridium flares, I had this story of a UFO over Connecticut passed to me from my wife, among others …

The general story is that on this past Saturday night, September 19, a very bright light was seen in the skies over Connecticut. According to reports, it briefly got very intense, then faded. The local authorities were contacted, who then in turn contacted NASA, who claim that what was seen was the vapor trail of a rocket launched Saturday night.

Here’s the FOX 61 report on it –

Did any of you see it? If so, please tell us your experience!

The other night I was at the Drinking Skeptically meeting when one of the attendees said, “Hey, anyone know what an Iridium flare is?”

Thanks to my interview of MUFON’s Mark D’Antonio, I did!

Courtesy of NASA

For the uninitiated, an Iridium flare is caused when sunlight is reflected off the antennas or solar panels of an Iridium communications satellite passing overhead. Considering the size of the satellites and the distances involved, they can be dramatically bright, so much so that they can even cast shadows on the ground in some instances.

Not surprisingly, they are often mistaken for UFOs.

The good news is that because they are satellites, it means that they have clearly established and documented orbits, and with a little work, you can determine when and where in the night sky they will occur. If you’re not quite as mathematically gifted (or just lazy like me), the site Heavens-Above provides detailed information on when and where you can see flares, as well as the information for spotting the International Space Station, the space shuttle (when in flight), other satellites, comets, constellations and other heavenly bodies.

Getting back to the other night at the Skeptically Drinking Meetup — which featured astronomer Michael Faison, director of Yale’s Leitner Family Observatory & Planetarium (complete astronomy geek out!!) — the question of Iridium flares came up because there was one getting ready to pass overhead (in Bridgeport). So of course, I went along with the other seven or eight interested people out to the parking lot to see it.

The funny part is that there was a streetlight right near where the flare was to occur, so you have to picture a group of people standing together in the lot, all holding our hands up to block the light, looking like some bizarre parking lot Nazi rally. Yeah, willing to look silly for science, right?

Despite the streetlight, we were able to see the flare — it was pretty cool. At first, the satellite looked like a small star or super-high plane moving across the sky, then it got dramatically brighter for a few seconds before returning to its original state. Not the most eye-catching flare, but still impressive nonetheless.

And if I didn’t know what it was, I would’ve definitely been left scratching my head when it was over.

We’re gearing up for October by compiling a list of damned-type events going on around the state, from haunted houses and hayrides to special lectures and lantern tours. If you know of anything that you think we should include, please either leave it in the comments or e-mail us at damnedct@gmail.com.

In the meantime, our friend Margey at the Connecticut Drinking Skeptically Group has another great speaker scheduled for this Thursday, September 17, at The Field restaurant in Bridgeport.

Michael Faison, astronomy professor and director of the Leitner Observatory.

“What’s Your Sign? Astrology, Astronomy, and Pseudoscience”: A look at the cultural phenomenon of Traditional Western Astrology, its historical connections to astronomy, and why astrology is not a science.

Should be another fun night. Make sure to pre-register so Margey can get a head count.

Okay, like many of you, when used to hear the term “Witch Hazel” I would always think of this:

Photo by poppy2323 under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 license.

“A cup of tea, a cookie, and youuuu …”

I eventually found out that although it sounds slightly diabolical, witch hazel is a flowering shrub that produces an astringent used in hundreds of products, from skin care to first aid. It grows abundantly in the forests of the Northeast — you may noticed it when hiking in late fall or early winter as that’s when it blooms with fairly bright yellow flowers.

As it turns out, Connecticut is the commercial witch hazel production capital of the world. Dickinson’s Brands is based in East Hampton, and supplies many major corporations with the pure distilled astringent that is used in many formulations. The Hartford Courant recently ran a nice profile of the company as well as providing some good information about the history of witch hazel.

From the article –

Native Americans called the plant “winterbloom” because of the distinctive yellow flowers produced in the late fall. They exploited the plant’s astringent qualities by boiling the branches and bark in water to make a catch-all remedy for bruises and insect bites. These uses were passed on to the early New England settlers, who probably adopted the name witch hazel from the old English word “wych,” meaning flexible, or because the distinctive yellow blooms colored the woods around Halloween.

Eastern Connecticut became a major center of witch hazel production after the Civil War, when a Baptist minister named Thomas Dickinson began distilling the hamamelis plant in Essex and nearby towns. After the Jackowitz family bought the operation in the 1970s, the plant was modernized and consolidated at East Hampton.

The article goes on to talk about how witch hazel is harvested, how much is produced and distributed. It’s also a “green” type business because it falls under the amorphous heading of “sustainability,” so it’s got that going for it, too. In addition, by clearing the shrubby plant out of forests, allows hardwoods to grow. Sounds like a “win” all around.

Personally, I’m always curious how people come to discoveries like witch hazel. Like, did Native Americans try burning every tree and bush to see which ones would give up something useful, or did they have a fire going with some witch hazel in it, and accidentally discovered its healing properties?

I guess it’s like with the first person who looked at a lobster — a giant, green underwater grasshopper — and said, “Wow, I bet that might make good eating.” We may never know.

Back from vacation on the beaches of Cape Cod (not so much weird as lots of mini golf and ice cream), and as I was trying to catch up on the latest damned local news, I came across this story from NBC 30.

From the story …

Police found Jose Chevere’s bullet-riddled body along Zion Hill Road in Milford Sunday night, after people reported hearing gunshots.

Zion Hill Road in Milford?!! Zoinks!

Well, I think we all know that better as Melon Head Road … alleged home to the Melon Heads!

Ah, the Melon Heads. Since we launched this site back in January, we’ve been tracking what stories people are reading the most (you know, because we’re geeks like that), and outside of pieces associated with The Haunting in Connecticut, no article has been more consistently popular than our write-up on those bizarre folk alleged to live in the backwoods of the state.

For those of you unfamiliar with legend of the Melon Heads (and are too lazy to click the link), in a nutshell: The Melon Heads are supposed to be a band of big-headed mutant freaks who live surreptitiously on the edge of town, just off an abandoned and lonely road, looking to prey on unsuspecting interlopers. (Think Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes.) Although as it turns out, the legend of the Melon Heads seems native to multiple towns around Connecticut including Shelton, Trumbull, Monroe, Seymour, Oxford, Southbury and of course, Milford, where I grew up and heard stories about midnight encounters with Melon Heads throughout my youth. I remember driving along Melon Head Road with my buddies more than once during my teenage years, trying to freak each other out.

Now throw a dead body into the Melon Head mix (shades of Stand By Me, right?), and no doubt the legend in Milford will grow even more, even if this story seems to be more about a drug deal gone awry more than anything involving inbred freaks feasting on regular folk.

Ironically, I was driving through Milford with my two sons about three weeks ago after having spent the day at Silver Sands State Park, home to Charles Island. I had been filling their impressionable heads with all the stories and legends associated with the island, so since we were in the damned mood, I made a detour and took them for a ride down Zion Hill Road, aka, Melon Head Road.

As I drove slowly along the infamous stretch of roadway, which winds through an undeveloped copse, it was fun to look in the rearview mirror and watch the kids peer out of the car windows and into the trees looking for signs of Melon Head inhabitation. We didn’t spot anything that afternoon … maybe we were just lucky?

I guess we’ll have to go back another time. After dark.

Does anyone remember the hub hub in the 80s over the game Dungeons and Dragons?

Some mothers and ministers got heated over a game that was said to invoke the devil and demons in the minds of their young children. They imagined that the game was no more than a portal or an “open door” to hell itself.

In reality, playing Dungeons and Dragons was no more harmful then reading J. R. R. Tolkien, whose books DnD borrowed from liberally. (It’s interesting to note that Tolkien addmitted Lord of the Rings was a work in Catholicism.)

I dabbled in DnD during my impressionable years, so I can say from experience that other than being a bit addictive, it was …well… it was like this:

It’s not like anyone ever busted out a hammer and started wailing on the other participants …right?

Wellllllll….Enter Wulfgar AKA Zachery Frank King…

Testimony Monday suggested a motive for the attacks may have grown from the trio playing the fantasy role-playing game “Dungeons and Dragons” and jealousy over a girl who King and Bryson knew.

That’s right, DnD has claimed another soul. How wrong I was all these years…Sorry, God.

Apparently, after a rough night of rolling 1s on his saves, Zachery Frank King crept back into the Dungeon Master’s house and proceeded to beat him and another player with a hammer, blinding one of them and concussing the other.

As the guys at Penny Arcade mention “There are manifold unanswered questions: for example, was defendant Zachary King playing a class that can even wield hammers?”

You can see their Comic take on this story here.

In conclusion: Yes, DnD is evil. It will cause your friends to brain you in the middle of the night….and I’m pretty sure you will also be going to hell. But the decision is yours. I say, don’t roll the dice with your eternal soul.

Something evil is lurking in the woods of Connecticut these days, something ancient and almost forgotten.

You can hide your children and lock up your pets, but even then all may be lost. For there is no stopping the fisher cat!

Okay, so maybe they aren’t all that bad, but it is true that the fisher cat is back in full force in Connecticut.

The fisher is neither a fish, a fisher, or a cat. It is a relative of the North American marten.
From the Wiki.

Adults weigh between 2 to 7 kilograms (4–15 lb) and are between 65 to 125 centimetres (26–49 in) in length. Males are about twice the size of females, with the smallest females having been recorded being as small as 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lb), hardly larger than most other martens, and males at as much as 9 kilograms (20 lb), by far the largest size recorded for the genus. Their coats are darkish brown, with a black tail and legs; some individuals have a cream-colored patch on the chest. All four feet have five toes with retractable claws. Because they can rotate their hind paws 180 degrees, they can grasp limbs and climb down trees head first.

A circular patch of hair on the central pad of their hind paws marks plantar glands that give off a distinctive odor, which is believed to be used for communication during reproduction. Fishers are also known for one of their calls, which is often said to sound like a child screaming, and can be mistaken for someone in dire need of help.

Their numbers drastically declined about a hundred years ago in Connecticut as they were hunted for their brown to black furs.

The fisher cat gets a bad rap because they seem to just love the taste of cats, and when a domestic cat goes missing within a hundred miles of a fisher sighting, it seems the fisher is always to blame.

The really damned scary part of the fisher is its scream. I was recently told it sounded “exactly like a women being murdered.” After taking a step back and wondering how this person knew exactly what a women being murdered sounded like, I went to YouTube to check it out and and I do find the fisher cat’s sounds a bit creepy. I can also see how the fisher could be mistaken for an unearthly spectre wandering the woods late at night. Apparently, the screams are the sounds they make while mating.

(And if you have been keeping up on your weird CT news, you will know the fisher isn’t the only mammal being accused of murder when romance is in the air: (Passionate Screams Mistaken, Assault Ensues))

You can read more about the fisher cat and it growing numbers in Connecticut in this article from the Hartford Advocate.

Proving you can’t keep a great showman down — even if he’s been dead for over a century — Bethel’s (and Bridgeport’s) P.T. Barnum has recently been back in the limelight. Of course, we here at Damned Connecticut embrace Barnum for his great efforts in collecting and exhibiting the exotic and strange, from Tom Thumb to Jumbo, to trying to purchase the Cardiff Giant (and NOT saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”) And don’t forget the Barnum Museum!

But ol’ P.T. has been in the headlines lately. The first thing is the recent announcement that star of stage and screen Hugh Jackman will be starring in a new musical based on the life of Barnum, The Greatest Showman on Earth, which Jackman will also be producing. That’s right, Wolverine is sheathing his claws for a top hat and a spot in the center ring! (And with Jackman as Barnum in a musical, it won’t be so hard to convince my wife to go a “damned” film with me!)

From the article –

“The Greatest Showman on Earth” will be produced by Jackman, Laurence Mark and Jackman’s Seed partner John Palermo. Jennifer Bicks (“Sex and the City”) will write the script. Contemporary British pop singer and composer Mika (“Grace Kelly”) is reportedly in talks to write the tunes and score the film.

Anne Hathaway, with whom Jackman shared a duet with at the Oscars, will play Jamed soprano Jenny Lind. Bicks co-wrote the Oscar telecast and Mark executive produced the telecast as well as the film “Dreamgirls.”

Sounds like it should be a lot of fun — we’re really looking forward to it!

And okay, for the wife …

The second item was the announcement that in honor of the 200th anniversary of Barnum’s birth in 2010, a full-sized sculpture of the legendary showman and humbug has been commissioned. The figure, to be sculpted by Bethel native David Gesualdi, will be unveiled next September during a two-day celebration of Barnum’s birthday.

Hopefully, all the events will be larger-than-life spectacles that Barnum himself would’ve appreciated. We’ll keep you posted as we get more details!

This is not a repeat from a few days ago, but a look at a few other recent unusual findings in faraway places — specifically, Mars.

There was some buzz last week when a few media outlets reported that a “monolith” has been detected on the surface of the red planet. Just as quickly, there were other outlets repudiating the claim, suggesting that the object was simply the result of shadows and light playing tricks with a boulder. Of course, until we land there and check for ourselves, there will be debate and controversy.

Then again, debating the existence of faces and other objects on the surface of Mars is nothing new — “astronomer” Richard Hoagland has dedicated years of research to the “monuments of Mars” on the Cydonia plain, as well as numerous other space-related theories dedicated to the idea that there have been others out there before us.

And of course, NASA has pretty much debunked all that also.

This item about a new object spotted on the Martian surface brought up an another interesting story that came up recently — that another monolith was spotted in the neighborhood of Mars, this time on the moon of Phobos.

The images were taken by the Mars Global Surveyor in 1998, so this story is a bit old news. But as mentioned, it’s in the news again because when astronaut Buzz Aldrin was recently questioned on C-SPAN about the current state of the space program and returning to the moon, he brought up this particular object on Phobos, as you can see here –

Sure, it might just be a naturally occurring oddly shaped rock, but where’s the fun in that?

(It helps if you read this post’s title in the announcer’s voice from the old “Muppet Show” when he was introducing “Pigs … in … Space!”)

So since my work wife Marisa was asking, I thought I’d mention a few astronomical oddities that have been in the news lately!

First off, if you haven’t heard already, something really big hit Jupiter recently, creating a huge disruption near its southern pole. The picture here is from amateur Australian astronomer Anthony Wesley using a 14.5-inch telescope in Murrumbateman, Australia, aka “the land down under,” and as such, Jupiter’s “southern” hemisphere is at the top of the picture. He’s the person who first discovered this anomaly on Jupiter’s cloud-covered surface, and alerted astronomers around the globe to the event. From the article –

“I had seen the scars caused by fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter in 1994, so I knew what an impact looked like,” Wesley says. “After I’d convinced myself that this was real, I could hardly use the computer. My hands were shaking. It was quite unbelievable.”

He quickly emailed his photos to friends and colleagues around the world, and within hours telescopes great and small were turning toward Jupiter to photograph the aftermath of a powerful collision.

“We believe it was a comet or asteroid measuring perhaps a few hundred meters wide,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office at JPL. “If something of similar size hit Earth—we’re talking about 2000 megatons of energy–there would be serious regional devastation or a tsunami if it hit the ocean.”

2,000 megatons of energy?!

Let’s think about that for a second.

A small asteroid — about 2 to 5 meters across — hit high above the Earth last October over the Sudan, creating an explosion equal to 1 kiloton of TNT. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was equal to about 13 kilotons of TNT.

By comparison, the object that caused the Tunguska event — a dramatic explosion over a remote section of Russia about 100 years ago that completely and utterly flattened an area of 830 square miles with the force of about 10 to 15 megatons of TNT, or about 1,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb — is estimated to have “only” been about less than a few dozen meters across.

The “thing” that hit Jupiter was “a few hundred meters across” (say, about the size of a football field) and caused a debris cloud on Jupiter that was the size of Mars! If that thing was to strike Earth with the force of 2,000 MEGAtons, well … you wouldn’t be able to do the math before you, me and the entire planet were vaporized!

On the plus side, NASA has officially thought about what would happen if such a large body struck Earth, and subsequently has released the Natural Impact Hazard Interagancy Deliberate Planning Exercise After Action Report. The entire 107-page report is available, but let me save you some reading — if we get hit by any sort of large asteroid or comet, we’re frakked.

Still, despite being able to do the math, no one is exactly sure what — if anything — hit Jupiter in the first place.

If it’s any consolation, it’s believed that because Jupiter is so big, and has such strong gravitational pull, it’s a magnet for wayward celestial objects, and as such, has spared Earth from such impacts for billions of years. (Works for me!)

Ironically, however, a few days after the Jupiter event, an eerily similiar event occurred on Venus, with an amateur astronomer discovering an unusually bright spot in the Venetian atmosphere. From that article –

But just what caused the brightening is still a mystery. Theories have abounded, from a volcanic eruption to solar particles interacting with the planet’s atmosphere.

[Planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison] says the volcano explanation is unlikely, for several reasons: Volcanoes on Venus seem to be less likely to blow their tops in Mount St. Helens-type fashion, instead behaving more like the oozing lava factories of Hawaii, so their eruptions wouldn’t likely produce huge clouds of ash and steam. Also, it is unlikely that the explosions would have the power to push through to the other layers of Venus’ extremely dense atmosphere.

Limaye doesn’t completely rule out the possibility, however. “It’s possible, we just don’t know,” he said.

Another explanation is that a coronal mass ejection (an energetic plume of plasma from the sun’s corona) or the solar wind could have interacted with the clouds of Venus.

These “could cause something, we don’t know what,” Limaye said.

Yet another possibility is some internal change in Venus’ atmosphere that could alter cloud particles and make them more reflective (and therefore brighter as viewed from space).

“Clearly something in the cloud properties changed,” Limaye said.

Of course, the article concludes with Limaye suggesting exactly what caused the event “is anybody’s guess.” So for all they know, something large could’ve struck Venus as well!

Ah, space. Home of mysterious big things that crash into other mysterious big things … and devastate them. Yay!