Word: halley
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...intergalactic spaceship ("No warranties expressed or implied"). He says it will take off Dec. 24 before the comet's gases can ignite the earth's oil supply and bring death to most of mankind. UFO Cataloguer and Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who was born under Halley's comet in 1910, is taking a more realistic view; he is bracing himself for a flood of calls at his Northwestern University UFO center from people worried about the fiery space spectacle...
...comet of 1456 and many of the others that influenced ancient history were one and the same: the celestial visitor that became known as Halley's comet. A 17th century protégé of Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley was convinced that comets travel, like planets, in closed orbits around the sun. Using his mentor's formulas, he calculated the paths of comets dating back to 1337 and found that three-those of 1456, 1531 and 1607 -had roughly the same orbit as the comet of 1682 (which he had seen as a young man). Halley concluded that...
...Freaks. Cometphobia took another form during Halley's reappearance in 1910. Fearing that mankind would be poisoned as the earth passed through noxious gases in the comet's tail, many people bought gas masks and "comet pills" to prevent asphyxiation; they also staged a round of end-of-the-world parties. But the gases were far too tenuous to do any damage, and the earth remained unscathed. One famous prediction, however, did come to pass. Mark Twain, who had been born during the comet's previous visitation in 1835, and wrote that he expected to die during...
Still, fear of comets persisted. Just before Halley's comet returned in 1835, rumors spread that it would collide with the earth. Although the path of Halley's comet precluded collision, the possibility that a comet could strike the earth is not entirely farfetched. The earth bears the scars of at least two impacts that some scientists ascribe to comets: at the site of the Great Tunguska catastrophe, which leveled the Siberian landscape for more than 20 miles around in 1908, and in the geological formation known as the Witwatersrand gold field in South Africa. The possibility...
...distant space. After making some rush observations of his own ("We spent a very tense weekend out at Harvard Observatory's Agassiz Station"), he reported that the comet Kohoutek had been sighted at a distance of roughly 480 million miles from earth, barely within the orbit of Jupiter. (Halley's comet, by contrast, was not found on its last approach until it was some 180 million miles closer to earth-even though astronomers knew where to look for it.) Never before had a comet been detected at such a great distance...