Word: meteorically
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Mass media begat mass hysteria, and the orchestrator was Orson Welles, who moved the setting of the sci-fi novel to New Jersey for a radio drama. Listeners heard a news bulletin break into a music broadcast and describe a meteor that crashed near Princeton and spewed fire-breathing aliens. They didn't seem to hear the network announce four times that it was fiction...
...foam that had damaged the shuttle Columbia's skin and led to its crack-up in the skies over Texas. Of course, they acknowledged, it was also possible that the ship actually started breaking up over California, and it might not have been foam that killed it, but a meteor. Or turbulence. Or an explosion in the wheel well. In fact, it began to seem that the only thing NASA could say with certainty was that nothing seemed to be certain...
With the foam and the bolts moving down the list of likely causes, a meteor hit moved up. Few people suggest that a cataclysmic collision simply blew the ship out of the sky--not so low in the atmosphere, anyway. But up in orbit, a bad ding by a rogue rock could have done enough damage to cause serious drag as the ship descended through the atmosphere, and Columbia indeed heeled sharply to the left before it disintegrated. Pits and gouges in the protective tiles are common during flight; ships routinely pick up close to 100 of them...
...their backs, huddled together for warmth. Some of the more resourceful students brought air mattresses, but the masses remained exposed to the cold concrete. The lights of Boston, the full moon, the telescope domes and some mild cloud cover all worked against the stargazers. The relative lack of meteors, combined with the cold and the early hours fueled quite a bit of griping. One student joked, “I think when meteor showers start to suck they should just set off fireworks to please me.” Jonas A. Budris ’06 had a more resigned...
Despite all the complaints, there were beautiful meteors that streaked white and blue across the sky. Every few minutes the whining was punctuated by “oooohs” rising from the crowd. There was a notable lack of “ahhhs” missing from the reaction—who knows why. Of course, all the oohing only made those who had missed the meteor more bitter. Ann Marie Cody ’03 an officer of STAHR, the astronomy club that publicized the shower admitted that “700 meteors per hour was probably overly...