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This declassified document is a March 22, 1949 letter from the Security Operations Branch of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Santa Fe Directed Operations. It forwards a transcript of a Conference on Aerial Phenomena held at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory on February 16, 1949. At the conference, Dr. LaPaz described the green fireballs, including his own Starvation Peak sighting of December 12, 1948, and argued that they were not conventional meteors. Dr. Teller and others discussed why the fireballs made no sound, and no conclusion was reached.
“meteor”14 pages
• • ., Conference on AERIAL PHENOMENA Page 24 Dr. Teller: Nov let • s try to get a check ot thie. (Dr. TelJ..er then spent approximately the next twenty minutes or so figuring on the blackboard - estimating light, apeed, kinetic energy, shock wave, etc.) Dr. ':reller: If' I can just believe ev~rything I have hel.U'd and put it together w1th vb.at I theoretically believe in, 1t ought to be a material body • might be an electron. phenomenon. Dr. La'?az: You eee why rm puzzled, Dr. Teller. Nothing like this, to my knowledge, ha.a ever been observed in the case of meteorite drops. nr. Teller: It you go to a group like UCLA or sane other place where they have a good eoUDd laboratory, they ought to be able to take the a.boence of sound observations - that ie definitely incompatible, assuming that you know tb.e.t there are .o. and assuming that they have heard no sound from this, they ought to be ab:te to work an upper range upon the dgbt of the object which has been moving, end f'rom these figures I would be inclined to believe the obJeet could probably not have a heat 'lot something'like l cubic centimeter. One centimeter in dimension, and that in turn would not have given the blinding effect, if it vas a material object. Dr. Bradbury: Wait a minute, I think you gve lett out something in light effects - you don't have to worry about kinetic energy. You can get your light from chemicals as well. Dr. Teller: That is correct. .. ........ Mr. Nevburger: This seemo to vind up the meeting. Dr. Bradbury: St1.ll don¥t feel tbat the meteor stuft is out. The puzzling thing is the long horizontal path; also, absence of noise is puzzling. hgc
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 25 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.