By Mary O’KEEFE

First a bit of a disclaimer: Remember when conspiracy theories used to be fun and would make the most amazing television shows and movies. Well, lately conspiracy theories have left the realm of “what if” and moved toward “gospel.” For this article I am asking you to remember the good ole days when conspiracy was an exercise in imagination and not a political statement.

When I spoke with NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Agency) and other weather specialists I began to wonder, “How did weather science come so far, so fast?” As I have stated before, I am from Iowa so I grew up with farmers coming into the soda shop where I worked as a kid with their weather predictions that were almost always spot on. It wasn’t quite like Bill Paxton’s character, Bill Harding, in the movie “Twister” when he held up a handful of dirt, let it blow out of his hand and knew where the tornado was heading … but it was close. Farmers I knew, including my dad and grandma, would talk about the “smell of rain in the air” though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky or, by listening to crickets, they could tell if a storm was actually coming. But beyond feeling, smelling or broken bones aching, there are many pieces of equipment that help us know whether to take out our umbrella in the morning.

One of the most interesting pieces of equipment for predicting weather was the weather balloon. (This is where the conspiracy part begins.) One of the most famous stories in the world of weather balloons is the one that supposedly flew, and crashed, on June 17, 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico. According to reports, a rancher, WW “Mac” Brazel, and his son Vernon encountered a “large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil and rather tough paper, and sticks.” The metallic looking lightweight fabric scattered across the New Mexico desert, about 80 miles northwest of Roswell. Brazel collected the materials and on July 7 drove it to Sheriff George Wilcox in Roswell. That’s where the story of UFO and aliens was born.

The Roswell sheriff contacted the military at the Roswell Army Airfield’s 509th Composite Group. The call went up the chain of command as no one, seemingly, could identify the material. They sent soldiers to collect all of the “wreckage” and then Major Jesse Marcel had his photo taken with material from the “UFO crash site,” according to newspaper and initial military accounts. From then on, the words “aliens” and “Roswell” became synonymous.

Later, the military changed its story and put the blame on a weather balloon; of course by this time the story of a crashed alien ship was much more interesting … and a lot of people “wanted to believe.”

But now even the story of the weather balloon crashing into Roswell has been debunked as the new real story is that the wreckage was part of Project Mogul that was conducted out of the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. The project was using ridiculously large balloons that were sent into high altitude and were equipped with listening devices to help keep an ear on Russia (remember it was the beginning of the nuclear age).

So the most famous weather balloon wasn’t an alien space ship or even an actual weather balloon … or so “they” say. For me, I still think the “truth is out there.”

Next week I will look into weather balloons that are not controlled by the “Men in Black” and how they shaped our weather prediction history.

For us, the rain we thought we were going to see thanks to Hurricane Kay (which was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm by the time it got to California’s west coast) did not quite give us the inches that were promised. In fact, according to the weather station at Rosemont Middle School, the Crescenta Valley area only received 0.05 inches of rainfall.

Over the next few days, our local weather looks to be a bit cooler with daytime temperatures in the low 80s and cool nights in the high 50s.