| 585 BC | Thales of Greece makes the first known prediction of a solar eclipse. | |
| 1085 | Alfonso VI takes Toledo, Spain from the Muslims. | |
| 1787 | The Constitutional convention opens at Philadelphia with George Washington presiding. | |
| 1810 | Argentina declares independence from Napoleonic Spain. | |
| 1851 | Jose Justo de Urquiza of Argentina leads a rebellion against Juan Manuel de Rosas, his former ally. | |
| 1911 | Porfirio Diaz, President of Mexico, resigns his office. | |
| 1914 | The British House of Commons passes Irish Home Rule. | |
| 1925 | John Scopes is indicted for teaching Darwinian theory in school. | |
| 1935 | Jesse Owens sets six world records in less than an hour in Ann Arbor, Michigan. | |
| 1946 | Jordan gains independence from Britain. | |
| 1953 | The first atomic cannon is fired in Nevada. |
A crashing boom. A jolting, excruciating pain. "My whole body was just stopped — I couldn't move any more," Justin recalls. "The pain was… I can't explain the pain except to say if you've ever put your finger in a light socket as a kid, multiply that feeling by a gazillion throughout your entire body."Read the stories of several lightning survivors, and a little of what we know about lightning's effect on humans, at Mosaic.
"And I saw a white light surrounding my body — it was like I was in a bubble. Everything was slow motion. I felt like I was in a bubble forever."
A couple huddled under a nearby tree ran to Justin's assistance. They later told him that he was still clutching the chair. His body was smoking.
When Justin came to, he was looking up at people staring down, his ears ringing. Then he realized that he was paralyzed from the waist down. "Once I figured out that I couldn't move my legs, I started freaking out."
On May 23, 1967, the sun fired off a flare so powerful that it was visible to the naked eye, and began emitting radio waves at a level that had never been seen before, study team members said.The geomagnetic storm that followed the flare disrupted radio signals for about a week afterward. But, as you can probably guess, World War III was not instigated. That was due to our government's early embrace of weather technology and space research, which you can read about at Sky and Telescope.
That same day, all three of the Air Force's Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar sites in the far Northern Hemisphere — which were located in Alaska, Greenland and the United Kingdom — appeared to be jammed.
Air Force officials initially assumed that the Soviet Union was responsible. Such radar jamming is considered an act of war, so commanders quickly began preparing nuclear-weapon-equipped aircraft for launch. (These newly scrambled aircraft would have been "additional forces," according to the study authors; the U.S. kept nuke-bearing "alert" planes aloft pretty much continuously throughout the 1960s.)
