THE PRINCETON EVENT

Publisher’s Note: I received this article Sunday morning from UFO Digest reader T. N. Hackney and thought it was very interesting and I think you will also. Enjoy Dirk

By T. N. Hackney

On Friday October 9, 1992, a string of meteoric fireballs flew by Washington D.C., one of which meteors took out the right signal-light of a parked Chevrolet in Peekskill, New York.  That is, a five-inch wide (by 11-inches long) meteor went through a five-inch wide (by 22-inches long) taillight without damaging the chrome bumper beneath it.  Curiously enough, the impact gave temporal notice of another meteor-string soon to appear, in 93/3 (March ’93), namely, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.  SL9 was discovered March 24 1993.  Those twenty-one meteors took it out on the backside of Jupiter twenty-one months later — only the most energetic events of any kind ever seen close up, or closely enough.   

Click here to enlarge top cartoon.

The third event in the series of impact events was not meteoritic, however, it was gun-related. It encapsulated rather starkly the dilemma the human species now faces.  Humans with guns: no problem you think, although it was probably a metaphor for humans with injury-dealing projectiles of any sort.  Since the event took place in a town called Princeton, of all places, this seems to include the atom, since Einstein more or less made the word Princeton famous (or was it the other way around?).  

Shoots own foot thrice

Princeton, W. Va. – A man accidentally shot himself three times in the right foot while cleaning three handguns, police said.   The 38-year-old man was drinking beer Wednesday morning when he decided to clean his guns, according to a report filed by Mercer County Sheriff’s Deputy L.R.  Catron.   His .32-caliber handgun went off, but it “didn’t hurt” so he finished cleaning the .32, then began cleaning his .380- caliber pistol, which also went off, said the report. That bullet “stung a little, but not too bad,” Catron quoted the man as saying. The man finished cleaning the .380 and then pulled out his .357-caliber pistol, only to shoot himself a third time. The man finally called an ambulance. Catron said the man told him the .357 shot “really hurt because the bullet was a hollow point.”  (NY Daily News, Oct. 11, 1992) 

Now the idea of a guy shooting himself in the foot is a well-known human saying. When people do this to themselves, they’re acting like their own worst enemy. So when a guy shoots himself in the right foot three times (ouch), with three different guns, he’s not doing himself any favors, nor is he going to go anywhere, very fast.  When a species explodes a few hundred nuclear bombs in the atmosphere for testing purposes, this is bad enough in a biological sense, but if countries start using them as payload projectiles (mega-ouch!), well, that’s not going to do your species any favors, either.

With all the recent talk, presidential warnings, and threats of imminent nuclear attack, the metaphor enacted on October 7, 1992 (see comic strip) twenty years ago seems especially apropos today, trenchant even.  The latest such warning comes from president Obama himself, there, as the March 25, 2014 New York “Daily News” headline tells: “Obama says he’s more worried about the possibility of nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan than Russian threat.”  If one could wipe away from serious thought Russia ever using its considerable nuclear arsenal to defend her legacy Ukrainian “interests” from Western incursions, then one could probably dismiss the whole statement as nothing but an empty bluff.  

The 21st century, which Shoemaker-Levy 9′s 21 fragments clearly augured, will severely test, or at least follow, the human penchant and legacy for using high technology to dominate or just eradicate others.  The metaphor enacted in Peekskill, then, was apt enough, under current human circumstances.  Princeton, the third impact event in the series (the first to occur in time), was dead on and to the point in so many ways, like everything else pointed out by the latter two impact events. What conscience did the old world show the “new world” in the years following 1492?  It was, of course, the old world’s superior technology that allowed the old world to ruin and then dominate America.  NASA-Ames’ ten-year, 100 million dollar “targeted search’ for extra-terrestrial intelligence (new worlds) did begin on October 12, 1992, after all. 

Being as the member injured in this instance was the right foot, not the left, and that it happened three times, not once or twice, the fact that the Peekskill meteorite tagged the right signal-light, not the left, causing the chrome tail-light accent to over score the license plate numbers ’933′ — perfectly, one could add — adds a certain weight to the word and it’s opposite: right and wrong.  

Considering what ET seems to know about us, one could wonder how many “quatloos” our extra-terrestrial neighbors are wagering on the nuclear fait accompli about now. 

Yes, it seems there is such a thing, by George!  Universally speaking, that is.