by James Wallace Harris
Sometimes it’s easy to be fooled especially when you think you know more than you do. Last week my wife came inside one evening and told me there were strange lights in the trees. She wondered if they could be fireflies this late in the year. So I went out to look too. There were random green lights, but I thought they were above the trees, way up in the sky, and they were in patches of sky not blocked by bare tree limbs.
“I wonder if they could be meteors?” I asked Susan.
“I don’t think so.”
“But the Geminid meteor shower was supposed to happen around this time of year. It was on the news.”
“But they don’t look like shooting stars,” she replied sounding skeptical.
They looked like little tiny flashes of green. And occasionally, a tiny white streak.
“Maybe because we’re in the city they don’t show up well.” I could see Orion and the green flashes were in the right area for Gemini, although I couldn’t see the constellation. And every once in a while there was a small white streak. “Maybe they’re leftover dust from the main shower.”
The more I looked at them, the more they looked like something way up in the sky, like in the upper atmosphere. But then I have bad eyes.
Susan seemed doubtful. And we finally went in.
The next day I read about the meteor shower but I couldn’t find any descriptions that described glittering green lights and flashes. I told Susan about my research. She seemed more convinced. The next night we looked again, but the sky was clear. Susan told our neighbor EJ about my theory.
On the third night, Susan was outside and texted me “The meteors are back.” She also texted our neighbor and he got his wife and kid up. By the time I came outside, they were laughing at me. EJ said those were his laser Christmas lights. I was disappointed my theory was wrong. And EJ ribbed me that he got his son out of bed for nothing.
I should have been embarrassed for making such a silly mistake, but those lights really looked like they were high up in the sky. So I argued I made the best assumption with the evidence I had. And I still think I saw a couple of real meteors mixed in, the short white streaks.
I’ve been out in the country and seen a real meteor shower, which is quite dramatic, so I shouldn’t have been fooled. But this was an interesting lesson. It made me wonder what people thought of meteor showers before they knew about astronomy. Guessing what the mysterious lights were in the sky made me feel a tiny bit of awe. It’s a shame they were laser lights. They did look really cool.
Here’s the 2019 Meteor Shower Calendar from IMO (International Meteor Organization). I’m going to get everyone out in the backyard for the next one, which will be January 3-6th, for the Quadrantids. Although, the Ursids are still active.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
“Sometimes it’s easy to be fooled especially when you think you know more than you do.” That must be why I’m always fooled. I was out stargazing with my brother last year. It was mid-November and the Leonids were in full display. We watched a very bright ‘skipper’, a meteorite that travelled from horizon to horizon, entering and leaving the atmosphere without burning up. It took about five seconds. After it left I said to my brother, “If we were not out here during one of the great meteor showers, I’d call that a UFO.”
What would people think if they saw the International Space Station moving across the sky? I once saw a large fireball cross the sky, and it looked pretty low, and it was impressive. If you look up at night, it’s possible to see all kinds of things that are mysterious. There’s a concept called the “narrative fallacy” that explains why we have to make up stories to explain things even when we actually know we don’t know. I was sucked into that one the other night.