I remember a Discovery Science or American Heroes Channel show covering ghost ships and ghost aircraft recently. This is one of the aircraft they covered.
Ghost Ships
- Thread starter coliver988
- Start date
I remember a Discovery Science or American Heroes Channel show covering ghost ships and ghost aircraft recently. This is one of the aircraft they covered.
One of my favorite "ghost aircraft" stories is the Stardust crash from the late 40s. Not because of the details of the crash itself but because of the asinine speculations UFO "investigators" engaged in for the next 50 years or so. If you ever need a good example of how credulous, irrational, and wild eyed even the seemingly normal members of the UFO investigating community are look no further than the Stardust crash.
The airliner was crossing the Andes at night in poor weather. It sent a radio message in Morse to the airfield expecting it. The message included an ETA and ended with a garbled final word; stendec(IIRC). The airfield asked the airliner to repeat the message and the same message with the same odd word was sent again. The airliner never arrived, the subsequent searches never spotted any wreckage, and the "researchers" in the UFO community lost their collective minds for the next half century.
The official reports used known facts and Occam's Razor to suggest plausible conclusions. The then little understood jet stream meant the airliner wasn't where the crew thought it was and the poor weather meant visibility was next to nil, so a "controlled flight into terrain" occurred. No wreckage could be found because the impact triggered an avalanche which covered it. The odd final word in the message was either misheard by the receiver, a key slip by the sender, or an odd WW2 acronym being used by a crew which had served in WW2.
The conclusions arrived at by UFO "researchers" and "investigators" using the same facts started off as crazy and went right on out the other side over the next 50 years. You can't even hope to summarize them as one crazy "theory" fed another and another and another almost ad infinitum. Believe me, there's a doctoral dissertation for some grad student waiting in the byzantine history of the UFO stories involving the "disappearance" of Stardust.
Late in the '90s climbers came across various bits and pieces which had to belong to an aircraft. They reported their find and an official expedition was sent out. The wreckage was found in a glacier which had been moving for the last 50 years and melting for a shorter period of time. The bits of aircraft and bits of people recovered all belonged to Stadust. More importantly, the evidence all those bits provided proved that the 50 year old conclusions in the official report were correct.
That garbled final word can never be explained because it's another example of human nature. It's that guy at the FP&L construction site stepping outside the safety rails 7 stories up for "just a minute". There is no explanation and can be no explanation because there was is no rational explanation for it occurring. Yet it still happened.
We've mulled over ghost ships, ghost blimps, and ghost airplanes so how about Ghost Islands?
Maps used to be littered with islands that don't exist and odds are a few ghost islands still appear on modern maps despite our use of satellites. Many ghost islands were a result of bad navigation, wishful thinking, and outright lies. Still others were placed on maps for the same reasons the same way unicorns, dog-headed men, and similar myths were. There are a handful, however, which can't be explained away that easily.
Back before the Civil War, the US passed a law allowing US companies to claim "guano islands" for the US. Guano was a major source of the nitrates needed for munitions and later fertilizer. One of the UK's advantages during the Napoleonic Wars was that it controlled access to the large scale nitrate farms of Bengal and thus could easily supply itself and it's allies with all the nitrates needed. In the 1870s, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia fought a war over control of fossilized guano deposits of the Atacama Desert. Bird (and bat) poop was big business.
Sometime in the 1850s, a ship working for a US company discovered a guano island in the Pacific and claimed it under US law. The island's position is noted, parties land to survey it, maps are drawn, the guano deposits are noted, plans are made to exploit them, and all of this registered with the US government. The company mined islands closer to home, but kept up it's claim. Passing ships noted they spotted the island as late as WW1. Jump forward to the 1930s and astronomers realize the guano island is perfectly positioned to observe an upcoming eclipse. A few ships from the Navy take aboard scientists and steam off to the recorded position to set up an observatory.
Except the island wasn't there.
Everything is checked and rechecked. They're in the right place and somehow the island isn't. They steam around looking for it without luck and eventually settle for setting up the observatory on another island along the eclipse's arc.
Another example involves an island which was supposed to be between Australia and New Caledonia group. It was first spotted by Captain Cook, someone who was noted for both careful observation and navigation. Other ships spotted and charted it over the centuries too with some passing close enough to note vegetation types and geological features like beaches, reefs, and mountains. In 2000, a ham radio group was looking for a remote place it's members could contact for bragging rights. They decided the island Cook had charted in the late 1700s would be perfect, headed out to the mapped position to set up their radio station, and - you guessed it - found nothing. Later official expeditions found nothing too and noted that the ocean bottom was over a kilometer deep where the island was supposed to be.
Similar ghost islands are "located" in the South Atlantic plus Arctic and Antarctic waters. The search for one north of Siberia cost a famous Tsarist explorer his life. Another between New Zealand and Antarctica was "found" a few times for more than a century and still appears on some maps despite satellites and others failing to locate it.
How can ghost islands work in Traveller? Again, one word: Planetoids.
Maps used to be littered with islands that don't exist and odds are a few ghost islands still appear on modern maps despite our use of satellites. Many ghost islands were a result of bad navigation, wishful thinking, and outright lies. Still others were placed on maps for the same reasons the same way unicorns, dog-headed men, and similar myths were. There are a handful, however, which can't be explained away that easily.
Back before the Civil War, the US passed a law allowing US companies to claim "guano islands" for the US. Guano was a major source of the nitrates needed for munitions and later fertilizer. One of the UK's advantages during the Napoleonic Wars was that it controlled access to the large scale nitrate farms of Bengal and thus could easily supply itself and it's allies with all the nitrates needed. In the 1870s, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia fought a war over control of fossilized guano deposits of the Atacama Desert. Bird (and bat) poop was big business.
Sometime in the 1850s, a ship working for a US company discovered a guano island in the Pacific and claimed it under US law. The island's position is noted, parties land to survey it, maps are drawn, the guano deposits are noted, plans are made to exploit them, and all of this registered with the US government. The company mined islands closer to home, but kept up it's claim. Passing ships noted they spotted the island as late as WW1. Jump forward to the 1930s and astronomers realize the guano island is perfectly positioned to observe an upcoming eclipse. A few ships from the Navy take aboard scientists and steam off to the recorded position to set up an observatory.
Except the island wasn't there.
Everything is checked and rechecked. They're in the right place and somehow the island isn't. They steam around looking for it without luck and eventually settle for setting up the observatory on another island along the eclipse's arc.
Another example involves an island which was supposed to be between Australia and New Caledonia group. It was first spotted by Captain Cook, someone who was noted for both careful observation and navigation. Other ships spotted and charted it over the centuries too with some passing close enough to note vegetation types and geological features like beaches, reefs, and mountains. In 2000, a ham radio group was looking for a remote place it's members could contact for bragging rights. They decided the island Cook had charted in the late 1700s would be perfect, headed out to the mapped position to set up their radio station, and - you guessed it - found nothing. Later official expeditions found nothing too and noted that the ocean bottom was over a kilometer deep where the island was supposed to be.
Similar ghost islands are "located" in the South Atlantic plus Arctic and Antarctic waters. The search for one north of Siberia cost a famous Tsarist explorer his life. Another between New Zealand and Antarctica was "found" a few times for more than a century and still appears on some maps despite satellites and others failing to locate it.
How can ghost islands work in Traveller? Again, one word: Planetoids.
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I can see ghost planetoids being used because some are not very reflective or their orbital parameters have mistakes in them.
I saw a program that included the Stardust. My conclusion was that it had hit a mountain. I remember it being made a few years after the wreckage was found and the official trip to look it over had gone and come back.
When I was in the US Navy, I didn't on out on deck at night much as I was typically too tired to go star gazing. One of the guys I knew whose occasional duty station was after lookout, told me he had seen things for which he had no conclusion for... but he felt they were most likely meteors and ocean fog.
I saw a program that included the Stardust. My conclusion was that it had hit a mountain. I remember it being made a few years after the wreckage was found and the official trip to look it over had gone and come back.
When I was in the US Navy, I didn't on out on deck at night much as I was typically too tired to go star gazing. One of the guys I knew whose occasional duty station was after lookout, told me he had seen things for which he had no conclusion for... but he felt they were most likely meteors and ocean fog.
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Good catch. Think about this: How does "Rock" from A:6 Expedition to Zhodane arouse peoples' suspicions?
There's a huge difference between saying "Hmmm... that's a flying object I cannot currently identify." and "That's a Class XR-9 scout craft piloted by blonde Venusians on a mission to perform body cavity searches on selected inhabitants of Hazzard County for the Greys of Zeta Reticuli."
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
I was at a con where someone ran that scenario (wasn't in those sessions, but I was in the live audience for the podcast debrief).
Spoiler:
What is it with those advanced societies that can readily travel between planets and stars but lack a decent MRI in their med-bays??!?
The best explanation I've heard is the one proposed by The Kids in the Hall. It seems that the aliens' supreme leader is...
Spoiler:
I decided years ago that if this was really happening, they wewe the galactic equivalent of high school students who wanted to become doctors.
Where did I get that ? Well, when I was a kid there was a movie titled 'Teenagers from Outer Space !'. I didn't watch it, but apparently one of them stole/borrowed dad's starship, found his ray gun in the glove compartment, and flew to Earth. Unfortunately they ray gun didn't have a stun setting , it just skeletonized anything they fired at.
It was supposed to be a Space Horror movie. Friends of mine who went to see it told me it was more like a studio decided to jump on the bandwagon of 'futuristic space movies'.
I've used various floating gas giant "critters/plants" up to island size for so long I can't remember where I stole the idea from.
An adventure in an issue of DGP's MTJ involves a gas giant life form large enough to both carry and hide the wreck of a scout/courier.
...and the parasites that life off it are plentiful enough and have been around long enough to evolved to become sophonts with a strange sense of attachment to their island, engaging in conflict with the occupants of other islands even when the islands come together to mate...
