Subject: +quot;Blind Girl Saw Test Explosion 120 Miles Away+quot; Date: Thu, 16 Sep 93 01:

From: C527790@mizzou1.missouri.edu (Greg Foster)
Subject: "Blind Girl Saw Test Explosion 120 Miles Away"
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 93 01:37:00 CDT

     The Fall 1993 issue of _The Skeptical Inquirer_ has an interesting
write-up of an UL worth passing along to the group ("The Blind Girl Who
Saw the Flash of the First Nuclear Weapon Test," by Rolf Sinclair, SL 18,
no. 1, pp. 63-67).
 
     The story is that shortly before dawn on 16 July 1945 a blind girl in
Albuquerque, NM, is supposed to have said suddenly, "What was that flash of
light?"--the idea being that although blind, she had been able to see the
flash of the first A-bomb test, 120 miles south at Trinity site.
 
     Rolf Sinclair, who is associated with the Physics Division of the National
Science Foundation, recognized the story as an UL (he cites Brunvand on the
definition thereof) and traced it to its specific source in an actual
happening which was picked up and distorted by the media.  Evidently there
was a blind student at the University of New Mexico, name of Georgia Green,
who really did "see" the explosion, though from a car 50 miles away near
Socorro rather than 120 miles away in Albuquerque.  Green had been blind in
one eye since birth and had lost most of her eyesight in the other in an
accident at age seven; however, she *was* able to distinguish light and
dark, so the idea that she could have seen the [normal but intensely bright]
light from the A-bomb test is perfectly plausible without stretching the
laws of nature.  Green died a few years before Sinclair made his investigation,
but he was able to interview her sister and brother-in-law, who had been in
the car with her that morning and who remembered stopping the car after
Georgia's exclamation of "What's that?" and helping her out so she could look
at the flash she had felt or seen.  The story was picked up and transformed
into legend by the newspapers, a process Sinclair documents with a number
of examples.  The Associated Press banner headline listed on the subject line
of this post is still on display today in the Los Alamos Historical Society
Museum.
 
Greg "Nowadays, I'd be worried about my contact lenses fusing" Foster