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This declassified document is a March 22, 1949 letter from the Security Operations Branch of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Santa Fe Directed Operations. It forwards a transcript of a Conference on Aerial Phenomena held at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory on February 16, 1949. At the conference, Dr. LaPaz described the green fireballs, including his own Starvation Peak sighting of December 12, 1948, and argued that they were not conventional meteors. Dr. Teller and others discussed why the fireballs made no sound, and no conclusion was reached.
• :------ •Conference on AERIAL PHENOMENA Page 23 Dr.. l3radbury: ..... Dr . Teller : You have to get a shock \18.Ve out ot it. W1th a very t.miaJ.l object the shock uave Vl?uld be emaller tban .. • . I ba.ve not .made colcula.tiona on it, but it0 s just common sense ... . • Dr. Le.Paz: I 1t-ould like to ask a question. Ien8t it true in the case ot t oo- called light movement that you have very intense, luminous effects off tbem vithout noi~'l ( talk between Drs. Bradbury and La.Pa!. too taot and too jumbled to be traniscribed.) Comdr. Mandelkorn: From what Dr. Tell r said apparently a solid object eon• ver ging with the atmosphere horizon·tally at o.bout 8 to 10 miles e.ltitude, 1t vs i ner dible that it wouldn 9t be accompanied by eome sort ot sonie phenomenon. Dr. Teller! I w-ould like to repeat that to try to get sn estimate ot the si~~ of the object, 'that it would have to have in order to get sound effects, 1e not an easy thing, but offhand I WPul.tl. a~ - this ie wtiat I -woulcl. e.xpoct - that you get a very small object, ,-a small as an inch or BDla4ler. Dr. LaPaz: . .... Dr. Teller: If I ral}elllber correctly, the :..ntensity, th~ amount of energy thnt goes into a ohock wave is proportio~ to th square of the velocity. The vel ocity tbat you have here proporti'onal to the square of the velocity and, of QOurse, is proport1.Qnal I sbould think probably to th' square ot the linear dimensions of the obJect tha't you bav~. Nov you hf;Lve 10 miles per eecond • •• velocity you have 20 vdles per second~ AO this could be, on that count, ten ·t;~es fainter .. t.be sound would be ten times fainter. OD the o\lM!r band, a m eteor1te that you· will hear, I think, . • • • . that much across J •• •• • l ( too much cross ta.lk) Dr. Teller: That i~ something we c0uld do right away. 1'ov I do not know, tried to get from you information on brightness, but I would like to ask again some details ..• o • Dr. l,aPaz: The brightest meteo;-1te tall 1n bistory, of Vhich ve have historioal. record, vae tbe .~. fall 1n 19()8, ~ 20 •••• est'-2na.tes the power, the light power, of' that .was ot the order of 101 • 1019 ergs w aecOlld. In the case of the Texas fall it wao prQbably not 100,0001;h as bright.
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 25 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.