The 1913 Great Meteor Procession (the Cyrillids)

February 1913. Sixteen years had passed since the mystery airship wave of 1897. So when something crossed the night sky in perfect order, many people reached for the only comparison they had.

Sunday, 9 February. The first reports came from Saskatchewan, around 7 p.m. Mountain Time. Then Ontario. Appin. Thamesville. Toronto.

A resident of Appin described it: "A huge meteor appeared travelling from northwest by west to southeast… looked like two bars of flaming material… throwing out a constant stream of sparks… in sight about five minutes."

After it came forty to sixty fireballs, all moving "from horizon to horizon in a practically identical path." They arrived "in twos or threes or fours, with tails streaming behind." Each stayed in view for at least thirty to forty seconds. They travelled almost parallel to the ground, "moving slowly with peculiar, majestic, dignified deliberation." In High Park, Gustav Hahn watched them pass about halfway between Rigel and Orion's Belt. He later painted what he had seen.

Most witnesses said the procession made no sound. But not everywhere. At eight Canadian stations, people felt their houses or the ground tremble.

The procession kept going. Over Escanaba, Michigan. Over Batavia and Nunda, New York. Over Osceola, Pennsylvania. At Bermuda the bodies looked "like large arc lights in appearance, slightly violet in colour." Earlier fragments had been yellow and red. The display ended with a large white body. No tail. No sparks.

Far to the south, the four-masted barque J. C. Vinnen logged more than 100 meteors moving "from Orion to the Southern Cross." Its position was 14°41′ S, 24°29′ W. Newspapers later pointed to a second procession on the same course, about five hours after the first.

Clarence A. Chant, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, collected more than 100 written reports and witness drawings. In 1913 he published them as "An Extraordinary Meteoric Display." He wrote that "many compared them to a fleet of airships, with lights on either side and forward and aft." He described "the slow, majestic motion of the bodies" and the "perfect formation which they retained." The reports had no radiant, the point a normal meteor shower seems to come from. Chant concluded that the bodies came from a short-lived natural satellite of the Earth.

In 1916, W. F. Denning put the height nearer 38 miles. His verdict: "Such an extended trajectory is without parallel in this branch of astronomy." In 1956, A. D. Mebane uncovered many more newspaper accounts. John A. O'Keefe named the event the Cyrillids, after St Cyril of Alexandria. He proposed that the bodies were remnants of a ring of lunar volcanic ejecta circling the Earth. Decades later, the Condon Committee's UFO study included a section on "The Great Fireball of 9 February 1913."

The standard explanation is an Earth-grazing meteoroid, possibly captured for a short time into a satellite-like orbit. It broke apart, and its pieces crossed the atmosphere almost horizontally. In 2013, Donald Olson and Hutcheon found seven previously unknown ship reports in German and UK archives. That pushed the track to the South Atlantic, "more than a quarter of the way around the world." In 2018, Beech and Comte modelled a parent body 3 to 4 metres across that broke into clusters. EarthSky still calls the origin unexplained.

Olson counts only four known meteor processions: 1783, 1860, 1876 and 1913. Nobody photographed this one. What survives are Hahn's painting, now in the University of Toronto Archives, and the words of people who watched the lights pass overhead in formation.