Monthly Archives: April 2008

Corbett and the Powalgarh Man-eaterA cool breeze blew over the lush Indian forest. Jim Corbett was being hunted. The tigress that stalked him was already credited with at least sixty-four human kills, and Corbett hoped that he was targeted to be next. Jim leaned against the rocky slope of a nearby hill and lit a cigarette. The Chowgrath Tigress had already sneaked up on him once in this grove, and he tried to give her the chance to do so again. As the afternoon waned, however, Corbett decided that she was too canny to try the same trick twice.

He opted to lay one last trap for his adversary before the sunlight failed. He led a buffalo into the grove, and tied it up securely as it grazed. If the tigress took the bait she would be able to kill the animal, but would be unable to drag it off. His intent was to circle behind the nearby hill, climb to the top, and give watch to the grove below. It would be a shot of over two hundred yards, but over the years he had felled many a beast from such distances. Even if his long-range shot only managed to wound the man-eating tigress, he would at least be left with a blood-trail to track, and therefore end his months-long hunt.

He set off at a quick pace, anticipating that the tigress would observe his departure and take the opportunity to prey upon the buffalo. As he rounded the hill in a dry riverbed his pace wasn’t so hard as to shut out all distraction: in a shallow depression there rested a pair of Rock-jay eggs. As an amateur oölogist, or egg collector, Corbett could not pass up these unusual specimens. He used some moss to wrap them up, and carried the eggs delicately against his belly with his rifle crossed over his chest. He continued briskly along the sand, hoping to make it to the hilltop before the tigress finished her buffalo feast. As he squeezed past a large boulder which blocked most of the riverbed, something in his peripheral vision gave him pause: something orange and black, with a predator’s eyes, poised behind the boulder and ready to pounce. In that instant he knew he had been outmaneuvered. With his hands full of Rock-jay eggs, and his rifle hugged against his body, there wasn’t much he could do to deflect the imminent attack. He turned his step into an anti-clockwise spin, set the rifle butt against his hip, and managed to fire a single shot.

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Just after midnight on the morning of June 13, 1942, twenty-one-year-old coastguardsman John Cullen was beginning his foot patrol along the coast of Long Island, New York. Although this particular stretch of beach was considered a likely target for enemy landing parties, the young Seaman was the sole line of defense on that foggy night; and his only weapon, a trusty flashlight, was proving ineffective against the smothering haze. As Cullen approached a dune on the beach, the shape of a man suddenly appeared before him. Momentarily startled, he called out for the shape to identify itself.

“We’re fishermen from Southampton,” a voice responded. A middle-aged man emerged from the soupy fog, and continued, “We’ve run ashore.” This sounded plausible to Cullen, so he invited the fisherman and his crew to stay the night at the nearby Coast Guard station. The offer appeared to agitate the man, and he refused. “We don’t have a fishing license,” he explained.

Just as Cullen’s suspicions began to grow, a second figure appeared over the dune and shouted something in German. The man in front of Cullen spun around, yelling, “You damn fool! Go back to the others!” Then he turned back to Cullen with an intensity in his expression that left the Seaman paralyzed—for he was now almost certain that he was alone on the beach with a party of Nazi spies.

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On the 5th of February 1974, NASA’s plucky Mariner 10 space probe zipped past the planet Venus at over 18,000 miles per hour. Mission scientists took advantage of the opportunity to snap some revealing photos of our sister planet, but the primary purpose of the Venus flyby was to accelerate the probe towards the enigmatic Mercury, a body which had yet to be visited by any Earthly device. The event constituted the first ever gravitational slingshot, successfully sending Mariner 10 to grope the surface of Mercury using its array of sensitive instruments. This validation of the gravity-assist technique put the entire solar system within the practical reach of humanity’s probes, and it was used with spectacular success a few years later as Voyagers 1 and 2 toured the outer planets at a brisk 34,000 miles per hour.

One of the more intriguing theories to fall out of the early gravity-assist research was a hypothetical spacecraft called the Cycler, a vehicle which could utilize gravity to cycle between two bodies indefinitely– Earth and Mars, for instance– with little or no fuel consumption. Even before the complex orbital mathematics were within the grasp of science, tinkerers speculated that a small fleet of Cyclers might one day provide regular bus service to Mars, toting men and equipment to and from the Red Planet every few months. Though this interplanetary ferry may sound a bit like perpetual-motion poppycock, one of the concept’s chief designers and proponents is a man who is intimately familiar with aggressive-yet-successful outer-space endeavors: scientist/astronaut Dr. Buzz Aldrin.

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Teetering between its medieval past and the “Age of Reason,” early 18th-century London was an environment in which the ancient practice of astrology held wide appeal. No astrologer was more influential than John Partridge, a part-time cobbler and quack whose Merlinus Almanac delivered a healthy sense of impending doom to thousands of discerning readers each year. As with all astrologers, Partridge’s predictions had a habit of being vague, noncommittal, and wrong. Nevertheless, his position as a leading astrologer and physician went largely unchallenged among a London society eager to find order and meaning in its world.

All of that was about to change in January of 1708. In that month, a short almanac under the name Predictions for the Year 1708 was published across the city by a previously-unheard-of astrologer identifying himself as “Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.” The paper was written, the author claimed, “to prevent the people of England from being farther imposed on by vulgar almanack-makers.” Such boastful tirades were nothing new; what made Bickerstaff’s publication unusual was that he seemed to have the results to back himself up. Following his opening rant, he moved into a long list of strikingly bold and precise predictions unlike anything that had been seen before. Beginning the list was this:

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