Creative History

  J. Robert Oppenheimer the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project codenamed the test “Trinity” after a sonnet by Elizabethan poet John Donne--Holy Sonnet 14--famed for these lines: Batter my heart, three personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend That I may rise, and stand o’erthrow me and bend Your force to break , blow, burn and make me new…. A fitting and prophetic poem, indeed, for what the gathered scientists, military personnel and unwitting civilians in the desolate New Mexico desert witnessed on that July day in 1945--the destructive power of God harnessed by man for the first time in human history. The Trinity Test--the first successful detonation in history of a nuclear device on the planet earth--took place at exactly 5:29 in the morning Mountain Time, only moments after sunrise, on July 16, 1945.  It was the penultimate achievement of the Manhattan Project, which thousands of individuals had worked on so diligently at the cost ...

  It is April 12, 1955--a Tuesday, exactly ten years to the day after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had served for over twelve years in the White House, but who also had spent most of his life crippled by polio. On this day, in 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr.--a fifty-four year old virologist and epidemiologist from the University of Michigan who had been the first person in the United States to isolate a strain of the influenza virus back in 1940 which led to the development of the yearly flu vaccine--stands at a podium in a large auditorium before an assembled crowd of upwards of five-hundred reporters and scientists from around the world. One of Dr. Francis’ former students--Jonas Salk who is originally from New York City and the New York University School of Medicine--but who has been working at the University of Pittsburgh on research and development has made a major breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against the dreaded childhood disease of p...

  February 25, 1866--two men, James Mattson a gold miner and John Scribner a commissary store owner, Wells Fargo employee and part time miner himself, at a place called Angel’s Mining Camp in Calaveras County, California, are looking-- just like thousands of others among them who have recently headed west over the past decade and a half--to strike it rich by finding gold. As the men dig their mine down deeper and deeper beneath a layer of hardened lava from an extinct volcano and reach a depth of approximately 130 feet below the surface of the earth, Mattson’s pick hits something hard in a side wall of the mine.  At first, he thinks it’s simply a fossilized tree root, but the two men consider the item oddly shaped enough, and interesting enough, to bring it up to the surface anyway. At the end of the day, this hard and oddly shaped object is brought to the commissary store that is owned by John Scribner.  For days it sits in the store on a shelf and is largely ignored...

  In September and October of 1903 the small rural Iowa farming community of Van Meter was terrorized for five nights by an unknown winged creature that many described as being both half-bat and half human and, that some say, emitted beams of light from its forehead not unlike those of a coal miner's headlamp.  The creature was said to bounce from rooftop to rooftop, cackling and screaming like a banshee while emitting a foul smelling odor like sulphur or rotten eggs--an odor so awful that many witnesses became faint and passed out from terror and the overpowering stench.   Each and every night for an entire week during October of 1903 the odiferous humanoid cackling creature, or creatures, appeared to terrorize the residents of Van Meter, Iowa who dubbed their cryptid the “Van Meter Visitor”.  And then, after a posse of local men armed with shotguns and revolvers chased the creature into the shaft of an abandoned coal mine on the outskirts of town, the Van Me...