Déjà vu Again!

Cometh to my e-mail this morning a tidbit from the Wall Street Journal News Alert advising me that, "A missile launched from a U.S. Navy ship in the Pacific struck a decaying U.S. spy satellite 130 miles above Earth's surface." In other words, we shot it down. Lawd, y’all that does bring back a memory and a story. On July 11, 1979 (I got most of these facts from my friend, Norm Schlemmer, a retired NASA rocket engineer), the 2nd stage of our Skylab reentered the atmosphere and (mostly) burned up. A piece of a charred fuel tank survived and can be seen in Huntsville’s Space and Rocket Center today. There was much hullabaloo before this return to earth and much panic among the populace lest the Skylab hit a highly populated area and kill a bunch of people. One morning, a Tennessee sheriff announced that part of the Skylab had landed in his town (the name of which will not be herein revealed). Now this was big news. At the time I was sales manager (that’s what you call the salesman when their ain’t but one salesman) for Huntsville (AL) Aviation. A local TV station owned an Aztec that we maintained and sometimes piloted. The TV station had a reporter then known as Jamie Cooper, The Country Rover. Jamie decided that this story could put him in the bigtime, up there with Cronkite (he didn’t tell me that, I’m just guessing). He rushed straight to Huntsville Aviation and got us to take him in the Aztec to the Tennessee crash site. We did. Well it did turn into a helluva story. Shortly after his arrival, Jamie—a pushy sort then and now—ran afoul of the sheriff, who arrested him and threw him in jail. The camera crew filmed Jamie through the bars of the jail window. The story came to naught, of course, when it was proved untrue. There was, indeed, some sort of junk in that Tennessee town, but it was not any part of an object from space. I have always wondered if it was some part of an old whiskey still, but there is no evidence of that, either. We’d love to post your comments. Please click the comment tab at the top.