Summer 1978: Over a year after its debut, Star Wars wasn’t through smashing box office records. Ushered back into theaters for a return engagement that July, it made $10 million in just three days. George Lucas had welded mythological structure, pioneering special effects, and a spectacular production design to create a cinematic phenomenon that redefined how studios selected and marketed big-budget spectacles. Movies would never be the same again.

Neither would television. That same month, filming began on The Star Wars Holiday Special, a 97-minute musical-variety show that featured Bea Arthur serenading a giant rat and Chewbacca’s father, Itchy, being seduced by a virtual reality image of Diahann Carroll. Originally, the show was intended to keep the property viable and licensed merchandise moving off shelves until the inevitable sequel. But with Lucas’s focus on The Empire Strikes Back and producers shrinking his galaxy for a television budget, the Holiday Special suffered. So did viewers.

mental_floss spoke with many of the principal production team members to find out exactly how Lucas’s original intentions—a sentimental look at Chewbacca’s family during a galactic holiday celebration—turned to the Dark Side.           

I. A VERY WOOKIEE CHRISTMAS

According to onetime Lucasfilm marketing director Charles Lippincott, CBS approached Star Wars distributor 20^th Century Fox in 1978 to propose a television special. Fox had seen a boost in box office returns after several aliens from the Cantina scene appeared on Donny and Marie Osmond’s variety show; CBS figured the success of the film would translate into a ratings win; Lucasfilm and Lippincott though it would be a good vehicle to push toys.

With all parties motivated to move forward, two writers—Leonard “Lenny” Ripps and Pat Proft—were brought on to write a script based on an original story by Lucas.

Leonard Ripps (Co-Writer): Pat and I spent the entire day with Lucas. He took out a legal pad and asked how many minutes were in a TV special. He wrote down numbers from one to 90. He was very methodical about it. He had at least a dozen stories he had already written, so we were just helping to fill in a world he knew everything about. His idea was basically for a Wookiee Rosh Hashanah. A furry Earth Day.

Pat Proft (Co-Writer): Wookiees played a big part of it. Stormtroopers were harassing them. I don’t have the script. It sure as [hell] wasn’t what it ended up being.

Ripps: Pat and I had written for mimes Shields and Yarnell, which is why we were brought on. We had written lots of non-verbal stuff. The challenge was how to get things across. Wookiees aren’t articulate. Even in silent movies, you had subtitles. Whatever we wrote, it wasn’t tongue-in-cheek.

Proft and Ripps delivered their script several weeks after the meeting. It focused on a galactic holiday celebrated by all species, with the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk selected to host the festivities that year. Chewbacca’s family—father Itchy, wife Malla, and son Lumpy—were introduced, with the writers leaving gaps for executive producers Dwight Hemion and Gary Smith to insert celebrity guest stars and musical acts. For the latter, Hemion and Smith turned to producers Ken and Mitzie Welch to arrange original songs and enlist talent.

Elle Puritz (Assistant to the Producer): I was working for the Welches at the time. I remember hearing, “OK, we’re going to do a Star Wars holiday special,” and everyone laughing about it. I thought it was a terrible idea.

Miki Herman (Lucasfilm Consultant): Lippincott requested I be involved with the special. I did a lot of ancillary projects. I knew all the props, all the actors. I hired Stan Winston to create the Wookiee family. [Sound effects artist] Ben Burtt and I were there to basically provide authenticity, to make sure everything was kept in context.

George Lucas (via Empire, 2009): Fox said, “You can promote the film by doing the TV special.” So I kind of got talked into doing the special.

Ripps: Lucas told us Han Solo was married to a Wookiee but that we couldn’t mention that because it would be controversial.

Herman: I do remember Gary Smith saying they wanted to have Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ann-Margret involved, high-caliber people that were popular.

Puritz: Ken and Mitzie called Bea Arthur. They wrote a song with her in mind.

Ripps: It never occurred to us to get Bea Arthur. We spent just that one day with Lucas, then got put in touch with [director] David Acomba. Our notion was Acomba was very much Lucas’s guy, so he spoke for Lucas.

Acomba was a Canadian filmmaker who had coincidentally gone to the University of Southern California around the same time as Lucas, though the two never crossed paths at the time. Lippincott knew him, however, and hired him to direct the special in keeping with Lucas’s spirit of finding talent outside the Hollywood system.

Larry Heider (Camera Operator): David came out of a rock ‘n’ roll world, a documentary world. Smith and Hemion had three different projects going on at the same time, so I think they felt they wouldn’t have time to direct just this one thing.

Puritz: David wasn’t used to shooting television. Using five cameras, everything shooting at the same time. He was very indignant about his own lack of knowledge, and he did not get along with the Welches.

Ripps: I got the impression it was not what he wanted, and had turned into something he didn’t want to do. I don’t want to say he was overwhelmed, but it would’ve been overwhelming for anyone.

II. FORCING IT

With a budget of roughly $1 million—the 1977 film cost $11 million—The Star Wars Holiday Special began filming in Burbank, California in the summer of 1978 with a script that had been heavily revised by variety show veterans Bruce Vilanch, Rod Warren, and Mitzie Welch to reflect the Smith-Hemion style of bombastic musical numbers and kitsch. Chewbacca was now trying to race home in time for “Life Day,” with his family watching interstellar musical interludes and comedic sketches—like a four-armed Julia Child parody—on a video screen. 

Ripps: Lucas wanted a show about the holiday. Vilanch and everyone, they were wonderful writers, but they were Carol Burnett writers. In the litany of George’s work, there was never kitsch. Star Wars was always very sincere about Star Wars.

Herman: Personally, I was not a fan of Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, or Art Carney. That wasn’t my generation. But they had relationships with Dwight Hemion and the Welches.

Heider: Bea Arthur was known for being a little cold and demanding. When she was asked to do something a second time, she wanted someone to explain what was wrong. When the script wasn’t making sense for her to say something, she had a hard time translating all of that. She was pretty much [her television character] Maude.

Bea Arthur [via The Portland Mercury, 2005]: I didn’t know what that was about at all. I was asked to be in it by the composer of that song I sang—”Goodnight, But Not Goodbye.” It was a wonderful time, but I had no idea it was even a part of the whole Star Wars thing … I just remember singing to a bunch of people with funny heads.

After shooting the Cantina scene, it became apparent that Acomba was an ill fit for the constraints of a television schedule.

Heider: David was used to a single camera—run and gun, keep it moving, a real rock ‘n’ roll pace. This show was anything but. There were huge sets, make-up, costumes. It was slow-paced, and it got to him.

Ripps: I didn’t go down for the filming, but Pat went down. He has a story.

Proft: Took my kid for the Cantina scene. All the characters from the bar were there. However, they forgot [to pump] oxygen into the masks. Characters were fainting left and right.

Heider: Characters would walk around onstage with just their shirts on to stay cool. We were shooting in a very warm part of the year in Los Angeles, and it was difficult, especially with the Wookiees. They took a lot more breaks than they had calculated.

Ripps: I knew how frustrated David was. It wasn’t his vision. He phoned me up and said, “I’m not going to be working on this anymore.”

Acomba left after only shooting a handful of scenes. A frantic Smith phoned Steve Binder, a director with extensive experience in television—he had overseen the famous Elvis ’68 Comeback Special—and told him he needed someone to report to the set the following Monday morning.

Steve Binder (Director): I was between projects and got a call from Gary basically saying they had completely shut down in Burbank and there was talk of shutting it down for good. The first thing I realized was, they had built this phenomenal Chewbacca home on a huge film stage, but it was a 360-degree set. There was no fourth wall to remove to bring multiple cameras into the home. I would think it would be impossible for a crew to even get into the set to shoot anything.

Puritz: I think David was part of that plan.

Heider: I remember when that happened. I don’t think it was David’s idea. It was the way it was conceived by producers on how to make this look really cool, but it didn’t work. You have no lighting control. Steve got it. He’s really a pro. There’s no ego.

Binder: They FedExed me the script. The first thing I looked at was, the first 10 minutes was done with basically no dialogue from the actors. It was strictly Chewbacca sounds. The sound effects people would use bear sounds for the voicing. It concerned me, but there was no time to start changing the script.

Ripps: We had concerns about that. But George said, “This is the story I want to tell.”

Binder: The Chewbacca family could only be in the costumes for 45 minutes. Then they’d have the heads taken off, and be given oxygen. It slowed everything down. The suits were so physically cumbersome and heavy. The actress playing Lumpy [Patty Maloney], when she came in, I don’t think she was more than 80 or 90 pounds and she a lost tremendous amount of weight while filming.

In addition to guest stars Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, and Art Carney, Lucasfilm approached most of the principals from the feature for cameo appearances. Feeling indebted to Lucas, they agreed to participate—reluctantly.

Puritz: They had made this big movie, and now they’re doing a TV special. Carrie Fisher did not want to be there.

Herman: They didn’t love doing TV. At that time, movie actors didn’t do TV. There was a stigma against it.

Heider: Harrison Ford was not happy to be there at all. Carrie Fisher, I think part of her deal was she got to sing a song, and that was her draw to it. Because Lucas was involved, and if another movie is coming out in two years, there’s pressure to keep going. So they showed up, on time. Mostly.

Binder: My recall with the whole cast was that there was a little mumbling going on with a few of the actors who felt they should’ve been compensated more for the movie. I think Lucas did do that after the special, giving them small percentages.

Heider: We were doing a scene where Ford was sitting in the Millennium Falcon and he just wanted to get his lines done and he made that very clear. “Can we just do this? How long is this going to take?”

Harrison Ford (via press tour, 2011): It was in my contract. There was no known way to get out of it.

Heider: Mark Hamill was a good guy. He just had that normal-guy-trying-to-work vibe.

Mark Hamill (via Reddit, 2014): I thought it was a mistake from the beginning. It was just unlike anything else in the Star Wars universe. And I initially said that I didn’t want to do it, but George said it would help keep Star Wars in the consciousness and I wanted to be a team player, so I did it. And I also said that I didn’t think Luke should sing, so they cut that number.

Herman: I worked with the actors on a lot of the ancillary stuff. Honestly, they were just all so dopey.

III. BUILDING BOBA FETT

Before Acomba departed the production, he and Lucas reached out to a Canadian animation company, Nelvana, to prepare a nine-minute cartoon that would formally introduce one of the characters from The Empire Strikes Back: Boba Fett. The bounty hunter originated from a design for an unused Stormtrooper by production designers Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie; he was intended to make public appearances in the interim between films, initially popping up at the San Anselmo County Fair parade in September of 1978.

Michael Hirsh (Nelvana Co-Founder): David knew me personally. Lucas watched a special of ours, A Cosmic Christmas, that was just coming on air at the time. He asked people on his crew, including David, who we were. David said, “Oh, I know these guys.” We were not a well-known company at time.

Clive Smith (Nelvana Co-Founder, Animation Director): Lucas supplied a script that he wrote. I think I probably had about two weeks to storyboard, then start character designs.

Hirsh: Frankly, I think the cartoon was more along the lines of what Lucas wanted to do in the first place—if he did the special, there was a possibility Fox and CBS would fund Star Wars cartoons. The variety show itself wasn’t something he was particularly interested in.

Smith: We ended up shooting slides of each storyboard frame. There must’ve been 300 to 400 frames. I loaded them up, put myself on a plane, and went down to San Francisco and did a presentation with a slide projector. I was in this room of people who were absolutely silent. Things that were funny, not a whimper or murmur. But at the end, George clapped.

Hirsh: CBS wanted him to use one of the L.A. studios, like Hanna-Barbera, who did most of the Saturday morning cartoons. But Lucas, from the beginning of his career, had a thing for independent companies, people who weren’t in L.A. The style of animation was modeled after [French artist] Jean “Moebius” Geraud, at Lucas’s request.

Smith: A lot of the designs and characters were inspired by Moebius, who did a lot of work for Heavy Metal magazine. We thought it was a good direction to point ourselves in. At the time, there was no Star Wars animation to follow.

Hirsh: There was a big deal made about the introduction of Boba Fett.

Smith: We needed to design Boba Fett, and all we had was some black and white footage of a costumed actor who had been photographed in someone’s backyard moving around. We took what was there and turned it into a graphic idea.

Hirsh: I directed the voice sessions. Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) had the most dialogue, and the other actors came in for short sessions. Harrison Ford and the other performers generally came in and nailed lines, whereas Mark Hamill was anxious to try different things. [Hamill would go on to a successful career in voiceover work.]

Herman: Michael got upset when I told him Princess Leia wore a belt. It was part of her costume, and they didn’t have it. Redoing it was going to cost them a lot of money.

Hirsh: That’s possible. Lucas was happy with how it turned out. After the special, we stayed in touch and we were developing a project with Lucasfilm and the Bee Gees. Nothing ever came of it.

IV. SPACING OUT

Nelvana had a relatively smooth journey to the finish line compared to the live-action production team. By the time Binder was prepared to shoot the climactic “Life Day” celebration with the entire cast and a group of robed Wookiees, there was virtually no money in the budget left for a large-scale spectacle.

Binder: No one ever mentioned there was no set for the closing. I was told by the art director we had no money for it in the budget. So I said, “No problem, just go out and buy every candle you can find in the store.” We filled an empty stage with candles. I had experimented with this on another special, maybe a Victor Borge ice skating show. Candles in a dark environment give off an incredibly creative effect.

Herman: The sad truth is, everyone was so overwhelmed. Ken and Mitzie knew that last scene was a disaster. They came to me saying, “Help us.” But George was out of the picture. It was a runaway production.

Ripps: Acomba and Lucas had walked away from it. They weren’t there to fight for anything.

Lucas: It just kept getting reworked and reworked, moving away into this bizarre land. They were trying to make one kind of thing and I was trying to make another, and it ended up being a weird hybrid between the two.

Heider: They were spending a lot of money for stage rental, lighting, a TV truck, and everyone was putting in really long hours. It translated into a big below-line budget problem. 

Herman: Honestly, a set wasn’t going to save that scene. All the Wookiees were wearing [consumer licensee] Don Post masks.

Premiering November 17, 1978, The Star Wars Holiday Special was seen by 13 million viewers, a significant but not overly impressive audience for the three-network television landscape of the era. It came in second to The Love Boat on ABC for its first hour, with a marked drop-off following the conclusion of the cartoon at the halfway point. Gurgling, apron-clad Wookiees, low-budget Imperial threats—they do nothing more sinister than trash Lumpy’s room—and an appearance by Jefferson Starship proved too bizarre for viewers.

Binder: I felt you have to open with a bang, really grab the audience, make it worth their time to sit and watch. The opening scene going on as long as it did was a killer for the TV audience.

Ripps: I had no idea what had happened to it. When it was broadcast, I had a party at my house and ordered catering. After the first commercial, I turned it off and said, “Let’s eat.”

Binder: The day I finished shooting, I was on to other projects. It’s the only show I never edited or supervised the editing of. The Welches had the whole weight of the unedited special in their hands, and I questioned how much experience they had at that given they were songwriters.

Heider: Somebody made choices in terms of how long each scene would be on TV, and it’s really painful.

Herman: I remember I was moving to Marin County the next day. I was staying at a friend’s house, and their son was a Star Wars fan. I had given him all the toys. Watching him watch it, he was really bored.

Binder: What I realized was, the public was not told this wasn’t going to be Star Wars. It was not the second movie. It was going to be a TV show to sell toys to kids. That was the real purpose of the show. It had nowhere near the budget of a feature film. [Lucasfilm and Kenner produced prototype action figures of Chewbacca’s family; they were never released.]

Heider: I didn’t watch it when it was on, but I do have a copy I bought several years ago on eBay. It’s not a great copy, but it’s enough to show how it was cut together. I haven’t been able to sit through whole thing at one time.

Herman: George hated it, but he knew there was nothing he could do about it.

Binder: I never met Lucas, never got a phone call, anything. Which was disappointing to me. It was his show, he developed it. To totally walk away from it and critique it negatively was, I felt, not cool.

Ripps: One of the reasons I took the job was I thought it would be an annuity. Every year, I’d get a check for Star Wars.

Hirsh: I did watch it. I was happy with our contribution. It was a phenomenal opportunity for our little company. We got to work on the Droids and Ewoks animated shows later on.

Ripps: I still go out to dinners on the stories. Once, at a dinner party, one of the waiters had Star Wars tattoos up and down both of his arms. When he found out I wrote the special, we got better service than anyone in the restaurant.

Lucas: I’m sort of amused by it, because it is so bizarre. It’s definitely avant garde television. It’s definitely bad enough to be a classic.

Herman: The interesting thing is, the day after the special aired was the day of the Jonestown Massacre. It was just a bad time for everyone.

Dwight Hemion (via NPR, 2002): It was the worst piece of crap I’ve ever done.

This article originally ran in 2015.

When Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, her dress—not her voice—stole the show. The actress wore a glittering, skintight gown while performing at a Democratic fundraiser/presidential birthday celebration held at New York’s City’s Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. A bidder paid $1.27 million for the iconic dress in 1999, but CNN reports that the slinky garment will go back on the auction block today. This time around, it’s expected to fetch up to $3 million.

Julien’s Auctions, a Los Angeles-based celebrity auction house, is selling the dress, along with an assortment of Monroe’s other possessions, including her jewelry, movie costumes, and even personal items like cigarettes, prescription pill bottles, and a used tube of lipstick. All of these items are expected to fetch a pretty penny, but none compare to the bejeweled gown, which Darren Julien, president and CEO of Julien’s Auctions, described in a statement (quoted by CNN) as “truly the most important artifact of Marilyn’s career that could ever be sold.” Currently, it holds the record for the most expensive personal clothing item to ever be purchased at auction.

Some people might argue that the white dress Monroe donned in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch is more memorable than the one she wore while singing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Someone purchased it for $4.6 million in 2011, making it the most expensive dress ever to be sold at auction. However, it didn’t truly belong to Marilyn in real life—plus, W points out, the doomed starlet wore the beige gown during one of her last major public appearances. Less than three months after JFK’s birthday, the 36-year-old Monroe was found dead on August 5, 1962.

Bidding for the dress starts at $1 million. To see the full list of items for sale, visit Julien’s Auctions.

[h/t CNN]

When it was completed in 1931, the Empire State Building instantly became the tallest in the world. Standing an impressive 1250 feet tall, it was the first 100-story building in history and held the record as the world’s tallest for the next 41 years, until the completion of One World Trade Center in 1972. After that, the title moved to Chicago, and then to a number of super-tall buildings in Asia, until the current world’s tallest—Dubai’s Burj Khalifa—took the title in 2007.

Precisely what constitutes the world’s tallest building is debatable, with arguments raised over whether or not uninhabitable structures (like telecommunications towers) qualify for inclusion, and whether the extra height gained by the addition of radio masts and flagpoles should be taken into account. But using a straightforward list of habitable structures measured from ground to roof as a yardstick, the back catalog of former World’s Tallest Building title-holders actually includes some quite surprising entries.

1. THE PYRAMID OF GIZA // EGYPT

When the Great Pyramid at Giza was completed after 20 years of construction in around 2500 BCE, it stood an imposing 480 feet tall—although erosion has knocked a full 25 feet from that total so that it stands 455 feet today. Precisely what held the title before then is debatable, although contenders include several more of Egypt’s pyramids, the 28-foot Tower of Jericho completed around 10,000 years ago, and Göbekli Tepe, a mysterious site in Southern Turkey that dates back to the 10th millennium BCE.

2. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL // UNITED KINGDOM

When construction of the immense central spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England was completed in 1311, it is believed to have stood an impressive 525 feet, easily surpassing the Great Pyramid’s height by more than 40 feet and breaking its run as the world’s tallest building after a staggering 3800 years. Sadly, all three of Lincoln’s spires have been lost: the two smaller spires were removed in 1807, almost a century after concerns about their safety were raised by the architect James Gibbs, while the taller central tower was destroyed by a storm in 1548. Its collapse also meant that Lincoln Cathedral’s title was temporarily handed over to …

3. ST. MARY’S CHURCH // GERMANY

The 495-foot-tall Marienkircher or St. Mary’s Church in the town of Stralsund in northeast Germany was completed sometime in the 13th century. It might have unceremoniously snatched the title from Lincoln Cathedral after the disaster of 1548, but the Marienkircher has had its own share of bad luck throughout its long history: its bell tower collapsed in 1382, and its central steeple blew down in a storm in 1478 and had to be replaced. The replacement, however, was struck by lightning and burned to the ground in 1647—handing the title of world’s tallest building over to …

4. STRASBOURG CATHEDRAL // FRANCE

After a run of bad luck for ecclesiastical buildings, Strasbourg Cathedral—at 466 feet tall—managed to hold on to the title of world’s tallest building for the next 227 years (although some in the 19th century thought it was shorter than the Great Pyramid). But in the late 19th century, improvements in building techniques and architectural engineering led to a flurry of tall buildings completed all across Europe.

In 1874, a rebuilt St. Nicholas’s Church in Hamburg was completed after the previous building burned down 30 years earlier; standing 482 feet tall, it took the title from Strasbourg (but went on to be all but destroyed during the Second World War and is now in ruins). In 1876, a cast iron spire was added to Rouen Cathedral in France, which stole the title from Hamburg. Then in 1880, work was finally completed—after a 407-year hiatus—on Cologne Cathedral in Germany: construction had originally begun in 1248, but was halted in 1473. The finished building stood 515 feet tall, enough to steal the title from Rouen and return it to Germany. But just like its predecessor, Cologne Cathedral only held the title for the next four years.

5. WASHINGTON MONUMENT // UNITED STATES

On its completion in 1884, the 555-foot Washington Monument became the world’s tallest entirely stone-built structure, the tallest obelisk anywhere in the world, and the first known structure in North America to hold the title of world’s tallest building. Despite that impressive record, however, Europe reclaimed the record just five years later with …

6. THE EIFFEL TOWER // FRANCE

The 986-foot Eiffel Tower was the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair. Although its designer and namesake Gustave Eiffel had a permit allowing it to stand for a total of 20 years, it was originally intended to be dismantled when the fair was over. Thankfully, aside from its popularity, part of the reason the Tower still survives is that it proved an excellent telegraph transmitter, and even proved useful in intercepting German radio signals during the First Battle of Marne in 1914.

On its completion on March 31, 1889, the 984-foot Eiffel Tower instantly became the world’s tallest building (although, astonishingly, it shrinks by up to 6 inches during cold weather). It held the record for the next 41 years, until finally it was beaten by …

7. THE CHRYSLER BUILDING // NEW YORK

When it was opened on May 27, 1930, New York City’s Chrysler Building broke the Eiffel Tower’s record by a full 60 feet—it stands an impressive 1046 feet tall, making it the first building in history to break the 1000-foot mark (thanks largely to a 185-foot spire constructed in secret to prevent any competition from beating it). It remains the tallest brick-built building in the world (although it does have a steel frame), despite holding the record as the world’s tallest for just 11 months: the Empire State Building was completed on April 11, 1931.

The good news: Tonight is the best night of the year to spot the Leonid meteor shower. The bad news: There’s a giant moon up there washing things out. Those are just the breaks. Moreover, this is a weak year for the shower. Sometimes it’s strong. Sometimes it’s not. Activity correlates to the return of its parent comet, Tempel-Tuttle, which traverses the solar system in a 33-year orbit. Alas, the comet won’t be back to spice things up until the 2030s.

Still, to stare into the night sky is to stare thousands of years into the past. (Longer if you use a telescope.) And that big and bright Moon, while meddling with our meteor viewing, is gorgeous this week and worth your time—it’s the super beaver moon, after all. But the Leonids, too, have earned their keep. They gave birth to meteor astronomy in terrifying fashion, having once been thought to signal Judgment Day.

THE CRACK OF DOOM

In 1833, biochemistry was born. Slavery was abolished in much of the British Empire. Across the Atlantic, the city of Chicago was founded. A re-elected president took the oath of office. And the nation was plunged into chaos as the sixth seal was apparently broken, “and the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.”

This was a pre-Edison world, and even gas lighting was in its infancy. The skies, in other words, were largely free of the eventual scourge of light pollution. They would have been painted with the Milky Way, and any motion at all, save the Moon and the planets, would have been obvious and noteworthy. So when thousands of shooting stars appeared in one crystalline night in November―when the sky became a dramatic field of streaking white―something was definitely wrong. This was no meteor shower. There were simply too many of them, too much, too frenzied in every direction. This was, well, it could only be one thing: a sign, and maybe the sign.

Scientists of the time weren’t necessarily on board with the Armageddon hypothesis, but they needed to move quickly to collect hard data on the phenomenon, determine how far the phenomena reached, build hypotheses on why this was happening now, and predict what might happen next. Scientific astronomy was paramount, as was the need to collect hard data from across the country (and perhaps around the world) before memories falsely inflated numbers and exaggerated meteor behavior. Now amplify the pressure of doing this when there was no way of communicating swiftly over great distances. This was a pre-telegraph world. It took weeks and months to bring the data together, but in the end they were successful.

So what was going on? Was this some sort of solar outburst? Were elements in the atmosphere ignited? Observations placed the radius of the shower in the constellation Leo. (Hence the eventual name “Leonids.”) In 1833, it was exclusive to North America, but there were reports of it the year before in Europe and the Middle East. Was it perhaps the work of some sort of particle field in space? It was in these fires of scientific inquiry about the Leonids that the field of meteor astronomy would be forged. The shower was particularly intense in 1833, these early meteor astronomers soon learned, because Tempel-Tuttle had returned in its 33-year orbit. After combing through some 2000 years of astronomical records, Yale College astronomer and mathematician H. A. Newton predicted the next spectacular shower would appear in 1866. He was right.

Because the world didn’t end in 1833, the terror of a sky lit in shooting stars would inspire people for years. Stories about that night were passed down for generations. The shower, for example, left an indelible mark on the people of Alabama, nearly a century later inspiring Carl Carmer, an English professor at the University of Alabama. He titled his literary exploration of the state, published in 1934, Stars Fell on Alabama. That phrase would inspire a song of the same name:

“We lived our little drama
we kissed in a field of white
And stars fell on Alabama last night
I can’t forget the glamour
your eyes held a tender light
And stars fell on Alabama last night”

CATCHING THE MAIN EVENT

The shower will peak after midnight tonight, in the early hours of November 18. If it’s too cold where you are to take chances on a quiet event, you can always watch the meteor shower on Slooh. You can also check out the Space.com feed. And of course there’s the old fashioned way: a dark area, a heavy coat, a blanket, an hour for your night vision to adjust, and a whole lot of patience. You might see 10 meteors an hour. And if you don’t, you’ll have a brilliant alabaster moon to keep you company.

Art authentication can be a tricky business. Seasoned experts can be fooled by forgeries or miss important clues that could cement the authorship of a particular piece. At stake: reputations of museums and millions of dollars.

The art world’s latest controversy arrived Tuesday, when two prominent scholars of Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh declared that a 65-page sketchbook passed down as a family heirloom in France was once owned by the uni-eared painter.

Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, however, fired back with an open letter claiming the sketchbook was not the genuine article. Using their library of more than 500 van Gogh drawings as a reference, museum staffers wrote that the illustrations aren’t indicative of the artist’s development circa 1888 and that the brown ink used was inconsistent with his preference of black or purple ink.

It’s believed that van Gogh gifted the proprietors of a hotel in Arles, France with the sketchbook after he had been remanded to a mental institution after slicing off his ear; van Gogh had asked his doctor, Felix Rey, to pass it along to the Ginouxs, who welcomed the artist as their guest and had given him a ledger in which to draw. The museum argues that Rey had left Arles by then and had never come to visit him.

One of the scholars endorsing the work as genuine, Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, is a highly-respected van Gogh expert who has just issued a book titled Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook, featuring commentary and reproductions of select illustrations. Welsh-Ovcharov spent three years researching the sketches after discovering them in 2013. The book, she said, was in the Ginoux family for decades before it came into the possession of a neighbor, who was unaware of its significance. The neighbor’s daughter thought little of it until a friend suggested she show it to an art historian.

Welsh-Ovcharov maintains that an entry in the hotel’s 1890 date book supports her version of events. In it, an employee of the Ginouxs wrote: “Monsieur Doctor Rey left for M. and Mme. Ginoux from the painter Van Goghe [sic] some empty olive boxes and a bundle of checked towels as well as a large book of drawings and apologizes for the delay.”

[h/t The New York Times]

Around 1941, the Germans dropped a bomb on a street in Liverpool, exposing among the rubble a watertight metal cylinder about six and a half feet long. For several years it lay on the side of the street, more or less ignored. People used it as a bench, kids played on it, and nobody thought it was anything particularly unusual—until one day somebody took a look inside.

Liverpool had been the most heavily bombed British city outside London during the Blitz. Much of the city was destroyed, and amid the chaos, the explosion on Great Homer Street seemed just like any other. Rubble had been cleared away by American soldiers in bulldozers, who left behind some larger chunks of debris, including the aforementioned cylinder—which went largely ignored until July 13, 1945.

On that day, a group of children managed to break part of the cylinder open and peer inside. What they saw inside likely chilled them to the core: a corpse.

The police were alerted, and the cylinder was opened fully to reveal the skeleton of a man who, many locals presumed, had perished in the bombings a few years earlier. Curiously, however, the man was dressed head-to-toe in clothing much more suited to the Victorian era and lying on some sort of cloth. He also still had a few strands of hair attached to his skull, which was propped up on a makeshift pillow formed of a brick wrapped in burlap.

Rumors, speculation, and confusion surrounded the first few days of the discovery, with local newspaper the Evening Express stating that “at the present stage there did not seem to be any suggestion of murder. It was quite possible that the man was of the ‘queer’ type and had crawled into the cylinder to sleep. He may have been dead 20 years.” (In this context, queer likely meant somebody with a mental illness.) The mystery deepened a few days later, when the coroner, one Mr. G. C. Mort, announced that along with the body they had discovered two diaries (sadly illegible), a postcard, and a rail notice, all dating from 1884 or 1885, as well as a well-worn signet ring, a set of keys, and an undated receipt from a T. C. Williams and Co.

An investigation by the coroner showed that T. C. Williams and Co. had been a local paint manufacturing company that operated from the 1870s until 1884, when the company fell into financial ruin and closed for good. Its owner, Thomas Cregeen Williams, was declared bankrupt in 1884. Creditors were asked repeatedly to come forward and stake their claim to his assets, but by 1885 Williams had disappeared. Local papers announced the mystery solved—but the coroner wasn’t so sure. Williams had a son, born in 1859, and some believed that it was actually his body in the cylinder. This theory was ruled out when the investigation found the younger Williams buried in a cemetery in Leeds. Meanwhile, the elder Williams’s whereabouts remained unconfirmed.

As outlandish as it may seem that a body could lay undiscovered in residential Liverpool for 60 years, as far as the police were concerned, that appeared to have been what happened. On August 31, 1945, the official inquest recorded an open verdict, meaning the death was deemed suspicious but without an obvious cause. According to the Liverpool Evening Express, the coroner said it was “impossible to find the cause of death, which he believed took place in 1885.” Although the body in the cylinder has never been officially confirmed as that of T. C. Williams, this still stands as the prevailing theory.

But what of the cylinder? And how did the body end up in there in the first place? According to an official from the Home Office in 1945, the cylinder seemed to be part of a ventilation system (no traces of paint were found inside, ruling out any chance of a freak paint manufacturing accident). Was T. C. Williams sleeping in the vents of his old factory to hide from the creditors, and had he succumbed to deadly fumes? (The cylinder was found about a mile from the factory, but the bombs and bulldozers might have moved it.) Did he, as one theory put forward by the blog Strange Company suggests, fake his own death using this body as a decoy while making a break for America? Being that Liverpool was a major port city in the 1880s, it’s not logistically impossible, if perhaps a little farfetched. We might never know for sure. Perhaps the answer is still lying at the side of a road in Liverpool somewhere, just waiting to be noticed.