The Blaisdell Blog

  Some 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, in what is now called White Sands National Park in New Mexico, a cluster of people, young men and women, perhaps some children, were playing in a shallow water hole.   They may or may not have seen, far in the distance, herds of mastodons and wooly mammoths.   Judging from the evidence they left in the form of fossilized footprints, this group was neither running away from nor walking purposefully toward something.   They were simply milling about, like people do when they are having fun splashing in the water.               We know of these activities because in 2009 the footprints were discovered in a dry lake bed.   The radiocarbon dating of plant seeds found embedded in these prints put the people who left them living in the America’s some 5000 years earlier than suspected, and well before the end of the last Ice Age.   These are the people who walked from...

  I picked up the headset and held one side to my ear.   There was the voice—calm, methodical, every tone measured and precise.   In the Gander Aviation Museum I was listening to recordings of air traffic control.               “Delta one five heavy, this is YQX approach, squawk zero seven seven niner.”             “United two two three heavy, this is YQX, descend to 5500 and hold for approach.”             “American four six heavy, this is YQX, you are clear to land zero three.”             The term “heavy” refers to a wide body airplane.   Air traffic control handles these by the dozen every day.   You would have thought it was any other day.   But it wasn’t.           ...