This week’s Geminid meteor shower is expected to be one of the most impressive of the year. According to astronomers, this stellar show — peaking Wednesday night — could produce up to 150 “shooting stars” per hour in white, yellow and even green hues.
As dramatic as that might be, it can’t hold a candle to the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1833. On the night of Nov. 12-13, so many meteors burned through the Earth’s atmosphere that they seemed to turn the night sky into morning. Eyewitnesses claimed the air was filled with brilliant “snowflakes,” while newspapers dubbed it “the shower of stars.” In oral histories, Native American tribes referred to it as “the night the stars fell.”
“It appeared so grand and magnificent as to be truly exhilarating,” Joseph Harvey Waggoner, a Pennsylvania teenager, recalled later. “It was a sight never to be forgotten.”
On the basis of contemporary descriptions, researchers estimate that as many as 240,000 meteors lit up the sky in a nine-hour period that night. In one hour, as many as 70,000 shooting stars streaked across the sky. The brightness of the shower caused countless citizens to rise from their slumber, in turn waking neighbors with loud exclamations of the vivid sight before them.
The spectacular scene had another effect on people: Many believed that it foretold a disaster of biblical proportions and that their lives were all but over.
“The world is now actually coming to an end, for the stars are falling,” exclaimed a Southern farmer who had run outside only in his shirt. As the display increased, he was so terrified that he sought cover under his house — sans clothing — according to the Georgia Journal.
Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was ecstatic at the sight, believing that Armageddon was imminent. He wrote of that moment:
“I arose, and to my great joy, beheld the stars fall from heaven like a shower of hail stones; a literal fulfillment of the word of God as recorded in the holy scriptures as a sure sign that the coming of Christ is close at hand.”