On May 19, 1780, Historian Thomas Campanella explains, “ a preternatural gloom settled upon the New England landscape, and by noon the sun had been all but blotted from the sky.” New England’s “Dark Day” was read as an omen, even, perhaps, as the biblical end of days. But the question has persisted for nearly two and a half centuries- what could have blotted out the Sun?
The air war in Korea is often remembered for the first jet on jet combats and the dreaded “MiG alley.” But a far less remembered part of the air war, before a MiG entered the fray, represented a key, if almost completely overlooked, moment in one of the hottest times of the Cold War.