In 1790, the idea that meteors actually fell from the sky was regarded as a superstitious delusion. By 1805, it was accepted by the scientific community as an indisputable fact. It ’s hard to think of any other paradigm shift which has ever taken place this quickly and conclusively. True, there have been theories which were damned for decades before their eventual acceptance (continental drift), and creatures whose existence has gradually crept from myth to fact (the gorilla, the giant squid). But never before or since has an entire class of physical phenomena made this unequivocal journey from heresy to orthodoxy.

As such,the meteor controversy is the most significant precedent for the work which thousands of researchers have undertaken on dozens of ‘parascientific’ subjects for the last hundred years or more. The inaugural address of the Society of Psychical Research in 1882 laid out its intention to “remove the scandal [of ]… the dispute as to the reality of these phenomena”; but over the last century, this “scandal” has both deepened and widened, spreading beyond ghosts and mediumship to telepathy, telekinesis, UFOs, ‘over-unity’ energy devices and dozens of other supposedly physical phenomena.

Given the spectacular lack of scientific acceptance of all of the above,it seems worth taking a step back to consider whether the kind of paradigm shift which is being pursued has ever actually happened.

And it’s here that the meteor controversy comes to our rescue:it is a bona fide example of this type of transition from scientific heresy to universal acceptance. This has, of course,not been lost on the parascientific community: believers in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, in particular, routinely quote the dogmatic nay-saying of the scientists of the 1790s who rubbished the idea of meteors having a cosmic origin, along with the deathless “they ’ll never get it off the ground ” pronouncements of the sceptics of heavier-than-air flight a century later.

But a careful autopsy of the meteor controversy shows that it’s not the clear precedent which UFO apologists like to believe. It’s a story full of paradoxes: collisions of the ancient world with the modern,of witness reports with prevailing theories, and both a triumph and an embarrassment for the practitioners of the emerging scientific method.

To understand how this transition took place, we need to build a picture of how the meteor phenomenon appeared before the modern theory fell into place. To begin with, it’s only with hindsight that meteor falls and meteorite finds are obviously part of the same phenomenon. Both had been,of course, familiar to us from the dawn of history: shooting stars had always streaked across the sky, and strange nuggets of metallic ore had always been found scattered across the Earth ’s surface. But these two phenomena could only be linked in one way: by witness testimony of shooting stars falling, landing,being noticed to be hot, then cooling into the familiar lumps of cosmic debris.

And such testimony could not, of course,be produced to order: it would only arrive randomly, sporadically, as hearsay from casual observers – typically, of course, without scientific training or any agenda of their own. Similarly, we who know what meteors are tend to forget that they show very different facets to people who encounter them in different contexts. To some, they belong to astronomy; to others, religion, or mineralogy, or meteorology, or geology, or elemental magic. It took several armies of dedicated specialists working in different realms – the heavens, the earth sciences, chemistry, classical learning – to imprison this mercurial phenomenon within a new paradigm on which everyone could agree.

In the 1790s,when our story starts, there were various competing theories of what meteors were – as, indeed, there had been
since distant antiquity. The first paradox we encounter is that the link between meteor finds and falls had been routinely assumed in the classical world. Pliny, for example, records the claim that the
early Greek thinker (and flat-earther) Anaxagoras predicted that a stone would fall from the Sun – which it subsequently did, in Thrace. Though Pliny is sceptical both about the prediction and about the assertion that the stone came from the Sun, he accepts that stones do sometimes fall from the sky.

In contrast, the rationalist Greek thinker Aristotle asserted that it was patently impossible for stones to fall from the sky, as there was no matter up there to fall, apart from the celestial bodies themselves. Instead, he proposed a type of solution which will be familiar to modern rationalist sceptics: meteors are the tops of volcanoes which have broken off, and are being carried to earth by the force of some distant explosion. This explanation was largely rejected at the time but came to be increasingly widely accepted as the cosmos envisaged by Ptolemy, a universe of interlocking spheres, became the orthodoxy. Obviously nothing could fall between one sphere and another, and so ‘meteors’ (a term which included the Northern Lights, will-o’-the- wisps and various other phenomena) were classed as atmospheric in origin.

It’s from this view that the idea of wishing on a falling star originates: sometimes the curiosity of the gods overwhelms them, and they peer through between the spheres, at which point a star or two may pass through. Thus a wish made at this moment has the guaranteed ear of the gods. Similar superstitions are widespread even in cultures remote from Europe: in Chile, you must pick up a stone in the same moment, and in the Philippines tie a knot in a handkerchief. Although the cosmos of Artistotle and Ptolemy had been disproved in the 17th century – by, for example, Tycho Brahe’s discovery of elliptical orbits – this was still more or less the view which pertained to the origin of meteors until the late 18th century. Theories were along the lines of ‘terrestrial exhalations’ encountering ‘elemental sparks’ of fire in the upper atmosphere, much as elemental water produced will-o-the-wisps in swamps.But this type of thinking was slowly beginning to unravel. The Northern Lights, supposedly a classic example of terrestrial exhalations, had been shown by Edmund Halley to be “magnetic effluvia from the Pole.” And Benjamin Franklin ’s spectacular creation of lightning by electricity in 1752 demonstrated the previously heretical belief that meteorological events could be artificially induced.

The opposite end of the problem, meteorite finds, was also beginning to come under more detailed scrutiny. ‘Thunderstones', of course, were familiar, and there were various conflicting accounts of what they were. Some held them to be rocks hurled from the sky,or struck by lightning;others simply large crystals, or even fossil sea urchins. There were also suggestions that they were tools from a lost Stone Age civilisation, a theory keenly proposed by the 17th-century Danish antiquarian Olaus Wormius – a name so splendid that HP Lovecraft was unable to resist co-opting it into his Necronomicon mythos.

More promisingly for empirical science, the various large ore meteorites scattered around the world were being examined and compared in greater detail than ever before. One famous example had been discovered in the 16th century by the Spanish conquistadores in the chaco badlands of Argentina (which the natives, believing correctly that the object had fallen from the heavens, had traditionally called the Campo di Cielo, or ‘Field of the Sky’). For two centuries this meteor had been the focus of Spanish hopes of limitless deposits of silver or iron, and periodic expeditions had visited it, hacked off samples and returned. Now, in the late 18th century, stratum geology was beginning to establish that objects like these weren ’t outcrops or seams, but were geologically alien. Metallurgists, too, were beginning to collate samples of similar meteorites around the world and note the similarity of their chemical composition.

As all these different areas of discovery inched forwards, the first individuals proposed the new paradigm, demonstrating with increasing effectiveness that the diverse elements of the meteor
mystery could all be assembled into the new (yet old) theory that meteors were metallic rocks which fell from the sky. But it would still be decades before these voices were accepted, for a combination of reasons. First, to overthrow the orthodoxy required the concerted effort of individuals working in a huge range of different disciplines and attempting to explain them to conservative authorities without specialist expertise in the relevant fields – a situation that vocal supporters of today ’s scientific heresies would claim is unchanged. Second, by an utterly bizarre statistical anomaly, 80 per cent of the meteors which were noted in the late 18th century fell during the daytime, making sightings – and thus the crucial link between falls and finds – temporarily scarce.

The third reason – and the one which is most frequently held up to ridicule by anti-scientists – is that the learned academies of the day ignored the thousands of eyewitness reports which surfaced during the period, dismissing them as hearsay and ignorant superstition. But we have to remember that, in the Age of Reason, oral accounts generally counted for little on the scales of evidence, and perhaps with good reason: almost anything one could think of – rains of blood, hoards of coins – were regularly reported as falling from the sky. In a world which was only beginning to escape from the witch craze and mediæ val mob rule, the testimony of witnesses was still suspect. Perhaps we should consider our own quasi-mediæval hysterias, like ‘recovered memory ’or ‘satanic ritual abuse’, before criticising the academies of the 1790s for insisting on sifting evidence from rumour.

For these and probably other reasons, the new theory was well
formulated for a good 20 or 30 years before its eventual acceptance. In 1771, for example, a meteor was witnessed by enough keen scientific observers on both sides of the Channel,not merely to establish its journey from Sussex to Paris but to calculate its velocity and dimension. This sighting finally proved that meteors were nothing to do with the Northern Lights, but the Academies of Science remained unconvinced of their cosmic origin. During this period the scientific academies of France, England and Germany all rejected sworn testimonies from meteor eye-witnesses, despite the fact that, in 1768, a meteorite had been discovered still too hot to touch. A committee concluded, in that case, that it was merely a stone which had been struck by lightning.

But not all scientists were as conservative as the official academies,and when the bastions of orthodoxy eventually crumbled,the process was, by contrast,relatively swift. Between 1794 and 1803,three separate scientific papers combined to steamroller the nay-sayers into submission. In the first,the respected astronomer Ernst Chladni (1756 –1827) assembled the by now convincing case that there was material drifting through cosmic space, that it was this material which produced the fireball phenomenon, and that these fireballs did indeed drop as meteorites. In the second, published by the British chemist Edward Howard in the Philosophical Transactions of 1802, it was shown that meteor stones all had similar chemical compositions, including the presence of nickel (which had only been isolated in the 1750s). The third was a report in 1803 to the Institut National de France by Jean-Baptiste Biot: the evidence, finally, of a scientist who was in the right place at the right time to watch a fireball dropping a cluster of stones over the town of L’Aigle in Normandy.

And, in some ways, that was that; the idea that meteors fell from the sky was never again seriously questioned. But, in other ways, that was only the beginning of the story. The new paradigm had, for example, no consensus about where exactly this nickel-rich material came from. Some stayed close to Artistotle’s theory, believing that it was originally spewed up into the atmosphere by volcanoes; others, in thrall to Lavoisier’s new gas discoveries, held that it was precipitated somehow in the upper atmosphere. Even within the cosmic theories, there were broad differences of opinion: the meteors originated in lunar volcanoes, or from comets orbiting Earth, or from deep space.

This exposes another question rarely considered by those agitating for paradigm shifts: what exactly do we imagine happens after this
kind of shift takes place? Is science itself disgraced, and if so, how? Do we imagine the sceptical scientists pilloried, paraded shaven-headed to some neo-Stalinist show-trial?

The meteor controversy suggests that there is a certain amount of schadenfreude to be had at the expense of the old guard, but also that the apparatchiks of orthodoxy are usually quite skilled at readjusting their positions and reasserting their own self-interest. Perhaps the best example here was the mineralogist Eugène de Patrin, who strongly rejected the cosmic origin of meteorites, maintaining right up to the death that it was down to the action of lightning. Even in 1802 he was dismissing the entire subject with the assertion that “the love of the marvellous is the most dangerous enemy of natural science.” By 1803 he had no choice but to accept the new view, but did so without apology – merely with an assertion that the “fact” that stones fell proved what he had been saying all along about volcanoes.

Another unexpected set of consequences was set in motion by the fact that the classical ancients – and even the “primitives” of the Argentinian Cielo del Campo – had been right all along. The renewed interest in classical culture sparked by the Grand Tour dovetailed with the new meteor theory to produce the idea that much of ancient religion had been based around cults of fallen meteors, including Wonders of the World like the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. Although proof positive of this is thin on the ground, several classical sites in Asia Minor were certainly associated with meteors, and the cult of meteor-worship persisted until abolished by Constantine (whose conversion to Christianity, ironically, was provoked by a vision of a burning cross in the midday sky).

By the same logic, meteorite-worship was insinuated into many contemporary shrines, notably the black stone in the corner of the Ka’aba at Mecca. The Arabs, with their own lines of transmission from the classical world, had always believed that stones fell from the sky; the great scientist Avicenna, in 10th-century Persia, had personally inspected a meteorite which fell during his life time. But they had never viewed the Ka’aba stone as a meteorite; in their tradition, it came from Paradise and was given to Abraham by the Angel Gabriel. The idea that it might be a meteorite, now widely believed, seems not to predate the reports of enthusiastic new meteor-converts like JL Burckhardt, who inspected it in 1814.

Thus the meteor paradigm shift was both a victory and a defeat for
modern science, both a validation of and a valediction to ancient wisdom. In the ‘Whig history’ of science it’s yet another triumph for the empirical method. In the contrasting view, it demonstrates that the power of the scientific establishment is severely compromised when its members refuse to challenge their own dogmas and self-interest.

Within these paradoxes are many insights shedding light on the modern efforts of damned and fringe sciences to insinuate themselves into the mainstream. Perhaps the most obvious is that the institutions of science don’t always represent the views of all their members – and, by the same token, that there’s no point in expecting the academies to shift to a new view before most of the scientific community have already voted with their feet.

More specifically, we can be sceptical of the claim that the current lack of acceptance of the extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis is merely a modern re-run of the meteor controversy. If UFOs were anything like meteors, their existence would have been accepted long ago. Structural comparisons of the meteorite finds, for example, demonstrated rapidly and incontrovertibly that they were all part of the same physical phenomenon. A similar comparisons of alien sightings and abductions, by contrast, points far more plausibly to the influence of individual psychologies and popular culture.

The modern fringe sciences which seem most closely analogous to the meteor story are those which are attempting to unravel rare but consistent and unambiguously physical phenomena which (unlike,for example,telepathy) don ’t require new laws of nature, merely a better understanding of the old ones. A shortlist might include the candle theory of spontaneous combustion, ball lightning and plasma phenomena,and perhaps earth sounds and lights.

And the final moral, lest we forget: keep watching the skies!