Weird Western Maryland

Beall Elementary on College Avenue in Frostburg has an unknown soldier buried in the schoolyard, only a few feet from the front door. Atop the grave is a boulder with a granite marker bearing this inscription: Unearthed 1870 by Christian Spitznas Civil War Veteran. Donated 1929 by his son Charles Spitznas The inscription is ambiguous in multiple directions. Just because a body was unearthed here doesn't mean it's necessarily buried here any longer, though the stone says nothing about the deceased being moved. "Civil War Veteran" could be read as referring to the finder, Christian Spitznas, rather than to the dead person who was found. If the veteran's name was unknown, how did anyone know they had fought in the Civil War? Had they been buried in their uniform? Surely they weren't found in their uniform, not five years after Appomattox. But under what circumstances were they unearthed? On the other side of the boulder, in stark contrast, is an unambiguous brass...

In late 1949, as the Cold War got increasingly tense, the Pentagon became interested in accounts of "green fireballs" over the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico and other military installations in the West. While meteors in the night sky can flash green*, they aren't terribly common, and these green fireballs were becoming so common and spooking so many personnel that the Air Force asked Dr. Joseph Kaplan of UCLA to look into them. On 3 Nov. 1949, Kaplan reported his findings at a Pentagon meeting. Kaplan believed the green fireballs seen at Los Alamos represented a previously undetected type of "auroral display" -- though he conceded this explained neither "the rapid horizontal motion reported" nor "the occurrence of these phenomena at low magnetic altitudes" (qtd. in Gross 13). Needless to say, Kaplan's explanation "did not escape criticism," in the words of UFO historian Loren E. Gross (60). In the ensuing animated discussion, one...