What Exactly Will Happen the Day of the Total Solar Eclipse? Will ‘The Birds Fall Down From the Sky to the Ground in Terror of Such Horrid Darkness’?

Solar eclipses are a well-documented scientific phenomenon, and have been for many centuries as far back as the time of the ancient Assyrians.

What the Assyrians could not have anticipated, however, was the immense stupidity of twenty-first century conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, who lie and make up tall tales the way most humans breathe air.

You may not have heard, for example, that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Project APEP, which will shoot rockets at the moon to measure Atmospheric Perturbations Around the Eclipse Path, or, in plainer language, changes in electric and magnetic fields, is really taking place in support of “rituals [to be] performed during the April 8th Eclipse… [by] Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups,” according to a far-right screwball named Dom Lucre.

Jones, meanwhile, wrote a post that now has well over one million views in which he pointed out that the trajectory of the upcoming eclipse will form the shape of the letters א and ת, that is to say the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet (or aleph bet, if you will), if seen from a certain perspective. This, of course, to the lunatic fringe, at least, naturally signals the beginning and end of time.

Such weird theories abound in large part because the majority of Americans apparently don’t understand science or causality.

Warning: Falling Bird Zone

Certain aspects of what will take place during a total solar eclipse are well established and rooted in scientific evidence, while others… well,  aren’t grounded in science at all.

The Moon will pass between Earth and the Sun and totally obscure the image of the Sun for someone viewing the event from Earth. The Moon’s diameter will appear to be larger than the Sun’s, and it will block all direct sunlight, turning the day temporarily into night.

Historians rely heavily on historical eclipse records, as they allow a few historical events to be dated precisely and other dates can then be deduced from these. The oldest recorded solar eclipse was documented on a clay tablet found in Ugarit, in modern-day Syria, and probably took place on March 5, 1223 B.C.E. As early as 763 B.C.E., ancient Assyrians in Mesopotamia were documenting the process by which the path of the Moon temporarily obstructs the sun for an eclipse that took place on June 15 that year.

Astronomers have continued to chart eclipses in a similar manner for thousands of years.

In later recent eclipse-related research, scientists in the 1850s and 1930s documented ants skidding to a stop during the event and crickets chirping “as loud as on any summer’s night.”

The moon, photographed during the daytime hours, with a cloud-free sky background

More recent observations, such as those from the 2017 total eclipse, found that, for birds, everything simply quieted down. Daytime routines, such as foraging for food, decreased, but weren’t replaced by nighttime habits. However, in the path of totality, there was a flurry of activity, Cecilia Nilsson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, reported at the time.

Nilsson’s observations were far less dramatic than those of German scientist Christopher Clavius, who, in 1593, wrote of his observation of an eclipse in Portugal 30 years earlier. Clavius was considered by his contemporaries to be the most distinguished mathematics professor of his generation.

“There was darkness in some manner greater than night; neither could one see where one stepped,” he wrote in “Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco Commentarius,” a commentary on Sacrobosco’s “Sphaera” that opens a fascinating window onto the transitional time period of the early scientific revolution, when the paradigm shift from an earth-centered to a heliocentric world view, from Ptolemaism to Copernicanism, was taking place.

“Stars appeared in the sky and (marvelous to behold) the birds fell down from the sky to the ground in terror of such horrid darkness,” Clavius said.

Birds won’t likely fall from the skies on Monday, but they may behave oddly, as other animals likely will.

What likely won’t happen, however, is a massive human sacrifice somehow connected to an intersection of fault lines.  The earthquake in the New York metropolitan area on Friday only added fuel to the fire of these far-fetched predictions.

Far-right conspiracy theorists are both predicting that the eclipse will usher in an apocalypse that will end civilization as we know it and also influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which are, or so we are being told, intimately related.

The way to understand the difference between a suddenly blackened sky in the middle of the day signaling Armageddon or the well-understood astronomical phenomenon of an eclipse is, well, science.

And that, boys and girls, is why you and I both should have been paying more attention in Mr. Stigman’s 7th grade science class and Mr. Sussman’s AP Physics class.

Tim Perry contributed reporting to this story.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)