~ Monday, May 18, 2020 ~
Elena was at the Moravian Gate in May. The wind came through from the north, as it does when the mountain chains on either side funnel the air from the Polish plain down toward the Danube basin. The pass is wider than it looks on a map — the contour lines suggest a narrowing, but the ground is open and gradual, and the headwaters of two river systems lie within a few kilometres of each other at the watershed. You stand at the Gate and you can feel the topography doing what topography does: making certain routes obvious.
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~ Friday, February 14, 2020 ~
Earlier this year, while requesting digitised historical weather data from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute for a separate project on atmospheric baseline conditions, I received a batch of scanned observation logs from the Røros station. Røros is a mining town approximately fifteen kilometres northwest of the Hessdalen valley. The station has been operating since the nineteenth century. I was looking for temperature and precipitation records. What I found, in a log entry dated February 14, 1947, was something else.
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~ Friday, November 15, 2019 ~
In September of this year I spent three weeks at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu in Rome, working through a run of Bohemian Province correspondence from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The material I was looking for concerns the missionary effort in rural Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain — the same campaign documented in the reports I have been writing about for several years. I found what I was looking for. I also found something I was not looking for at all.
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~ Tuesday, October 8, 2019 ~
There are currently five competing physical explanations for the Hessdalen lights, all with peer-reviewed literature behind them, none of which accounts for the complete observational record. This is not a failure of science. It is a description of where the science stands. I am going to set out each model, note what it explains well, and note where it runs out.
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~ Saturday, September 14, 2019 ~
A map of the amber route shows something that does not look like a road. It looks like a river system — which is, in essence, what it was. The route followed water: north to south along the Vistula, across the Silesian lowlands, through the single gap in the mountain chain that separates the North European Plain from the Danube basin, and then south along the Morava river to its mouth at the Danube. From there, east along the river to the great legionary fortress at Carnuntum. The route is roughly two thousand kilometres. The terrain determines nearly all of it.
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