Series & desks

Case files grouped into running series. Each series page explains its method and lists the files published so far.

• Recurring series

  Was It a Rocket? — The Sky Desk

  Glowing spirals, "jellyfish," slow comets that cross half the state in a few minutes. Most of the mass sky-light reports that reach the ledger turn out to be launches, reentries or meteors. This desk checks those first, with times, and says so plainly when that check comes up empty.

  10 files · latest: The Novato Fireball, 17 October 2012: Cameras Called the Fall, a Roof Confirmed It

• Deep-dive series

  The Great Airship Wave, 1896–97

  Fifty years before "flying saucers," American newspapers filled with lighted airships: first over Sacramento and San Francisco in November 1896, then across Texas and the Midwest in April 1897. The same papers that printed the sightings printed the jokes, the hoaxes and the debunks. This series reads them side by side.

  4 files · latest: Aurora, Texas, 1897: The Martian Who Hit a Windmill

• Seasonal run

  October Ledger 2026

  Three October anniversaries, posted a day or two ahead of each date: a meteor storm that alarmed rural Portugal, a "great fiery ball" in a Devon church, and the radio panic that newspapers built bigger than it was.

  4 files · latest: The Novato Fireball, 17 October 2012: Cameras Called the Fall, a Roof Confirmed It

• Series

  Booms & Skyquakes

  Unexplained booms are a local-news staple. The USGS has a working list of what they usually are: explosions, construction, sonic booms, and sometimes very small, shallow earthquakes. This series sorts the famous ones.

  1 file · latest: Seneca Guns: The Booms Over the Finger Lakes, and the 'Legend' Cooper Made Up

• Series

  Things That Fell

  Meat, ice, frogs, jelly. Falls are anomalies you can bag and send to a lab, which makes them a test of evidence handling as much as of the sky. Every file checks the boring explanations first, starting with aircraft "blue ice."

  1 file · latest: Ice From a Clear Sky: Airliner 'Blue Ice' and Spain's Ice-Block Scare of January 2000

• Series

  Ball Lightning & Luminous Weather

  Ball lightning is a real, rarely measured phenomenon with centuries of vivid testimony behind it. This series keeps "someone saw a fiery ball" separate from "an instrument recorded ball lightning," and looks at the look-alikes.

  1 file · latest: Qinghai, 2012: The Ball Lightning That Got Caught on a Spectrograph

• Regional desk · Australia & New Zealand

  The Antipodes Desk

  Strange lights, phantom airships and night noises from Australia and New Zealand, read through the two national newspaper archives: Trove (National Library of Australia) and Papers Past (National Library of New Zealand). It is the ledger’s international comparison shelf.

  9 files · latest: Fisher's Ghost: the Campbelltown Murder (1826) and the Ghost That Arrived in 1832

• Monthly series

  From the Archive

  Once a month the ledger takes one old file, a newspaper page, a government record or a museum object, and reads it closely: what it says, who printed it, and what later research did with it.

  8 files · latest: The Meteor Every Town Claimed, October 1894