A story out of Arkansas has been making it around the intertubes this weekend. Thousands of blackbirds dropped out of the sky in Beebe, population 4,500. The curious tragedy reminds me of an episode I wrote about several years ago: 

In the wee hours of Sept. 11, 1948, a thick fog descended on New York. It blanketed the Hudson Valley north and west of Manhattan, obscuring the stars above and river below, leaving the city's only beacon the pale office light from Empire State Building windows. Beginning around 1 a.m., that beacon withstood a hapless assault that would persist in tragic-comic oddness for two hours. 

The fog had jammed the built-in compasses of thousands of birds migrating south. Disoriented and knocked off course, they consulted their emergency protocols, which instructed them to fly toward light. Twelve species of birds, inadvertent suicides, hurled themselves at top speed into windows, steel and concrete. Some died instantly. Some survived the long drop to the pavement. "Tiny Bodies Litter 5th Ave." reads the New York Times front-page headline. "Not only was the intermittent plob of the birds disturbing," the paper reported, "but particularly weird was the shrill chirping of many injured birds that dropped to setbacks or ledges."

I came across this episode by accident, clacking and whirling through an old Library of Congress microfilm, looking for another article. The New York Times magazine on Sept. 12, 1948, featured a lengthy story by a science writer named Bernhard Jaffe, who declared, "The next ten years or fifteen will see the rise of a massive new industry which will free us from dependence on foreign sources of oil." The article hails the coming of the American synthetic-fuel industry—the production of diesel by gasifying coal and then chemically transforming it into a liquid hydrocarbon. Many commentators today don't acknowledge that the phrase “energy independence” even entered the public discourse until the oil shocks of the early 1970s. The U.S. became a net importer of oil in 1948. 

If Jaffe had been right, by 1963 the United States would no longer have needed Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela or any of our other partners in the petroleum trade. Coal-to-liquid fuel plants, based on 1920s German technology, would have gushed from sea to shining sea. As the coal industry has pointed out at least since 1973, America is "the Saudi Arabia of coal." How striking, I thought, rewinding the microfilm, the irony of the birds' doomed flight, paired with Jaffe's absurd confidence. The New York Times of Sept. 12, 1948, with its plea for energy independence and the pitiful assault on the city’s tallest building, was winking through history to the front page of Sept. 12, 2001.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)