For a handful of minutes, the skies will darken Monday in a total solar eclipse where the sun’s rays will be completely blocked by the moon’s orbit — something Hoosiers can only view with special glasses, but more on that later.

Our sister outlet, the Kansas Reflector, compiled its own , which we’ve tweaked to fit our Hoosier audience. Our Kansas neighbors aren’t in the path of totality like Indiana but provided some great context before the big event.

Wait! There’s going to be a solar eclipse?

Yes! On Monday, April 8, 2024, to be precise. Portions of the state will be completely dark for just over four minutes, as detailed by the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. While the skies will start to darken as early as 1:50 p.m., complete darkness will occur in Indianapolis between 3:06 and 3:09 before the skies lighten again at 4:23. Other parts of the state will roughly follow that same timeline but may be off by a few minutes.

What’s a solar eclipse again?

According to our : “A total solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun. The sky will darken as if it were dawn or dusk.”

Just imagine that you’re watching an important TV program and your beloved spouse passes in front of the set. They instantly become much less beloved.

Now, let’s equate your TV set with the sun and your spouse with the moon. It’s just like that.

Who will get to see it?

All of Indiana will experience some portion of the eclipse but a portion of the state will be in the “Path of Totality,” where the moon will completely block the sun. This band, stretching from Bluffton to Evansville, has attracted for the rare event.

How rare? While partial solar eclipses happen two or three times each year somewhere on earth — and there are roughly two total solar eclipses every three years — Indiana won’t experience another until .

Any advice on watching it?

Don’t look at the eclipse with your naked eyes. Let me repeat that, in italics: Don’t look at the eclipse with your naked eyes.

The sun is usually so bright that we can’t physically stand to look at it. An eclipse cuts down on the brightness, but doesn’t stop solar radiation that can cause . This happens to people. It literally scars their retinas. They see a phantom image of the sun for the rest of their lives.

But I can still sneak a peek, right?

Please don’t do that. If you don’t believe me, listen to Shannon Schmoll, the director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University.

“We don’t ever, ever want to look directly at the sun. It will harm our eyes and can cause permanent damage,” she told journalists during a . “So to look at this, you need to use either eclipse glasses or some sort of eclipse viewers.”

So where do I find those solar viewers?

The American Astronomical Society of reputable manufacturers and retailers. For the record, they do not recommend going to your prominent online retailer of choice and searching for “cheap eclipse glasses.” You can do better. For goodness’ sake, think of your eyes.

Some public libraries are distributing glasses and the Department of Natural Resources has .

Could I just use a camera instead?

Nope. An unfiltered look at the eclipse will leave your fancy digital camera . You need a specialized to take photos of the event with a standalone or phone camera.

Okay, okay. Let’s get glasses and filters aplenty. But does this mean the world is about to end?

No. Millennia of eclipses have come and gone, and , for better or worse.

People are handling this totally normally and rationally online, right?

Haha. Of course they aren’t!

A bonkers story from online technology website some of the wilder claims circulating online. Among them: The eclipse will bring down electrical grids and cellphone service, it will disrupt the “” in which we all live, and assorted Biblical nonsense.

Will animals act all weird?

Take a read through the . In short, we know that birds and insects quiet down during an eclipse, but they don’t freak out or anything.

“The eclipse is strong enough to suppress that daytime diurnal activity — of day-flying insects and birds going to roost — but it’s not strong enough to initiate the kind of typical nocturnal behaviors we see at sunset,” said Andrew Farnsworth of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology.

For their part, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources if they have trouble with leashes but note that animals, generally, don’t look directly at the sun.

What is the state government doing?

In anticipation, Gov. Eric Holcomb has  letting Indiana call on a nationwide aid compact should the upcoming eclipse stress the state’s emergency response systems. Due to the number of people, officials expect a “widespread and significant impact” on Indiana’s “critical infrastructure systems,” including for communication, emergency response and transportation, according to the order.

Alcohol regulators are even getting in on the fun and will be able to .

If you might be driving, be prepared for potential slowdowns and traffic disruptions. Pack plenty of water, food and fuel along with chargers, maps and emergency kits. The Indiana Destination Development Corporation (IDDC) has for safe viewing.

And, perhaps our favorite thing, First Lady Janet Holcomb made ‘Path of Totality’ deviled eggs.

Any events in Indiana I should know about?

Tons! The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, for example, was selected as a National Air and Space Administration (NASA) broadcast location. Now it’s got a packed schedule  multiple astronauts, IndyCar drivers, NASA officials and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb. The brickyard will also host technical and family-friendly educational programming.

Speaking of the IDDC, they’ve compiled a of all the other festivities around the state.

Indiana Capital Chronicle Reporter Leslie Bonilla Muñiz contributed to this story.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

For a year and a half, 20 eager Virginia Tech students have diligently prepared their scientific balloons for Eclipse Day. Along with about 800 other undergraduates nationwide who will participate in the NASA-sponsored National Eclipse Ballooning Project, these STEM students will launch balloons with scientific instruments attached to gather more information about Earth’s atmosphere.

On April 8, a total solar eclipse will cross North America, tracing a path over far more populated areas of the United States than the last one in August 2017. The project, which Montana State University started in 2017 to involve STEM students in this historic day, includes 53 teams who will document an event that won’t happen again for another 20 years.

Angela Des Jardins, director of the project, says the experience provides students with hands-on opportunities that they don’t get in the classroom. Of the 75 colleges taking part, 30% are minority-serving and 15% are community colleges.

“Ballooning has been around for a long time, and some of the bigger institutions that have more resources, it’s easy for them to go do this kind of thing,” Des Jardins says. “What’s really important is to give students opportunities that wouldn’t have them otherwise.”

The project also offers students access to over 200 mentors and a speaker series where NASA scientists and other experts in the field offer career advice.

The program has two tracks: atmospheric science and engineering. Each group is focused on preparing its payloads. For the atmospheric science groups, these are instruments like radiosondes that are used to measure temperature, humidity and wind speed. Radiosondes are the same instruments used by the National Weather Service at least twice a day at the 93 stations across the country.

“The thing that’s different from what the National Weather Service does is, instead of just flying two a day, they [students] actually fly one every hour 24 hours before the eclipse, then six hours after,” Des Jardins said.

Des Jardins says flying the radiosondes multiple times gives students a snapshot before and during the eclipse to compare the changes caused by the cold, dark shadow of the moon. 

For engineering team members, the payloads involve different types of cameras, such as GoPros and 360-degree cameras. NASA will be livestreaming the images they capture on its website.

The project is not only beneficial for documenting history and allowing environmental scientists to understand the atmosphere better as they research climate change. The highly technical experiment also gives students experiences they need as they pursue internships, graduate school and full-time jobs.

Virginia Smith participated in the 2017 challenge during her senior year at the University of Kentucky as a mechanical engineering student. Like many of the current participants, Smith came on to the project having little experience with technical electronics. She started by building boxes for the cameras to be placed on the balloon’s flight string. Her team had two balloons, one of which she was in charge of. As mission lead, she says, timing was everything. It was crucial that the balloon reached 100,000 feet right in time with totality, which occurs when the moon is completely obscuring the sun.

“Students create timelines that allowed us to be at a particular altitude during totality and record footage, which was the entire goal of that project,” Smith said. “As mission controller, not only making sure that the other people who have payloads are ready to go, you’re making sure that you’re on that timeline. You have a very small window to hit for the launch. And if you miss that window, you’re going to miss your altitude target.”

Smith credits the project from seven years ago for her interest in satellites and balloons. The project also helped her during her two internships at NASA in 2016 and 2017, where she focused on designing small satellites and did finite element analysis, which involves using calculations to predict how an object might behave under various conditions.

Now, as a graduate research assistant and Ph.D. candidate in aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech, she has been mentoring this year’s participants for the last year and a half, offering her first-hand knowledge to the group as a former mission lead. The team will be stationed at Three Rivers College in Missouri on the big day and flying two balloons.

What she learned during those internships “actually did come into play for the [2017] eclipse, because we were designing payloads … and making sure they could withstand impact in terms of landing,” Smith said. The team had to consider multiple possibilities, such as the balloon landing in water, in a high tree or on top of a roof. “There are all these scenarios that you’re looking at. How do you make a successful design to survive the environment both in the atmosphere and then also as you land?”

Smith is excited to be able to view the total eclipse for a longer period this year. But she’s most looking forward to seeing the hard work the students have put in for several months, with test launches and payload development, pay off. Many team members are transfer students from community colleges and came in with different skill sets and no background in engineering or ballooning. This experience has helped multiple students get summer internships.

“We get to enjoy the eclipse and then we get to enjoy totality. It’ll be an exciting event for everyone, and most of the students have not seen an eclipse before. So this is also an opportunity for them to be able to experience natural phenomenon that will not be coast to coast in the U.S. for several years more,” Smith said.

Corrections: The name of the NASA-sponsored organization is the National Eclipse Ballooning Project. The project reached out after publication to correct the balloon’s target altitude. It’s 100,000 feet.

On April 8, more than 750 college students across the United States will launch hundreds of weather balloons into the atmosphere to research, observe and engage with the total solar eclipse as a part of a student initiative spearheaded by the Montana Space Grant Consortium.

Drawing from the highly successful NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored (NEBP) implemented during the 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023 total solar eclipses, this current NEBP initiative aims to broaden STEM student participation during the upcoming total solar eclipse — .

Students from 75 higher education institutions, including Minority Serving Institutions and community colleges will have the opportunity to garner atmospheric measurements that can only be conducted during an eclipse. 

The balloons, carrying long, hanging strings of scientific instruments, will enter the path of totality, the area on Earth’s surface where the moon completely covers the sun. 

People along the path of totality, which stretches from Texas to Maine, will have the chance to see the eclipse. For those outside this path, a partial solar eclipse will be visible.

NEBP hopes to “enable inclusive STEM education for participating students, advance learners’ understanding of the process of science as well as create, enhance and sustain networks and partnerships.” 

As anticipation builds for the upcoming spectacle, we wanted to share incredible archives from NEBP’s previous balloon launches. The breathtaking snapshots from the sky offer a unique perspective on past solar eclipses to gear up for the big day.

All photos courtesy of National Eclipse of Ballooning Project (NEBP) Education

As a child, was a self-described “geek,” thrilled by science fiction. 

In 1969, he watched with awe as Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind” onto the surface of the moon. For Harris, it was also “a tremendous leap for this little kid,” he said, “this little Black kid.”

The event inspired him to pursue a career in medicine as a pathway to becoming an astronaut. He excelled in high school, college and medical school, even as controversies over desegregation disrupted many campuses in his home state of Texas.

Nearly 25 years after the NASA moon landing ignited his passion for space travel, Harris achieved his longtime goal, embarking on his first space mission in 1993 and flying over 4 million miles in space. Two years later, in 1995, he became the first Black American to walk in space, spending 6 hours in orbit outside the spacecraft.

Now he’s on a new mission — what he calls his “terrestrial mission” — to ensure that all students have access to high-quality STEM education. The retired astronaut serves as the CEO of the , which works with students and teachers across the country to advance learning in those disciplines.

With researchers estimating that pandemic disruptions caused U.S. students, on average, to fall last school year, ����Ӱ�� spoke with Harris about how to inspire students to bounce back and succeed in STEM fields. (Plus some bonus questions about what it’s like to be in space — we couldn’t help ourselves.)

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What inspired you to become an astronaut? And what was the pathway that got you there?

Bernard Harris: My inspiration began when I was 13 years old watching the [NASA] space program. I’ve been a geek for a long time. So I love science and science fiction and particularly space science. So I followed the early space program, you know, as many kids did at my age. 

In 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And when they said, ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’ it was a tremendous leap for this little kid. And I should add, this little kid of color, this little Black kid would look at that black and white television and say, ‘Hey, I want to follow these guys’ footsteps.’ And that’s really how it began.

I also remember, I think it was in the beginning of high school, writing a letter to NASA and saying, ‘I would like to be an astronaut, what do I need to do?’ And so they sent back this list of requirements. One of them was to have an advanced degree in a STEM field. So I started looking at careers that could lead me to NASA. One of those was aerospace engineering and the other one was medicine. And the medicine stuck.

You’ve traveled over 7 million miles in space. What’s that like? And also, what did it mean to you to be the first Black American to complete a spacewalk?

I flew on two missions. The first one was Columbia and the second was Discovery. My first mission was about two weeks, and my second one was nine days. … [In the space shuttle,] we’re able to go from zero to 17,500 miles an hour, and reach an initial altitude around 200 miles in about eight and a half minutes. So it’s a very exciting ride. You’re being pushed back in your seat to three-and-a-half times your weight and you go from that to zero gravity in just a split second when the main engines cut off. Then you know you’re in orbit. 

I was lucky enough to [don an extravehicular activity suit and step outside the spacecraft] on my second mission, and spent just under six hours in orbit. … I could look inside and see my fellow crew members, as we all went around the earth at 17,500 miles an hour. That allows us to go around every 90 minutes and see a sunset or sunrise every 45 minutes. So it’s pretty awesome.

Having that view from space … it is a uniting experience to realize that, you know, as big as we think the Earth is, it really is a tiny thing amongst the vastness of not only our solar system and our galaxy, but the universe in which we reside.

That sounds incredible. Do you want to say a few more words about what it meant to you to be the first Black American to do a spacewalk?

It’s not something that I set out to do, it just happened. It had been 30 years since did the first spacewalk [before] a person of color, particularly Black, had had a chance to do a spacewalk. So that’s a long period of time. 

I did feel that I had a lot riding on my shoulders … to help those who may not think that we as Black people can do those things (like space travel and space flight) to say, ‘Hey, we can.’ And not only can we do those things, but we can in many cases do them better.

It’s about breaking the ceiling, it’s about providing a different perspective so when people think about spaceflight, they just don’t think about white guys going into space, or white guys doing a spacewalk. They can see people of color, they can see women that are equal participants in the next frontier, which is spaceflight. And I felt very proud to be part of that moment.

It’s hard to think of a career more thrilling than astronaut. So why then pivot to STEM education?

I like to describe it as my terrestrial mission. My extraterrestrial mission was to go into space. … Now, I want to make sure that any person, no matter what skin color [or] ethnicity that wants to have that same experience can do it. 

We’re in the 21st century where technology drives everything that we do. And I want to ensure that all of our communities have the opportunity to participate in this world equally. Because we all have the same ambitions, ideas, motives and needs. I want to make sure that there is high-quality STEM education that’s being delivered to all of our communities no matter who you are. … So my new mission, which includes the National Math and Science Initiative, is to make sure that we have high-quality STEM education that is delivered no matter where the students are. 

Can you tell us more about the National Math and Science Initiative’s model? How does it work?

Yeah. So the National Math and Science Initiative has been around almost 14 years now. We have what I call four legs of the stool: 

We have what we call the , which is basically Advanced Placement. And so we’re one of the larger providers with Advanced Placement education in the country. Over 2 million students have gone through that program. 

Our second program is called . And this is where we provide STEM education to educators, so professional development to make sure that they have the expertise, and content delivering STEM education. Our idea here is to make sure that teachers can teach effectively to the students. … Over 65,000 teachers have been educated through that program and growing. 

Our third program is called . We have a partnership with the University of Texas where we create a program that takes students who are majoring in STEM, add some additional coursework and now they’re able to leave with their STEM degree and the ability to teach. So that’s part of our teaching preparation pipeline. 

And our fourth leg is one that was accelerated by COVID, and that is to take our programs and deliver them virtually. We have online training for both teachers and students in STEM and so we now as an organization have the capability of doing what we call blended learning. So we can do face-to-face or be able to give them access to our programming virtually.

You mentioned that it was watching the initial NASA space missions that lit your flame in science education. How do we light the flame for current students?

We light that flame by showing them what they can do. And I make that statement specifically for kids of color who, you know, may be watching television and see the stereotypes. We have to get past that. And one way in which you can get past that is to have people who look like you doing the things that you might not think were possible. 

I spent a fair amount of my time in schools so that kids can see me as a Black astronaut, as a Black physician. There was — it’s not mine — that ‘You can’t be what you can’t see.’ And it is important that we open that door for everyone. 

Just personal background, I grew up poor. I came from a divorced family. My mom had a college education. My dad didn’t. And so one of the first lessons that I learned growing up was the fact that education gives you options. So part of my goal is to make sure that kids, no matter what their background, have options. 

Researchers estimate that U.S. students, on average, fell about a typical year’s worth of learning in math last year with further gaps for the most disadvantaged. To catch students up, what are some successful techniques you’ve seen on the ground that give you hope or optimism?

So of course, I’d be remiss not to say that we are on the ground. That’s what we do. And a couple of programs I’d like to highlight [with which] we’ve done some partnership: 

We have a program that we’re doing in Houston where we are working with colleges and with high schools, to prepare students in high school to become STEM teachers. There are a lot of school districts that don’t have enough teachers, especially STEM teachers. So we’re trying to fill that pipeline. 

We have a program in Alabama in which we’re partnering with the state where we are providing our master teachers to support teachers in their existing schools. And Alabama, of course, they have a large rural population, but this can be applied anywhere. We’re taking this model to many other states. 

I also want to bring up curriculum, because if you open a typical science or math textbook, most of the researchers described — from Newton to Einstein — are white men. But those narratives are incomplete. How can teachers widen whitewashed conceptions of who “does” science and math? Are there other historical figures teachers should highlight? And you’re allowed to include yourself.

Yeah, not only myself, but there are plenty of scientists and folks that are not famous, but should be. Now, I’ll name a couple of them. [] was the first physician, not just Black [physician], to do open heart surgery, but people don’t realize. You’ll find him in some historical texts, but not many, unfortunately. Another one is . He was the architect who laid out Washington, D.C. There are hundreds of other scientists out there. 

And one last thing I’ll say, is that for one of our programs, we invite our funders — we have funders like Exxon Mobil, Boeing and Toyota, for example — and they will give us their scientists and their engineers to go out and be mentors for kids. So these are not “famous” people, but they’re famous to those young people because we’re exposing them to people who look like them. And, you know, it’s not just Black people, it’s not just people of color, but women. They’re also part of this program. We call them rock stars of STEM. So we try to show kids that you don’t have to see these folks on TV to be inspired.

“(Space) is an interest that most people enjoy,” Maximos said, “Everybody has a little curiosity in it whether it’s a little bit or a lot.”

Maximos, 14, along with a couple dozen other high school students, spent one Thursday in August at the Williams Indoor Pool, tucked in a cozy neighborhood just a few miles from Space Center Houston, the official visitor center of NASA Johnson Space Center. It’s the same pool where the last two classes of NASA astronauts have obtained their SCUBA licensing, a mandatory component of astronaut training.

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During their day at the pool, Maximos and her classmates at the weeklong Space Center U® program completed challenges in engineering and robotics, working in teams inside and outside the pool. Experts say these skills, and the love of STEM, are best developed in hands-on environments so many students went without last school year when remote learning, COVID-19 protocols, and truncated curricula made labs and field trips impossible.

“There were so few positive experiences,” said Daniel Newmyer, vice president of education for Space Center Houston. Teachers did what they could, but he knows they too were frustrated by the limitations. Space Center Houston is committed to helping students reignite their love of science, and to fan the flames of those, like Maximos, who have their sights set on all kinds of STEM fields. “These informal learning opportunities activate, or in this case reactivate, learning in the classroom.”

Informal learning abounds at Space Center Houston. The hands-on museum is open for field trips, families. Explorer Camps for younger students ran throughout the summer, and Space Center U®, for children 11-18, runs year round. Science clubs and school groups from around the world make up most of their school year attendance. Individuals like Maximos can join sessions as well, as their schedule permits.

While the more well-known Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama focuses on the astronaut experience, Space Center U® incorporates the many other STEM fields required to put humankind into space. NASA has always had its eyes on space, Newmyer said, but he regularly reminds students of all the earthbound innovation it has spurred along the way.

The day at the pool is a perfect example of the broad range of skills and content the Space Center U® students explore. On one side of the large garage-like building, a few pods of teenagers learned to use SCUBA equipment under the guidance of professional diving instructors. Once they knew how to breathe through regulators and manage their bright yellow oxygen tanks, they culled the bottom of the pool for painted rocks symbolizing nitrogen, hydrogen and other elements that make up the atmosphere of an imaginary planet.

They resurfaced from their mission, analyzed the rocks they had seen, and created a report detailing whether or not the imaginary planet could support life.

In addition to the biology and chemistry content, the exercise is designed to stoke imagination. The quest to find another habitable planet has occupied the mind of science fiction writers and NASA scientists for decades. Earlier that week at Space Center Houston, the students visited a special exhibit dedicated to the future of space exploration, in particular, the hunt for signs of life on Mars.

On the other end of the pool, Maximos and her team stood at the edge, navigating the underwater drone to collect data from laminated pieces of paper under the water. This sort of challenge, along with coding exercises earlier in the week, were particularly appealing to Maximos, the aspiring obstetrician.

“I know a lot of doctors nowadays are using robotics and robots,” Maximos said, “So learning how to code them could help me in surgery when I grow up.”

Once they had finished with the drone, Maximos’s group joined several other teams building robotic boats to ferry ping pong balls across the surface of the pool. Other than a mechanical core, the materials for the boat were far from high-tech — they included popsicle sticks, plastic bags, and the fasteners best known as “chip clips.” Once completed, all the teams would race the length of the pool.

The teams quickly realized that coming to the water with a finished product on the first try was not an efficient or rewarding use of their time and materials. Instead, most made repeated trial runs with various pieces and parts, studying the way the friction of the water affected each component. They assembled, disassembled, reassembled and tweaked their creations continuously.

They were, in many ways, learning from failure.

That’s science, Newmyer said, learning from what goes right and from what goes wrong. He wants the students to experience “the positive emotions associated with productive struggle.”

In other words: he wants them to fall in love with the doing of science, not just the end result.

As an educator, he understands the need for tests and content mastery, which schools will no doubt be laser focused on as they address the huge learning loss of the pandemic. However, a large part of scientific education is about questions that can’t be put on a test, because no one knows the answer. Engineering a lab exercise to create, say, a volcano can teach content about acids and bases. However, the process of asking “what happens when I combine elements that have never been combined?” or “How do I get a result no one has ever gotten before?” are also science. That pursuit, he said, is as much about the attempts that don’t get the expected results as the ones that do.

“It’s just dreaming and thinking as big as you possibly can,” Newmyer said.

That kind of learning takes time, which is what Space Center U® provides, and to the best of their ability, he said, they try to provide it equitably.

The kids at the pool were racially and culturally diverse, and the Space Center U program can be adapted for hearing impairment and sensory processing disorders. Also, Newmeyer emphasized, the kids need not be science prodigies. It is designed to appeal to any ability level. “It’s about moving them forward wherever they are.”

That said, he acknowledged, it is a paid program. The multi-day program offers both virtual and in-person experiences ranging between $149.95 and $674.95 per student per week depending on the size of the group and the accommodations. For schools and parents to make that kind of investment, most of the students have a pretty well-developed interest in STEM subjects.

He hopes the Explorer Camps, visits to the museum at Space Center Houston, and outreach programs with Houston area after school programs will stoke some of that early interest. Extracurricular learning took a hard hit during the pandemic, and the Delta variant has everyone on edge about the near future.

Every program at Space Center Houston is taking precautions, said Space Center Houston communications supervisor Meridyth Moore, but they are determined to continue offering something to spark curiosity, and to cultivate the increased interest from private endeavors like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic in the news.

Virtual programming was part of that during the initial coronavirus pandemic, but actually, Moore said, if anyone is able to turn a pandemic into a learning opportunity, it’s Space Center Houston.

During the pandemic, Space Center U® was able to create a full simulation of the kind of quarantining required to keep astronauts healthy before they go into space. Kids dressed in full “” coveralls from head to toe learned how to create sterile environments, conduct experiments with heightened safety protocols, and work as a team through layers of personal protective equipment.

While it may not come to that again, Moore said, Space Center U® is committed to finding innovative and creative opportunities, whatever the constraints. “We’re in the business of awe and wonder.”

David Black once saw a UFO.

At least that’s how he gets his students’ attention before revealing that it was only a sundog — a bright light caused when the sun’s rays refract through ice crystals in the atmosphere.

Researching more famous accounts of UFO sightings and purported alien abductions with students is how he’ll be spending the summer. And with the federal government’s report on “unidentified aerial phenomena” — or UAPs — expected as soon as this week, they’ll have new grainy videos to analyze and debate.

“If you have a current event that comes along, as a teacher you want to weave that in,” said Black, who at New Haven School, a private boarding school for girls in Saratoga Springs, Utah.

When former President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion funding bill in December, educators were eye-balling the $54 billion in relief funds included for school reopening. But tucked into the more than 5,500 pages of legislative text was a Sen. Marco Rubio-sponsored directing Naval intelligence to uncover what they’ve been tracking in the skies. The bill asked for detailed reports of UAPs and knowledge of whether “a potential adversary may have achieved breakthrough aerospace capabilities” that might harm Earth, or at least the U.S. The report, combined with Navy pilots’ of aircraft displaying unusual movements, provide fresh material for teachers who find that questions about alien visitors are a great way to engage students in science.

Highly trained admit they are taking the sightings of these unusual aircraft seriously — and think others should, too. With both interested in the report’s findings and respected news shows like “60 Minutes” following the topic, the possibility that otherworldly beings are patrolling our atmosphere is no longer just the stuff of sci-fi movies and paranormal conventions.

The upcoming release of the report is perfectly timed for the search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence unit Black teaches each summer. He hooks students with tales of close encounters and uses hands-on projects and 3-D models to explore the math and physics involved in aliens traveling for tens of thousands of years to reach Earth.

His students learn the , a formula for the probability of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. They read news reports of alleged sightings — like that of , a lumberjack whose 1975 account of being abducted by aliens was featured in the 1993 film “Fire in the Sky.” Then they present the skeptics’ side, offer their own opinions and lead their classmates in a discussion.

‘Studying these things for decades’

UFO conspiracy theories teach students to have an open mind, “but also to have a skeptical filter,” said Jeff Adkins, an at Deer Valley High School in Antioch, California, near Oakland.

He has students consider the sheer size of the universe when deciding whether alien life forms would bother conducting experiments on humans or jamming the military’s radar systems.

“I still have a childhood fascination with aliens, but now I know that there must be … solid evidence to support aliens before I truly believe they are real,” said Dennis Gavrilenko, a senior in Adkins’s astronomy and space exploration course this year. “I find it unlikely that aliens traveled thousands of lightyears to get to Earth just to fly around super fast and not make themselves known.”

But physics professor Kevin Knuth, at the University of Albany in New York, thinks there is something — or someone — observing us from above. He’s among the UFO researchers who have shared their expertise with high school students.

His suspicions that UFOs are more than a hoax began while he was in graduate school at Montana State University. In 1988, two cows from a nearby herd were mutilated with surgical precision, and a professor mentioned UFOs often interfered with nuclear missile systems at Malmstrom Air Force Base three hours away.

Years later, UFO researcher held a press conference with Air Force officers talking about the same occurrences at Malmstrom. That’s when Knuth became convinced, and he thinks the report to Congress will tell only part of the story.

“We now know that the government has been studying these things for decades and not telling anybody about it,” Knuth said.

A paper Knuth co-authored in 2019 focuses on of “unidentified aerial vehicles” that display “technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft.”

Knuth’s calculations of speed and acceleration are also good high school physics problems, said Berkil Alexander, who teaches at Kennesaw Mountain High School, outside Atlanta. His fascination with UFOs began when he saw “Flight of the Navigator,” a 1986 film about an alien abduction, and in 2019, he was chosen to participate in focusing on increasing student engagement in STEM.

In the final days of each school year, he holds an “E.T. exoplanet symposium” in which teams of students, taking on the roles of astronomer, astrobiologist, historian and a Pentagon investigator, compete against each other to make a case using the evidence they’ve collected.

Alexander thinks the truth has been concealed for decades because it might provoke panic. But now he thinks, “people are pretty well prepared to handle whatever it is.”

‘Don’t take a side’

Teachers who touch on UFOs might find a place for the topic when they introduce students to the solar system in elementary school — think colorful Styrofoam balls dangling from wire hangers. Space science gets even more attention in middle school.

At Coles Elementary in Virginia’s Prince William County Schools, aliens turned up in an afterschool “cryptozoology club” in which students studied crop circles and interviewed a UFO researcher from — the site of the alleged UFO crash in 1947.

How to report a UFO sighting and whether there are baby aliens are among the questions students asked the experts, said Tara Hamner, one of three teachers who started the program four years ago. Like the other cryptids they study, including Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, she believes the club is one of a kind and is a fun way for students to learn how to collect evidence, evaluate online sources and interact with scientists.

The group didn’t meet this year because of the pandemic, but Hamner said she’s sure the government’s report will spark additional questions from students in the fall. “We love it when we have current news to use our inquiry-based learning to investigate,” she said.

In high school, standalone astronomy classes aren’t common and are typically offered as . Those teaching the subject might have a personal interest, but didn’t study it in college — like Alec Johnson, who asked for a day off work in 2017 to watch the solar eclipse but ended up turning the expedition into a school trip with 150 students and 20 adults.

Afterwards, his students at Morgan County High School in central Georgia pushed for a separate astronomy class. The possibility of alien life is the topic they get the most passionate about, perhaps because of the stereotype that are more common in rural areas like theirs.

“The kids get into it, especially if you don’t take a side,” Johnson said, adding that he’s looking forward to the government’s report including previously unreleased footage and photos to share with his students. “It makes the History Channel and the teachers happy.”

Bennett Evans, a senior who took Johnson’s astronomy class this year, said his teacher’s enthusiasm for the subject rubs off on students.

“His class made me more conscious of science in general,” said Evans, recalling an image Johnson uses to get students thinking about whether aliens exist. “If you take a glass of water from the ocean, we know there are whales in the ocean, but we can’t tell from that glass. That’s like our universe.”

Georgia science standards require students to study whether there are other “habitable” zones and planets besides Earth. But Johnson goes all out, enhancing his lessons with “The X-Files” theme music and classroom decor.

“Any self-respecting astronomy teacher has to have a Fox Mulder poster on the wall,” he said.