I see that the poster for this year’s Kennedy Summer School (which opens in New Ross on August 28th) features a series of world leaders dramatically arrayed around a representation of the planet Earth, which has a big crack down the middle.
But by uncanny coincidence, this week brought me an email from elsewhere in Wexford concerning a security incident, 63 years ago, that also involved a distressed, globe-like object and an explosion.
The Duncannon Sputnik Hoax of 1962, as my correspondent calls it, happened at a time of great tension between east and west. A month later, John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev would play chicken with each other in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nearest the Cold War got to turning hot.
Ireland, by contrast, was more peaceful than usual at the time, the IRA’s six-year Border campaign having been officially called off in February.
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So there was both puzzlement and alarm when at about 11pm on Friday, September 7th, 1962, neighbours reported a loud bang, a flash of light, rattling windows and shaking of the ground near a big field at Ramsgrange.
A local garda arrived immediately to cordon off a crater in the field, replaced at 4am by reinforcements from New Ross, while Army explosive experts from Dublin were called in.
Media interest was heightened by the presence in Ireland that weekend of a group of international air transport journalists, gathered for a conference, who also descended on Wexford the next day.
The object found in the crater was described by some witnesses as being of “Telstar” shape, referring to the US communications satellite launched in July 1962. Others thought it similar to Sputnik, with which the Soviet Union had stolen a march in the space race several years before.
But as revealed at lunchtime on the Saturday by Comdt P.I. McCourt, of the Ordnance Corps, Eastern Command, The Curragh, this was not a piece of fallen space furniture. The globe at the centre of the structure was a common ballcock, painted in shellac. Four brass antennae attached to it were “probably stair rods”.
The ballcock’s interior, at least, was somewhat more sophisticated. As the People newspaper, one of Britain’s bestselling titles, reported: “The inside was expertly assembled and obviously the work of someone who knew quite a bit about electronics. It contained transistors and resistors, elaborate wiring and electronic devices probably taken from a wireless set.”
As for the explosion, that had been real enough. The Army noted strong evidence of “gunpowder”. But the crater, said to be about “five feet” in diameter and “eight to 10 inches” deep was not the result of an impact. It had been dug beforehand, the Army said.
A damp (if elaborate) squib as it may have been, the incident still made the front-page lead in that weekend’s Sunday Independent. Like the crater, the headline was wider than the story was deep. “‘Sputnik’ Was Just A Hoax And A Big Bang,” it declared across six columns.
Only the question of who built it remained to be answered and still does six decades on. My correspondent tells me the event continues to be the stuff of “storytelling, verse, and song” in and around Duncannon: “But it’s also cloaked in one remaining element of mystery as no one has ever owned up to the prank that gained unexpected international attention.”
The People newspaper surmised it to have been a joke for local consumption that led to consequences “not at all intended by the person or persons responsible”.
Tongue-in-cheek, the paper also said: “It is thought to have been an experiment by some space-minded person or persons who had hopes of establishing a Cape Canaveral in Ramsgrange … The Garda, however, may have different ideas, as it was they and the military who were most upset by the hoax.”
So was it a mere prankster? Or could it have been a budding astrophysicist ahead of his/her time, lacking safer outlets in an Ireland that had not yet invented the Young Scientist Competition? (It may be no coincidence that the YSC was established only three years later.) Either way, if anyone has information/a confession to share, the Diary’s incident room is open.
Getting back to the Kennedy Summer School, I also see that the 2025 event begins with a schools STEM event on – what else? – astrophysics and space science.
“In this session,” the programme says, “we have a panel of scientists and engineers discussing the final frontier and what they are discovering today can be applied to the betterment of all. The mysteries of black holes, pulsars and supernovae, putting people on Mars, creating and deploying probes deep into the solar system, the importance of Earth’s magnetic field in defending us from solar radiation. Come along to experience the wonders of engineering, science and space!”
No better place for experiencing that, clearly, than the magnetic fields of Wexford.
