DARK DAY: “It was Sunday, and my girlfriend and I were playing
Monopoly. About 3 p.m., all of a sudden, we noticed it was getting
darker and darker. We thought it might be a thunderstorm, but no
storm came. The streetlights were coming on and it was so weird. It
was as black as night.”

Barb Tomerlin of Limestone, N.Y., recalls the “dark day” a
reader had inquired about the other day.

“I lived in Little Valley at that time and remember it very
clearly. I was just a high schooler at the time.”

The dark came and, “We went back in and played Monopoly. We
thought it was secret testing by the Army or Navy since we had just
gone through World War II and the Korean War.”

“It seemed like it was about 5 or 6 p.m. when it began to
lighten up again.”

Barb goes on, “The next day, they told us it was a forest fire
in Canada, which we didn’t believe. I’ve seen smoke from forest
fires, and this was nothing like that.

“I thought it was some testing … still do … a lot of secrecy was
going on .. we were scared to death of the Communists … .”

Arlene Howard of Bradford phoned to tell us she was a young
married woman when the sky went dark that Sunday.

She was at the home of her mother-in-law who went in the attic
and said the world was coming to an end. “I was so young I was
scared to death,” Arlene tells us.

She remembers the yellowish tint to the sky for a few days
after.

Margaret Sutterlin writes, “I remember that it was a Sunday as I
was alone and was about 12 years old. It started to get dark about
1 o’clock and stayed dark until about 4:30, then the skies got a
weird color of yellow black as the light began to appear before
nightfall.”

Another reader recalls the skies darkening – it was June 25,
1950 – from 3 p.m. to about 7 p.m.

“My brothers and cousins were in the woods. Some of us went to
Sunday afternoon church devotions and when we came out at 3:30 the
sky was very dark pink. Ten minutes later we couldn’t see
anything.”