FIRST, I STRESS THAT THE LATE JIMMY CARTER was one of our most technically trained of presidents: He was a Naval Academy graduate eventually specializing on nuclear submarines. Thus, his 1969 observation of a UFO was never claimed to be an “alien” sighting; he noted it was an unidentified flying object (with an interesting tale eventually to evolve).
Second, I continue to appreciate the London Review of Books for its erudite, diverse, and entertaining commentary, whence tidbits are gleaned about Carter, Gairy, and Titania in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow.
Which Titania Do We Mean? Shakespeare’s Titania is the Queen of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595 or 1596. British astronomer William Herschel named Uranus’ largest moon Titania when he discovered it in 1787.
Shakespeare’s Titania sleeping in the moonlight, protected by her fairies. Painting by John Simons from Bonhams.
And Then There’s Titan. Saturn, along with its seven main rings, has 146 moons, the largest of which is Titan, which among the solar system’s objects is quite the moon. Discovered by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens in 1655, it’s larger than even the planet Mercury and the only moon with a dense atmosphere.
“Northern Summer on Titan. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sees bright methane clouds drifting in the summer skies of Saturn’s moon Titan, along with dark hydrocarbon lakes and seas clustered around the north pole.” Image from NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Institute.
NASA notes, “…it’s the only world besides Earth that has standing bodies of liquid, including rivers, lakes and seas, on its surface. Like Earth, Titan’s atmosphere is primarily nitrogen, plus a small amount of methane. It is the sole other place in the solar system known to have an earthlike cycle of liquids raining from clouds, flowing across its surface, filling lakes and seas, and evaporating back into the sky (akin to Earth’s water cycle).”
Titan’s Rain. A neat tidbit: “Titan’s dense atmosphere, as well as gravity roughly equivalent to Earth’s Moon, mean that a raindrop falling through Titan’s sky would fall more slowly than on Earth. While Earth rain falls at about 20 miles per hour (9.2 meters per second), scientists have calculated that rain on Titan falls at about 3.5 miles per hour (1.6 meters per second), or about six times more slowly than Earth’s rain.”
Gairy’s (and LRB’s) Titania is Likely Titan. What’s more, in what follows here, the phrase “Saturn’s moon Titania” recurs in LRB Letters. And the letters are too entertaining to discard because of this ambiguity (of either Gairy’s or LRB’s doing.)
Eric Gairy—First-rate Autocrat. Wikipedia writes, “Sir Eric Matthew Gairy PC (1922—1997) was the first Prime Minister of Grenada, serving from his country’s independence in 1974 until his overthrow in a coup by Maurice Bishop in 1979.” Further down, it cites “the Sky Red” unrest, Gairy’s “questionable use of state funds,” a “Miss World controversy,” and a later highly charged political environment “with Gairy’s secret police, the Mongoose Gang, terrorizing opponents.”
Sir Eric Matthew Gairy, 1922–1997, first Prime Minister of Grenada. UFO enthusiast. Image from White House—Carter White House Photographs via Wikipedia.
Eric Gairy—UFO Whacko. “On 27 November 1978,” Wikipedia recounts, “Eric Gairy led a group including scientists and an astronaut in addressing the United Nations on the subject of UFOs…. In 1979, a rumour circulated that Gairy would use the Gang to eliminate leaders of the New Jewel Movement while he was out of the country…. On 13 March 1979, while Gairy was at the UN for further discussions on UFOs, the New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop launched a bloodless coup and overthrew the government.”
There’s more, but this UFOism is sufficient to lead us to the LRB Letters, each following on Edmund Gordon’s “Weird Things in the Sky,” LRB, December 26, 2024.
Tomorrow in Part 2, we’ll connect the dots. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025