April 17, 1954, In Renton, Washington, My grandad was 18 years old, with his newly-bought car parked in front of his apartment, when a strange phenomenon happened, tiny pits begin to appear on his windshield, and this did not occur on his car alone, but to thousands of other cars in the Seattle Area.. They look like small craters but were multiple, here's a link to describe how they look:
http://glassaidokc.com/images/151_Pit_4.jpg
This weird anomaly spread from Bellington, to Renton, to Puget Sound, and to the entire Seattle area, and the quantity of affected cars was overwhleming! It involved approximately 3000- 5000 cars.
Here's an exerpt from HistoryLink.org Essay 5136:
"The sheer number of damaged windshields ruled out hoodlums, and experts were at a loss as to the cause of these strange pits and holes appearing out of nowhere. On Whidbey Island, Sheriff Tom Clark postulated that radioactivity released by recent H-bomb tests in the South Pacific was peppering windshields. Geiger counters were run over windshield glass, and also over persons who had touched the pit marks, but all were free of radioactivity. Still, the sheriff held firm that “no human agency” could have created the scars left on the glass.
The police were swamped with calls. Close to 3,000 windshields had been reported as being pitted, and no one knew what to do. Looking for outside help to solve the enigma, Seattle Mayor Allan Pomeroy (ca. 1907-1966) wired Governor Arthur Langlie at the state capitol in Olympia, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Washington D.C."
Here were the possible causes:
1)Navy’s new million-watt radio transmitter
2)Cosmic rays bombarding the earth from the sun
3)A mysterious atmospheric event
4)Sand Fleas, people reported seeing the glass bubble right before their eyes.
5)Supersonic sound waves, non-radioactive coral debris from nuclear bomb tests
6)Gremlins
The media was informed by several US agencies and departments that this was only a mass hysteria, people panicking, thus creating hallucinations, or glass pits created by coal dust, but majority of the population do not believe, skeptics strongly agreed on Government cover-up just like Roswell.
And my Grandad, who is now 76, insists this is something else.
Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia