On Sunday, September 24, 1950, Western New Yorkers were reading headlines about the Korean War, specifically the liberation of Seoul and a debate on whether the U.N. forces should advance across the 38th parallel. News about the “Reds” also filled the news cycle. East Germany had become a permanent satellite of the Soviet Union and President Truman was considering the $15 billion “Anti-Red Defense Bill,” which called for the rearming of America. At the same time, Defense Secretary Marshall warned the nation that an atomic attack was possible, stating that we were in “great peril.”

In the midst of such turmoil, at approximately 2:00 p.m. that Sunday, the skies over Western New York went black – day turned into night. The Buffalo Courier-Express described a sky “darkened with many hues…with the sun turning blue and displaying a yellow aurora.” Other sun colors included purple, pink, yellow and brown. According to the Buffalo News, “Shortly after 2 o’clock, darkness began to fall. Between 3 and 4, it was complete.” The Buffalo office of the U.S. Weather Bureau recorded “upper clouds yellowish – sun’s disk visible with purple hue” around 1300 EST. Between 1400 and 1600 EST “light from the sky was diminished to the dimness of late twilight (or pre-dawn).” The observers also noted that “the sky was chaotic with mammato forms showing where the obscurement appeared thickest.” Mammato forms refer to pouch-like structures that form at the base of clouds in a turbulent atmosphere. In both the newspaper and Weather Bureau accounts it was noted that street lights came on and the “Artificial lights were needed for all purposes.” Runway lights came on at Buffalo Airport and planes used their landing lights. Similar reports of unnatural darkness appeared throughout Western New York, including Jamestown and Batavia.

One can only imagine the sensation and confusion people must have felt on that afternoon, as they drove down a city street or walked out of a store or matinee. Surely all eyes were directed to the sky as the darkness became the source of speculative conversation. September 24 that year marked the first day coming off Daylight Savings Time. Did the time change have something to do with the darkness? The Courier-Express wryly noted that Buffalonians had “the daylights scared out of them.” Some recalled end-of-the-world prophecies, while others thought that “an atomic bomb had been dropped somewhere nearby, possibly in Lake Erie” – the beginning of a third World War. One woman stated she had “just received a long-distance phone call from Cleveland. A radio station there has announced that Canada is on fire!” The Buffalo News added that the darkness “aroused concern, wonder, fear, anxiety and an inordinate amount of speculation among the perturbed citizenry.” The Buffalo Office of the U.S. Weather Bureau noted in their monthly summary that the phenomenon was “causing anxiety and incipient hysteria to a large segment of the population…due to the lack of information from any authoritative source and to some speculative remarks made by radio announcers.” The summary went on to state that a reassurance statement was issued in mid-afternoon for broadcast by local radio stations. Not surprisingly, telephones at local newspapers, radio stations, police and fire headquarters and the Buffalo Office of the U.S. Weather Bureau were “deluged” with calls. The reassurance statement, however, was thought to have worked “a quieting effect.” There was also a quieting effect of a different kind as “chickens and birds roosted in the afternoon, thinking it was night.” Around 4:30 p.m., according to the Courier-Express, “Light of an eerie kind began returning” in time for a normal sunset at 6:08.

The woman’s fear that “Canada is on fire!” was actually close to the truth. The reassurance statement given out by the Weather Bureau and local radio attributed the darkness to a smoke pall from forest fires in northern Alberta and British Columbia, where approximately 100 fires burned. Collectively, these fires were possibly the largest in North American recorded history. The smoke plume from the fires first flowed eastward to the western coast of Hudson Bay. At that point, however, the plumes’ flow took a dramatic turn southward, caught, as on a conveyer belt, between the counterclockwise air flow around a deepening low pressure center over Quebec and the clockwise air flow of high pressure over Minnesota. The smoke plume held together, following a southeastern course, as part of an outbreak of polar air, and reached Buffalo on September 24. Snow and rain contributed to the extinguishing of the forest fires during the last week of September.

The smoke plume and darkening skies were not confined to Western New York, but extended throughout eastern Canada and the eastern United States, stretching from Toronto to Knoxville, TN, and as far west as Iowa. According to reports in the Buffalo News, “The state of Michigan was blanketed.” Areas of greatly diminished daylight were reported in a swath between Detroit and Toronto, extending from north of Lake Superior to southeast Pennsylvania. On that Sunday, Major League Baseball’s day games in Cleveland and Pittsburgh were played under the lights and Great Lakes ship traffic was slowed. The Buffalo News reported that, in other large cities like Philadelphia and New York, “the sun shone only as a pink or purple blob, both its light and warmth cut by the smoke screen.” Dramatic newspaper stories with headlines such as “A-Bomb?,” “Doomsday?” and “Weird Skies Scare Great Lake Millions” provided accounts in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario. While the plume over Buffalo dissipated somewhat during the evening and following day, a mixture of smoke and clouds prevented the viewing of a lunar eclipse the evening of September 24 and provided the area with a second “murky” day the following Monday. The last account of smoke aloft in the United States occurred on September 29, but across the Atlantic there were reports of blue suns over London and Copenhagen as early as September 26.

Aside from turning day into night, the smoke layer aloft lowered the day’s expected maximum temperature by about 10 degrees F (46 degrees F, as compared to 57 degrees F the day before and 55 degrees F the day after). A weather forecast by noted meteorologist Prof. Selby Maxwell appeared in the September 17 issue of the Courier-Express. For the dates of September 23, 24, and 25 he fore casted a high temperature of about 59 degrees F. His temperature forecast was within a few degrees of observed conditions, with the exception of September 24. Darkening skies and cooling temperatures at other places and times have been similarly attributed to forest fires and volcanic eruptions. Collectively, these events were used in the development of a “Nuclear Winter” hypothesis, where debris from the detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and subsequent fires could reduce sunlight and depress temperatures for months to years.

The weird hues noted by observers, such as the purple sun, can be attributed to the uniformly fine particles within the smoke layer. The very fine smoke particles aloft scattered the sun’s light, dispersing the red and yellow light which accounts for most of its visible spectrum, allowing only the shorter wavelengths of blue and magenta to penetrate the smoke layer. Thus, wherever the sun or moon were visible though the cloud layer, they were often painted with hues of blue, pink or purple.

At the time, the Erie County health commissioner stated that if the cause of the pall hanging over the area was wood smoke, there would be “no deleterious effects” on the population. Interestingly, the smoke aloft was actually trapped between 12,000 to 17,000 feet above sea level, and while a pilot reported smoke entering the cockpit when flying through the smoke cloud, the smoke itself never reached ground level. The reassurance statement that the darkness and hues observed was due to a forest fire, coupled with the absence of the smell of smoke on the ground, led many to doubt the explanation offered by the U.S. Weather Bureau. In its report, the Bureau confirmed that “There are still individuals who believe a military experiment had been carried on without announcement.” The polar air mass that passed through Buffalo on September 24 acted as a cold dome separating the city from the smoke aloft. Seemingly at odds with these facts, the Associated Press reported on September 28 that “the giant smoke screen drifting over the eastern states...could become a serious health threat to persons suffering asthmatic, heart and respiratory troubles.” This concern was based on the fact that the base of the smoke plume over the eastern states was lowering with each passing day. Another concern raised in the Associated Press story was that the cold air dome was trapping pollution from heavily polluted cities below the smoke cloud. Despite the health concerns from the smoke plume or air pollution concerns associated with trapped pollutants, there were no reports of poor air quality.

Western New Yorkers have experienced sky events such as auroras and eclipses, as well as weather events such as wind storms, rain deluges, floods, blizzards, lake effect snow bands and thundersnow, to name but a few. These events are not out of the ordinary for the region, after all. The stealing of an afternoon’s daylight, however, when combined with the Cold War rhetoric, created a unique event in the region’s history. No one in Western New York has since experienced what those who looked to the sky on September 24, 1950 did; the afternoon the sun disappeared.

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