The Truth about Sputnik

For twenty years it has been said that the first persons in the Western Hemisphere to see a satellite, Sputnik I, were scientists of the Geophysical Institute at Fairbanks. All these years I have remained silent, but now I reveal the truth--they were not the first.

Early on the morning of October 6, 1957, the Geophysical Institute scientists picked up the radio signal from Sputnik. One of them stepped outside to view the sky and immediately saw, high overhead, the Sputnik This was the first reported sighting on this continent.

Several days later I was discussing the sighting of the Sputnik with my neighbor, Dexter Stegemeyer, and he casually said, "Oh yes, I saw it, too." At first he was reluctant to give details but finally came out with the full story.

That morning, well before dawn, he was sitting in his outhouse. The door of the outhouse was open and faced to the west. Mr. Stegemeyer said he was just sitting there enjoying the beauty of the stars twinkling in the sky when he saw a strange moving star come up out of the west. Though not a scientist by training, Stege, as we called him, was a good observer and a thinker. He said that he did not know that the Russian satellite had been launched some hours before. Yet he reasoned that the object he saw was a strange new thing. From its speed and uniform passage across the sky, he knew it could not be an airplane, a meteor or any other familiar phenomenon.

Stege and his family left Alaska some years after the launch of Sputnik, but the outhouse from whence he made the sighting still stands. His was the first sighting since he did see Sputnik lower in the western sky than did those at the Geophysical Institute.

Sometimes it takes a long time for the truth to come out. Even our artist was reluctant to illustrate the full truth in his rendition of Stege making that first sighting. Instead he only shows Stege walking to the outhouse on a brisk winter morn, typically Alaskan in his parka and warm toilet seat in hand.