Spring 1823 — The First Reported Anomaly
Palmyra, NY. A farm boy, age seventeen, describes an object he calls 'the golden plates.' Witnesses say the object glowed.
The earliest documented account of what the committee now believes to have been a contained nuclear event comes from the Smith family farm in Manchester, New York, in the late summer of 1823.
Contemporary neighbours, interviewed decades later by Mormon historian ██████████, describe a single bright flash visible from three farms away, accompanied by a sound “as of a great stone dropped into the river from a great height, but without the splash.”
Joseph Smith, age seventeen, would later describe the event in his 1838 history as the first of his heavenly visions. The committee notes that the description of the object — its colour, weight, and the way it “translated” itself to him — does not match the folklore of any known period and matches no published archaeology of the period.
The plates themselves are, of course, famously missing.