The Day of Darkness Continued
A short story by Clarence G. Underwood
Man has always looked to the Sun for light and warmth. He understood from early times that the sun was at the root of his existence. He has lived with a regular night and day pattern since he has been conscious of himself. Back around 800 BC the Chinese writing in the I Ching, hinted at the existence of Sunspots. Back in 1223 BC a clay tablet was inscribed with a description of a Solar Eclipse which was found in Ugarit. Thus we know that man both watched and recorded events surrounding the Sun. In my poem, Jacob’s Ladder, I proposed that beings have been watching the skies at least since 200,000 BC. Surely, since that time many solar phenomena have been observed.
Given a possible early foundation for sky watching and the notion that sunspots were a known occurrence thousands of years ago, what can we suggest as a possible behavior of the sun? We know that the sun has cycles of maximum and minimum sunspot periods. We know that during active periods during maximum, there is a slight warming of atmosphere and during minimum, there is a slight cooling. The Maunder Minimum is an example! The sun is active all the time! A manifestation of that is in the sunspots that we see. Could the sunspots blanket the sun? I don’t know but in March of 1958, 285 sunspots were seen on the sun! That Is the most ever recorded by anyone! Recently, in August of 2024, that number reached over 300 unofficially!
If as I posit in my poem, The Day of Darkness, it is likely that sunspots could cover the entire area of the sun then, it may have already happened! Without a detailed explanation of a solar eclipse it’s impossible to tell the difference between an actual eclipse of the sun by the moon or whether the sun was just covered with sunspots! As a candidate for this occurrence allow me to suggest that at a minimum sunspots can exist for only several hours. There is a documented event where the plausibility of a sunspot coverage of the sun appears, as a solar eclipse that could never have taken place! We read in the Bible that at the time of Jesus death the sun was darkened for several hours during the day, a solar eclipse and the moon was blood red in the evening, a lunar eclipse! You can’t have both at the same time. You can have sunspots which exist for a short duration and a lunar eclipse at the same time! So the solution to our proposal is found in the Bible!
Thus in conclusion I suggest that the idea of a sunspot blanket event of the sun has already occurred. The real day of darkness happened on April 3, 33AD. It lasted for about three hours. A miracle perhaps, an unusual phenomenon, most definitely!
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Sunspots on September 1, 2025
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Sunspots November 9, 2025
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