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Fake Vampires, Wailing Ghosts, and Other Fascinating Psy-Ops and Military Deceptions

Khalid Elhassan January 29, 2020 33 min

North Vietnam - Viet Cong Fighter — Viet Cong. Wikimedia

15. The 1504 Lunar Eclipse

Faced with starvation and the possibility that the enraged Arawaks might fall upon him and his marooned men and massacre them all, a desperate Columbus hit upon an ingenious plan. While perusing an almanac which contained astronomical charts covering solar and lunar eclipses from 1475 to 1506, he noticed that a total lunar eclipse was due shortly, on the night of February 29^th, 1504. So Columbus arranged a meeting with the Arawaks’ chieftain and told him that the Christian God was angry with the natives for not feeding Columbus and his men.

He informed the Arawaks that his furious God would demonstrate His wrath three nights hence by turning the moon blood red, then blotting it out as a harbinger of the calamities He was about to unleash upon the natives. The Arawaks laughed it off, until the appointed night when Columbus’ prediction came true and the moon turned red, and then started disappearing. According to Columbus’ son, the terrified Arawak “with great howling and lamentation came running from every direction to the ships laden with provisions and beseeching the admiral to intercede with his god on their behalf“. They promised to cooperate if Columbus restored the moon back to the way it was.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.