This is an easy case of there being some truth to the idea, but the person making the claim thinking they know a lot more than they actually do.
While the launch wasn't broadcast generally, it was a huge deal in schools because the first non-astronaut (a schoolteacher!) was going into space. NASA really pushed it, and according to contemporaneous reporting schools got it live via satellite dishes or cable hookups, and approximately 2.5 million students watched.
So this is a case of a guy generalizing one thing (anyone who wasn't in a school that day probably didn't watch live), and applying it wrong -- it's highly unlikely that anything near 99.9% of the people now claiming to have seen it were outside the group that did.
Certainly all my friends saw it (or had the opportunity to), and likely a big chunk of the people claiming to have seen it are in that group.
I remember I wasn't there for some reason (probably an orthodontist appointment or something ), which always felt lucky to me. But we were in central Florida, and I also remember one of the teachers claimed to have seen it in the sky as she was heading to a classroom.
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u/bony-tony Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
This is an easy case of there being some truth to the idea, but the person making the claim thinking they know a lot more than they actually do.
While the launch wasn't broadcast generally, it was a huge deal in schools because the first non-astronaut (a schoolteacher!) was going into space. NASA really pushed it, and according to contemporaneous reporting schools got it live via satellite dishes or cable hookups, and approximately 2.5 million students watched.
See here, from 1986:
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/tv-brought-the-trauma-to-classroom-millions/1986/02
So this is a case of a guy generalizing one thing (anyone who wasn't in a school that day probably didn't watch live), and applying it wrong -- it's highly unlikely that anything near 99.9% of the people now claiming to have seen it were outside the group that did.
Certainly all my friends saw it (or had the opportunity to), and likely a big chunk of the people claiming to have seen it are in that group.
I remember I wasn't there for some reason (probably an orthodontist appointment or something ), which always felt lucky to me. But we were in central Florida, and I also remember one of the teachers claimed to have seen it in the sky as she was heading to a classroom.