I have two second-hand sightings.
My father just happened to be outside when the first atomic bomb went off at Trinity. He could see the glow on the horizon.
One of my co-workers used to work at the Nevada Test Site. He witnesses several cratering shots (underground tests), one from a helicopter.
Well , yeah
The conversation started off , with me saying , now that you mention it , you do look fat 
Declan
This has potential of being one of my all time favourite threads and I can’t believe its sinking like this, so yeah I’ll post this to give it another boost on the boards.
Come on people, what was seeing the most devastating explosion ever devised by Human minds like?!?!?! And I’m talking about a Nuclear explosion 
My dad’s oldest brother was one of the troops that played around at ground zero at Desert Rock I. He died of cancer 15 years or so ago. :dubious:
My Dad was involved in Operation Hard Tack in 1958. It was the last above ground detonation (I think) in the Bikini Atoll. I’ve forwarded this thread to him in hopes he’ll register and tell us more.
According to him it was amazing.
For those of you who posted regarding older relatives having seen these in the 50’s, I appreciate it.
See, I have been having a bit of a personal crisis in the last couple of days, as on Christmas eve, my great uncle told myself, Mr. Armadillo, and my younger sister about having seen a-bomb testing in New Mexico when he was in the Marines. I asked him why he’d been sent there, and he said along with two thousand other soldiers, they were there basically as guinea pigs. He said 70% of the soldiers that where there when he was have since died of cancer. He also said that there’s no record of his station there in his personnel record (maybe wrong words? I can’t remember what he called it) and that he can’t get medical recompensation for it, because the Marines deny that group was ever there. He’s got some paperwork they gave him at the time, that was supposedly classified information, but otherwise no proof.
He served in Korea, and tells some amazing stories. He is one of my favorite relatives, but for the last two days I had been wondering if maybe he’s… you know… stretching the truth, as I thought all of the testing was done in the 30’s and that there was no way he could have been around for that.
Mmm…maybe this is too distant, but my roommate bristlesage’s family is from Nevada and her grandparents used to watch tests. Her grandmother later died of cancer.
Does it look like a giant eye peering down from the sky?
His timeline is convincing - if he was in the Marines for the Korean War (1950-1953 I guess?), he was also in the military during an intensive time for atomic bomb tests. The first atomic bomb was tested in 1945, and aboveground testing continued into the 1960s. Underground testing continued into the 1980s by the US, IIRC, and I think the French continued, and the Indians and Pakistanis began testing into the 1990s.
If the government put him there and then refuses medical compensation, that really sucks. 
I think we haven’t gotten any firsthand doper sightings of atomic tests because the population of the SDMB is too young in general to have been in the military during the '50s and early '60s.
wevets–I don’t want to make it sound like he’s always telling big, unbelievable stories or anything, he’s just got some incredible, and some hillarious stories about being in the military, and silly stuff he and his brothers did when they were younger. Nothing I ever had reason to doubt, or anything. But then he told us this story the other day, and I had no idea they were still doing the testing at that time, so it didn’t make any sense to me. Phew. Glad to know it’s plausible.
He’s in his late sixties, and is in really poor health. He had to have a heart transplant in the mid-eighties, and has suffered pretty continuous health problems for the last twenty five years or so. He’s also one of my absolute favorite people, ever.
(Continuing highjack)
I just finished reading a new book about the incident. It’s very informative but delves into speculation a little too much. They’ll know why it happened, but the reactor had been having problems for some time. The rods had been sticking and that may have caused the explosion. If anyone decides to read the book, and you have a weak stomach, skip the autopsy chapter.
NEVER
They’ll never know why it happened
I swear I previewed.
My great uncle (who passed away a few years ago of cancer) was in the Air Force during WWII. He was on one of the planes escorting the Enola Gay to Hiroshima - he said that they got the hell out of there as fast as possible, but they could still see the explosion.
Well, one of those damn French test in the South Pacific briefly woke me from my nap. :mad:
I’ve seen the original manuscript of (iirc) Feynman’s description of the first A-bomb test. Just seeing it felt portentious.
Okay so it’s starting to look like most of the posters on this board are too young to have seen one personally. So most of these posts are of previous generation’s encounters with nukes. Well I happen to have a great story along those lines. Unlike these fathers or uncles who were in the military after the war and got to see the above ground tests, how about a story from a Hiroshima survivor ?
When we visited Hiroshima in '88, and were walking through the awesome A-bomb museum, we got to this scale model of the city with this ball hanging from the ceiling indicating where the bomb was when it was detonated. My one aunt showed us where she was (at a Mazda factory out of town. High school aged kids were being used in the factories to aid the war effort), and how this hill happened to sheild the factory from the blast. Word got to them about what had happened, and they were told to not go back into the city (where her family was). She followed the train tracks all the way around the city (quite a hike) to reach these hills on the other side of town. And there she stayed with relatives.
It was a pretty amazing story, and it was cool that she could recount her day with that scale model in the museum. I was pretty amazed how unemotional she was as she told us.
My aunt is still alive and well, and has no ill effects from the exposure (so far).
Just so you know, my folks were in internment camps (in different states) back in the US while all this took place.
This comes under the heading of * feeling * the blast.
I was about 5-10 floors up on a constuction elevator at the IP in Las Vegas ca.1977 when they set off a below ground blast at the test site.The floor beneath me rumbled-sorta like a minor quake-for about 10 secs.or so as I recall.
I was impressed.