My purpose in writing this book is to describe my own experiences, from
my graduate student days in the 1950s to the present (2001), when I came
upon phenomena or facts that did not support the prevailing ideas and
theories, or even contradicted them. In some instances, the encounters began
with nothing more than the naïve questions I posed as a graduate student to
my professors regarding a well-established fact; others were the result of
questions my graduate students asked me. Essentially, this is an account of
my personal encounters with some of the ideas and theories that once
prevailed but were later eliminated in the history of auroral science.