At a distance of one million miles from the Earth, the leading edge of the invisible cloud finally made contact with NASA's WIND satellite at 8:00 PM EST on January 9. By 11:30 PM the particle and field monitors onboard NASA's earth-orbiting POLAR and GEOTAIL satellites told their own stories about the blast of energetic particles now sweeping through the solar system. Interplanetary voyagers would never have suspected the conflagration that had just swept over them. The cloud had a density hardly more than the best laboratory vacuums. The tangle of fields and plasma slammed into the Earth's own magnetic domain like some enormous sledgehammer as a small part of the million mile-wide cloud brushed by the Earth. Nearly a trillion cubic miles of space were now involved in a pitched battle between particles and fields, shaking the Earth's magnetic field for over 24 hours. The storminess in space rode the tendrils of the Earth's field all the way down to the ground in a barrage of activity. Major aurora blazed forth in Siberia, Alaska and across much of Canada during this long winter's night. The initial blast from the cloud (astronomers call it a 'coronal mass ejection' or CME), compressed the magnetosphere and drove it inside the orbits of geosynchronous satellites, amplifying trapped particles to high energies. Dozens of satellites positioned at fixed longitudes along the Earth's equator like beads on a necklace, alternately entered and exited the full-bore of the solar wind every 24 hours as they passed outside of the Earth's magnetic shield. Plasma analyzers developed by Los Alamos Laboratories, and piggy-backed on several geosynchronous satellites, recorded voltages as high as 1000 volts, as static electric charges danced on their outer surfaces. It was turning out to be not a very pleasant environment for these high-tech islands of silicon and aluminum. High-speed particles from the cloud seeped down into the northern and southern arctic regions, steadily losing their energy as they collided with the thickening blanket of atmosphere.

On January 9, at 8:00 PM EST, the darkened, but cloudy, northern hemisphere skies over Alaska and Canada were awash in a diffuse auroral glow of crimson and green which subtly flowed across the sky as the solar storm crashed against the Earth's magnetic shield. This quiescent phase of activity was soon replaced by a far more dramatic one whose cause is a completely separate set of conditions and events which play themselves out in the distant 'magnetotail' of the Earth. Like some great comet with the Earth at its head, magnetic tendrils trail millions of miles behind it above the nighttime hemisphere. At nearly the distance of the Moon, the Earth's field contorts into a new shape in an attempt to relieve some of the stresses built up from the storm cloud's passage. The fields silently rearrange themselves across millions of cubic miles of space. Currents of particles trapped in the shape-shifting field accelerate as magnetic energies are exchanged for pure speed in a headlong kinetic onrush. Within minutes, a beam of particles enters the Earth's Polar Regions, triggering a brilliant aurora watched by residents of northern latitudes in Canada and Europe. The quiet diffuse aurora which Alaskan and Canadian observers had observed during the first part of the evening on January 10th were abruptly replaced by a major auroral storm which lasted through the rest of this long winter's night.

As the solar cloud thundered invisibly by, a trace of the arctic atmosphere was imperceptibly sucked high into space in a plume of oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The changing pressure in the bubble wall pumped this fountain as though it were water being siphoned from a well. Atoms once firmly a part of the stratosphere now found themselves propelled upwards and accelerated, only to be dumped minutes later into the vast circum-terrestrial zone girding the Earth like a donut. Still other currents began to amplify and flow in this equatorial zone. A river of charged particles 5,000 miles wide asserted itself as the bubble wall continued to pass. Millions of amperes of current swirled around the Earth in search of some illusive resting-place just beyond the next horizon. Like electricity in a wire, this invisible current created its own powerful magnetic field in its moment by moment changes as current begets field and field begets more current. The Earth didn't tolerate the new interloper very well. The current grew stronger, and the Earth's own field was forced to readjust. On the ground, this silent battle was marked by a lessening of the Earth's own field. Compass needles bowed downwards in silent ascent to magnetic forces waging a pitched battle hundreds of miles above the surface. The same magnetic disturbance that made compasses lose their bearings also infiltrated any long wires splayed out on telegraph poles, in submarine cables, or even electrical power lines.

As the field swept across hundreds of miles of wire and pipe, currents of electrons began to flow, corroding pipelines over time, and making messages unintelligible. During the January, 1997 storm, the British Arctic Survey at its South Pole Halley Research Station reported that the storm disrupted high-frequency radio communications, and shut down its life-critical aircraft operations. The storm conditions continued to rage throughout all of January 10th, but just as the conditions began to subside on January 11th, the Earth was hit by a huge pressure pulse as the trailing edge of the cloud finally passed by. The arrival and departure of this cloud would not have been of more than scientific interest, had it not also incapacitated the $200 million, Telstar 401 communications satellite in its wake at 06:15 EST. The storm had now exited the sphere of scientific interest and landed firmly inside the wider arena of human day-to-day life among millions of TV viewers, AT&T tried to restore satellite operations for several more days, but on January 17th they finally admitted defeat and decommissioned the satellite.

All TV programs such as 'Oprah Winfrey', 'Bay Watch', 'The Simpsons', and feeds for ABC News, had to be switched to a spare satellite: Telstar 402R. The Orlando Sentinal on January 12 was the first newspaper to mention the outage in a short, 74-line, note on page 22. Three days later, the Los Angeles Times described how this outage had affected a $712 million sale of AT&Ts Skynet telecommunications resources to Loral Space and Communications Ltd. No papers actually mentioned a connection to solar storms until several weeks later on January 23, when the focus of the news reports in the major newspapers was the thrilling scientific studies of this 'magnetic cloud' . The New York Times closed their short article on the cloud by mentioning that, "...Scientists said they do not know if this months event caused the failure early on January 11, of AT&T's Telstar 401 communications satellite, but it occurred during magnetic storms above the earth." Whether stories get covered in the news media or not is often a matter of luck when it comes to science, and this time there was much than urgently demanded attention. A devastating earthquake had struck Mexico City at 2:30 PM on January 10th and cost thousands of lives. This had come close behind the three million people in eastern Canada who had lost power a few days before the satellite outage. In Montreal, over one million people were still waiting for the lights to go back on under cloudy skies and sub-freezing temperatures. These were very potent human-interest stories, leaving little room at the time for stories of technological problems caused by distant solar storms. Although the news media barely mentioned the satellite outage, the outfall from this satellite loss reverberated in the trade journals for several years afterwards, extending far beyond the inconveniences experienced by millions of TV viewers.

It was one of the most heavily-studied events in space science history, with no fewer than 20 research satellites and dozens of ground observatories measuring its every twist and turn. Still, despite the massive scientific scrutiny of the conditions surrounding the loss of the Telstar 401 satellite, the five month long investigation by the satellite owner begged to differ with the growing impression of solar storm damage which was rapidly being taken as Gospel by just about everyone else. Although they had no 'body' to autopsy, AT&T felt very confident that the cause of the outage involved one of three possibilities: an outright manufacturing error involving an over-tightened meter shunt, a frayed bus bar made of tin, or bad Teflon insulation in the satellite's wiring. Case closed. Firmly ruled out was the solar disturbance that everyone seemed to have pointed to as the probable contributing factor. In fact, AT&T would not so much as acknowledge there were any adverse space weather conditions present at all. So far as they were publicly concerned, the space environment was irrelevant to their satellite's health. In some sense the environment was, in terrestrial terms, equivalent to a nice sunny day, and not the immediate aftermath of a major lightning storm or tornado. "