Source: University of Utah Explainer on the Oh-My-God Particle
source confidence: Medium status: Useful updated 2026-08-11
Summary
A University of Utah College of Science explainer describing the 1991 Oh-My-God particle event at the Fly's Eye observatory at Dugway Proving Ground, written for a general audience. It is the institution writing about its own research programme, so it is good evidence of what Utah says about the detection and weak evidence for the physics.
Useful Claims
- The account places the Fly's Eye experimental observatory at Dugway Proving Ground and dates the Oh-My-God particle detection to October 15, 1991.
- It describes Fly's Eye as an atmospheric detector watching for air showers caused by high-energy interactions in the upper atmosphere.
- It says University of Utah researchers worked backward from the observed air shower to infer the properties of the cosmic ray.
Verbatim
"It was the night of October 15, 1991." — Article, Fly's Eye account
"The University of Utah had set up an experimental observatory called the Fly's Eye in the isolation of Dugway Proving Ground, a sprawling 800,000-acre tract of land used by the U.S. Army to test biological and chemical weapons since the 1940s." — Article, Fly's Eye account
"Scientists looked at the data they'd collected and worked backward to deduce the properties of the space-borne particle that led to the air shower." — Article, analysis account
Reliability Notes
Self-reported tier: an institutional explainer, useful for location, date, and plain-language framing, and not a substitute for the literature. The HiRes spectrum result belongs to the peer-reviewed record — see HiRes GZK Suppression Measurement (PRL, 2008).
The original 1995 Astrophysical Journal record for the Oh-My-God particle event is still missing from the wiki and would be the primary source for the detection itself.