In the ten-years-on spirit of our looks back at AIRhead Project 2000, here’s a predictive research study:
“An Assessment of Where People Will Witness the First Sunrise of the New Millennium,” Peter D. Lechtner, Philip A. Blain, Norris D. McWhirter, and Ingrid S. Kristament, Geographical Journal, vol. 163, no.3, July 1997, pp. 251-8. (Thanks to improbable researcher Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report that:
“There is increasing world-wide interest in the rapidly approaching advent of the third millennium, and more especially, the first sunrise of that new epoch…. This paper establishes that the Chatham Islands area of New Zealand, in particular certain hill tops on Pitt Island… will be the first inhabited places to see the first light.”
To forestall quibbling, they calculated for Jan 1, 2000 and Jan 1, 2001.