Since 1954 there have been sporadic reports that very strange things can happen in the first few centimeters after an energetic nucleus fragments in photographic emulsion. Before the Berkeley Bevalac came along in the mid 1970s to accelerate middle‐weight ions to kinetic energies of 2 GeV per nucleon, such reports came entirely from cosmic‐ray exposures of very limited statistics. Indeed the anecdotal tone of the early reports generated more skepticism than excitement.