When I wrote Aunt Marj’s obituary, it was a short statement for the local community. The pastor who officiated at the funeral only met with us once and got some of the basic facts turned around, but since only the family attended and I thought he would no longer be involved, I did not correct him. Someone at the funeral home offered to send an announcement of Marjorie’s death to organizations he thought she had been involved in (from some of the various printouts we had shared from the internet). I have not inquired what was sent to whom. After being ignored by the public as a person for so many years, I did not think Marjorie’s short obituary would receive such interest or provoke a word-for-word examination.

Marjorie’s work on Betty Hill’s map is still viable and worthy of consideration. To clarify what I was referring to, I remember Marj talking about a binary system that would not allow for the development of life – the source was not a newly issued star catalog. While working on the obituary for Marjorie, my father recalled that Marj wrote a letter/statement to the effect that new data indicated that a system could not support life so her matching of the Betty Hill map was incorrect. Perhaps she and/or the recipient(s) realized that the published interpretation of the data was in error – not Marjorie’s work. In any case, Marj did not tell my father who was not involved anyway. If one wishes more details, please see the attached notes from Stanton Friedman. Our current knowledge allows for planets and possible life where Marjorie had indicated.

The larger point, that Marjorie was a true skeptic willing to let go of projects she was deeply involved in if the evidence was to the contrary, also remains. We will see how many people using my obituary for Marjorie to say her work is "debunked" will make corrections to their sites, etc.

Of course, Marjorie built more than one three-dimensional representation of our stellar neighborhood. She started her quest with one, built another with more data, others as newer star catalogs became available, ones with selected data, and so forth. I built the first of the type using suspended beads (1968). I would like to make clear that Sol is in a lonely position between two clumps of like (type G – yellow) stars: our system is of interest.

Marjorie suffered the worst end for a person of her intellect and her life-long cultivation of knowledge and artistic skills. Alzheimer’s disease stole more than a decade of her life, her memory, and her brilliant yet loving mind. Playing the piano was one of the abilities she retained the longest. Many of her former students (first and third grade) shared with us their memories of how she started each day playing patriotic songs (on her own tiny piano) for them to sing. Later she worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where it was left to her to make sense of data from disparate sources and methods. Her only sibling, my mother, had slipped away from us earlier, also due to Alzheimer’s disease. The constant, continuing loss of a loved one’s essence is painful. The final end is more so, even the second time.

ConiAnn (Lowien) Limpert

Eldest niece of Marjorie Eleanor Fish

2013