Wonders in the Sky (83 page)

The object disappeared on the horizon, moving in a southwesterly direction. It is noteworthy that an employee of the
Times
named Thomas Lloyd saw this balloon as it was very high in the southeast and traveled south slowly, rising and falling in its course.

A real balloon (the “Pathfinder”) piloted by professor John Wise had taken off from the town of Louisiana, Missouri in this period, but it had fallen into lake Michigan some ten days before, and could not have been the cause of the sighting.

It is noteworthy that the last eight sightings in the Chronology come from the United States, and that the last one is a report of an unknown “airship” flying slowly over a city. But that, as journalists of the nineteenth century liked to say, “is another story.”

 

Source:
The Inner Ocean
(Chicago, Illinois), 11 October 1879.

Three aspects stand out when we review 19
^th
century reports of unusual aerial phenomena:

-
Meteors and meteorites
were reported with greater enthusiasm and in more abundance than in previous times. The press, exploiting people's interests and concerns for the sake of sales, began a love story with these still-mysterious astronomical phenomena, and it lasted till the end of the century. Given the interest in meteorites in the name of scientific progress, the public was encouraged to report the latest observations at their local newspaper offices.

-
Claims of extraterrestrial encounters
were first made in this century. Such claims were not published until the 1850s on, but tall tales involving the alleged inhabitants of the moon, allegedly spied through telescopes, had become popular decades earlier. It was not long before stories of aliens on the moon would turn into stories of aliens on visits to Earth. Indeed, by the late 19
^th
century the press would be full of articles speculating on what extraterrestrials drank and ate, on the average height of Venusians and on whether airships had already made the journey across interstellar space to meet us. As early as 1847 the Mormons, followed by the Jehovah's Witnesses, began to discuss interplanetary travel and speculated on which physical planet God inhabited. We have generally avoided including examples here for want of truly convincing cases.

-
Reports of UFO crashes
were first claimed in the nineteenth century. Though examples can be found in the literary efforts of earlier generations, allegedly
factual
reports had never been published before. That most of these cases were probably hoaxes is not in doubt, hence our avoidance of them, but they do allow us a glimpse of the world's new mentality.

We stopped our Chronology before 1880 because the world was about to change radically and irreversibly, with increasingly common access to novel forms of energy and transportation: The Suez Canal was opened; John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil; Most significantly, the first mobile gas engine was demonstrated by Siegfried Marcus, and other engineers rushed to make plans for new vehicles based on the internal combustion engine, which had been demonstrated as early as 1860 by Lenoir.

With the introduction of automobiles, the telegraph and an oil-based economy, the basic structure of the modern world was established. In science, the first measurements of the speed of light were accomplished, and the kinetic theory of gases published. In technology, high tension induction coils, cast-iron frame buildings, Bunsen gas burners, and Singer's sewing machines were developed.

Most importantly for our purpose, the social context was revolutionized by changing standards in journalism, the increasing demand for escapism and instant news and the renewed fascination for the exotic and the unknown.

In 1876 Italian priest Pietro Secchi announced that he had discovered “canals” on Mars. When astronomer Antonio Schiaparelli confirmed this observation in 1877, and Asaph Hall discovered the two satellites of Mars the same year at the Naval Observatory, it led to much renewed speculation about life on other planets, which in turn tended to color reports of unexplained aerial objects and inspired today's fascination with the extraterrestrial theory, to the exclusion of any other hypothesis about these phenomena.

It is not for lack of data that we decided to stop this chronology when we did. The end of the nineteenth century would see an extraordinary burst of sightings, popularized by the new media and amplified by the growth of urban centers, the greater ease of travel and the vast extension of the railroads and the telegraph. A catalogue of unexplained aerial phenomena beyond our chronology would deal with history's first major “wave” of reports about 1885 and with an even bigger one from the fall of 1896 to 1897. The records of that era, now known as “the Airship Wave,” if they are ever analyzed and published, will dwarf the present book.

In our effort to understand how certain recurring themes linked to unexplained aerial phenomena have evolved and spread throughout human history, we have tested many claims for the sake of accuracy. Naturally, given the hoary age of these accounts, it was not possible for us to measure the truth or falsity of every story compiled. However, in the process of analysis, we have uncovered many spurious items that cloud the literature of the field. Some of them deserve special documentation.

Descriptions of unexplained objects or phenomena in the sky are found in the records of the earliest civilizations that used some form of writing. Several serious authors, such as Alexander Kazantsev and professor Agrest in Russia or Aimé Michel in France, have suggested that some prehistoric rock carvings and primitive statues were indicative of contact with non-human visitors from the sky.

Less cautious or less scholarly writers such as Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin have expanded this notion into the popular theme of Ancient Astronauts, where it is assumed that the Earth was either visited or colonized by beings from another planet. Some forms of the Ancient Astronaut theory quote the Bible and other ancient texts in support of the notion that these beings intermarried with primitive earthlings or modified them genetically to produce modern humans.

Indeed, the literature of earlier centuries is rich in legends involving beings flying in the heavens, sometimes alongside humans as witnesses or as participants in their warfare or their lovemaking. Although such accounts are too vague in date and circumstances to be included in our chronology, they cannot be ignored in any study of the history of the field. Having said this, the reliability of these accounts must be critically challenged, either because they were the product of poetic imagination, because they were fabrications used in blatant support of political or religious movements of the time, or because they were invented by opportunistic authors and popularized by overly credulous readers.

Other accounts in the literature were genuine historical events that were misinterpreted in good faith by observers at the time, and propped up later as “evidence” for various theories, some of which still flourish in contemporary works. Accordingly, we have classified the stories we have rejected from the main chronology, under four major categories.

Deceptive story, hoax, fictional account or tall tale.

These accounts may be deliberately couched as true happenings, or they may have been lifted from their fictional context by later retelling as true facts. History is full of examples where a simple rumor gave rise to major movements while truthful accounts were only reconstructed much later.

Religious vision.

The real (or imagined) arrival of beings and artifacts from outside Earth has had enormous impact on human societies, and the evidence can be considered from many points of view. Theology has been shaped by a belief in sky-dwelling divinities. If mysterious craft are seen in the sky and stones fall from the clouds, what can Man's position in the scheme of things be?

Religious visions have their own characteristics, and we do not feel qualified to judge their relevance to the overall problem. While they may represent true happenings for large groups of believers, these accounts are not amenable to scientific study in the same sense as the observation of an objective phenomenon.

It has not escaped our notice that a genuine paranormal phenomenon may come to us dressed up as a religious vision, either because the witnesses interpreted it in such terms, or because the standards of the society around them demanded such an interpretation. Therefore we do not exclude reports purely on such a basis.

Natural astronomical phenomenon.

Throughout history, mankind has anxiously observed the heavens for signs of future events. The sky has answered with a bewildering series of displays, such as comets and meteors, which we recognize today as natural phenomena. Ancient accounts of such “wonders in the sky” provide precious information for today's astronomers, in the form of accurate data on the periodicity of comets, and the frequency of meteor showers, to give only two obvious examples. Auroral displays (aurora borealis) are frequently the occasion for historical amazement, and rightly so: The natural mechanism for such phenomena was not fully understood by physicists until the present (21
^st
) century.

Optical illusion or atmospheric effect.

These deserve a category apart. Here we deal with sincere witnesses faced with spectacular sky displays such as luminous crosses, multiple suns, multiples moons, or fantastic mirages. The mechanism behind such displays has only become understood in recent centuries, and new discoveries are still being made today about the properties of the atmosphere, lightning, tornadoes (often seen by terrified witnesses as sky serpents or dragons), the propagation of light through the air, and yes, even swamp gas!

It would be most interesting to compile an exhaustive list of events reported in the ancient literature under the general topic of sky phenomena. Some authors such as William Corliss have published catalogues of scientific anomalies that give fascinating compilations for comets, meteors, globular lightning, or
aurorae borealis
. Such work was not within our scope, but we needed to tell the reader why certain well-known incidents had been excluded from our main chronology.

The following list, selected among hundreds of items, makes interesting and sometimes comical reading. It illustrates the vagaries of the human mind, indeed even the scientific mind, as it tries to come to grips with phenomena beyond its understanding.

400 million years ago, Kentucky, USA
Crashed saucer, strange alien bodies

One of the most common recurring themes in the literature of this field is that of a flying machine that comes down from the sky and crashes, along with its extraterrestrial occupants. Far from being unique to Roswell, crashes of alien artifacts constitute a standard story, complete with descriptions of small cadavers and mysterious writing on the recovered craft. The present case, however, which is little known even within the paranormal community, must set some sort of record in terms of the extremely ancient date of the alleged incident.

In January 1969, the American periodical
Beyond Magazine
published a curious article about an alleged extraterrestrial fossil found in Kentucky. “Reader Melvin R. Gray of 417 South 5
^th
St., Louisville, Kentucky, 40202,” wrote columnist Brad Steiger, “has discovered a stone which has what he considers very suspicious indentations.” Mr. Gray's examination of the stone led him to conclude that it contained fossilized remains of tiny humanoid creatures and “what may at one time have been a tiny flying saucer no larger than our present day washbasins or dishpans.”

No photographs illustrated the article but Gray described the stones as looking like “a small chunk of meteor.” In order to get a better idea of what the “beings” looked like he made plaster, fiberglass, and aluminum castings from the rock. He reported:

Steiger himself was not entirely convinced. While acknowledging that, with the aid of a magnifying glass, he could make out the outline of “a tiny human pilot sitting in a bucket-type seat” on the casts that Gray sent him, he wondered whether it was merely a trick of nature? There was no reason to think Gray had made the “fossil” himself.

A second article was published about Melvin Gray's fossil in Ray Palmer's magazine
Flying Saucers
. In “A Fossilized Alien Spaceship and its Occupants,” Executive Director of the Kentucky-based National UFO Research and Investigation Committee, Buffard Ratliff, wrote that, after reading about Gray in
Beyond
, he contacted Mr. Gray and obtained the fossil.

Gray told Ratliff that he and his wife had come across the stone while cutting the grass in their back yard. He then examined the artifact carefully “for a period of approximately seven months and made several discoveries that led him to believe it might possibly be from outer space.”

Ratliff and Gray were able to find “seven very small creatures…in or on the fossilized stone.” Three of the creatures were ape-like in appearance. The other four were humanoid. All were approximately three inches in height, vertebrates, and very strong for their size. Ratliff and Gray concluded that the three tiny ape-like creatures “could very well be humanoids in special space suits,” and that these beings were in a separate section of the craft they labeled “B.” However they were quick to point out that one of the humanoids was also in that section, as opposed to section “A” of the spacecraft. As the two sections seemed to be divided, “apparently where the spaceship is fitted together,” this “indicates intelligent construction and design by intelligent beings.”