Wonders in the Sky (99 page)

March 1796: Don region, Russia
The Devil and the brawling Cossack

According to writer Peter Kolosimo, the inhabitants of a Russian village in the Don region were surprised to find a large metal ball in one of their fields. The ball measured ten feet in diameter. People from everywhere flocked to see it, wondering where it had come from. Clearly it had not been delivered by road, as there were no wheel tracks to be seen anywhere in the vicinity. It could only have fallen from the sky, they thought. Except for a regular pattern of circles etched into its surface, the ball was as smooth as marble.

The village folk tried to move it but their effort was useless: it would not budge an inch. Then a man named Pushkin arrived. Pushkin was a drunkard and a gambler, even a heretic, and everyone looked down on his ways. But despite his faults, he was also known to be very courageous. They led him to the spot: “He drew his saber, spurred his horse toward it, he cursed it and defied it,” the legend says. “Whether it came from heaven or hell he challenged it to fight back.”

The man struck the object with his sword again and again. Suddenly the crowd around him began to howl with terror: one of the circles on the ball had opened up, revealing a single inhuman eye!

Pushkin sneered and carried on with his blows against the object. He struck it so hard, in fact, that the blade of his saber snapped off.

The peasants fled in fear. When they looked behind them they saw the drunkard and his steed were suddenly becoming transparent, fading into the air like ghosts. They could still faintly hear Pushkin's voice, cussing angrily, but even this quickly faded away. “The villagers were not unduly perturbed by this,” it is said. “The devil had gotten his own back with the brawling Cossack.”

Two days passed: nothing was seen or heard of Pushkin. Then to everyone's surprise both he and his trusty horse staggered back into the village as if half asleep. He seemed calm enough, but he soon flew into a rage and began to howl that he was going to put an end to the unholy globe and set fire to it and the woods and everything around it.

Hearing this, everybody in the village trailed along after him to watch the spectacle, but he never could take his revenge on the mysterious metal ball, for “all that was there to be seen was his sorry mortification. The ball was no longer there.”

Unlike the case of the crash at Alençon, we have been unable to prove that this tale is a modern hoax. However, not one Russian specialist we have approached had ever heard of the story, and the general consensus is that it originated as a fictional tale.

Early 19
^th
century, Penrhynisaf, North Wales
Three hours' missing time

The Rev. R. Jones's mother, when a young unmarried woman, is said to have started one evening towards her home, accompanied by a servant man, David Williams, called on account of his great strength and stature, Dafydd Fawr, Big David, who was carrying a flitch of bacon. The night was dark, but calm. Williams walked in the rear of his young mistress, and she, thinking he was following, went straight home. But three hours passed before David appeared.

Interrogated as to the cause of his delay, he said he had only been about three minutes behind her. Told that she had arrived three hours ahead, David would not believe it. At length, he was convinced that he was wrong in his timing, and he proceeded to account for his lagging behind:

He had observed, he said, a brilliant meteor passing through the air, followed by a ring or hoop of fire, and within this hoop stood a man and woman of small size, handsomely dressed. With one arm they embraced each other, and with the other they took hold of the hoop, and their feet rested on the concave surface of the ring. When the hoop reached the earth they jumped out of it, and proceeded to make a circle on the ground. As soon as this was done, a large number of men and women appeared, and to the sweetest music that ear ever heard commenced dancing round and round the circle. The sight was so entrancing that the man stayed, as he thought, a few minutes to witness the scene. The ground all around was lit up by a subdued light, and he observed every movement of these beings.

By and by the meteor which had at first attracted his attention appeared again, and then the fiery hoop came to view, and when it reached the spot where the dancing was, the lady and gentleman who had arrived in it jumped into the hoop, and disappeared in the same manner in which they had reached the place. Immediately after their departure the Fairies vanished from sight. The man found himself alone in darkness, and he proceeded homewards.

Unfortunately, we have found no original document to authenticate the circumstances of the story, or even the year of the event, so it has to remain as an interesting fable.

 

Source: Elias Owen,
Welsh Folk-Lore, A Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales
, (1896 edition). Facsimile reprint by Llanerch Publishers, Felinfach, Wales 1996, 93-4.

22 February 1803, Hara-Yadori, near Tokyo, Japan
Female visitor

A saucer-shaped “ship” of iron and glass floated ashore. It was 6 meters wide and carried a young woman with very white skin. The episode began when a group of fishermen and villagers saw a ‘boat' just off the shore of Hara-yadori in the territory of Ogasawara etchuu-no-kami. (
1
)

People approached the object in their own small boats and managed to tow it to the beach. The object was round. The upper half was composed of glass-fitted windows with lattice, shielded by a kind of putty, and the lower hemisphere consisted of metal plates. Through the glass dome the witnesses could see letters written in an unknown language and a bottle containing a liquid, perhaps water.

Fig. 58: Japanese object and occupant

The villagers arrested the girl and tried to decide what to do with her. One of the villagers, who had heard of a similar case that had happened at another beach not far from there, suggested that the woman was possibly a foreign princess, exiled by her father because of an extramarital love affair. The box, he said, may even contain her lover's head. If this was so, it would be a political problem, and that would imply some sort of cost: “We may be ordered to spend a lot of money to investigate this woman and boat. Since there is a precedent for casting this kind of boat back out to sea, we had better put her inside the boat and send it away. From a humanitarian viewpoint, this treatment is cruel for her. However, this treatment would be her destiny.” Backing their decision with such straightforward logic, they forced the visitor back into the domed object, pushed it out, and it drifted out of sight.

This is not the only version of the story but it is probably the earliest. It comes from the Japanese
Toen-Shosetsu
, a compilation of stories written in 1825 by various authors, including Bakin Takizawa, a Japanese novelist. There was even a reproduction of a sketch of the object, showing something like a typical round, domed flying saucer.

A second version of the story was published in 1844 in a book called
Ume no Chiri
, written by Nagahashi Matajirou. This version said the incident took place on 24 March 1803. The beach was now named Haratono-hama. The girl was 1.5 meters tall and her dress was strange, made of an unknown material. Her skin was white as snow. She spoke to the astonished crowd in a language they were at a loss to interpret. She also had a strange cup of a design unknown to the witnesses.

Was there a precedent for a tale of this kind in Japan? Kazuo Tanaka explains that the report seems to be based on a variety of Japanese folklore known as
Utsuro-fune
or
Utsubo-fune
, a series of stories handed down over generations that preserved “the ancient national memory of Japanese immigration.” In these tales, a founding member of a family, usually a noblewoman, would be said to have come across the sea by boat. If the tale was believable it could raise one's family to a higher social status. In the lyrics of one folkloric song from Kyushu Island we find references to “a daughter of a nobleman” who was sent to sea in a boat with glass windows. It even mentions that “the food in the boat was delicious cake.” (
2
)

Could the whole report, then, have been a fiction based on much older hearsay? Tanaka draws this conclusion: no official document of the period mentions the incident of the woman in the round boat, and there are no references to beaches called Haratono-hama or Hara-yadori, which would be suspicious omissions if the story were true. On the other hand, the erudite ufologist Junji Numakawa has pointed out that the name of the beach could easily have changed over time. If the beach was originally named Kyochi-gama, as he postulates, this could be meaningful, as ‘gama' or ‘kama' means pot or cauldron, and the pot-like recipients used at the time were not unlike the craft in which the mysterious woman arrived. (
3
)

 

Sources: (1) Kazuo Tanaka
Did a Close Encounter of the Third Kind Occur on a Japanese Beach in 1803?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 24, Number 4 July/August 2000. Masaru Mori,
The Female Alien in a Hollow Vessel
, Fortean Times No. 48, Spring 1987, 48-50 and
The UFO Criticism by J. N. from Japan
, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2001. The latter is the English version of a privately published newsletter (UFO Hihyo) written and distributed by Tokyo-based researcher Junji Numakawa.

(2) This song was collected by the great Japanese folklorist Yanagida Kunio (1875-1962) and reproduced in a paper of his titled
The Story of Utsubo-fune
in 1925.

(3)
The UFO Criticism by J. N. from Japan
, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2001.