by John A. Keel
In his book A Guest from the Universe, Alexander Kazentsev theorized that the angels mentioned in the Bible might actually have been extraterrestrials. British ufologist Brinsley Le Poer Trench, author of The Sky People, supports this notion, as does Paul Misraki in Les Extraterrestres. They all cite the Biblical stories in Genesis in which Lot meets two angels and takes them into his home, where they feasted like ordinary men (Genesis 19:3). The Bible never describes angels as being winged creatures, although artists usually depict them that way. Indeed, the angels seem to have been manlike, though gifted with extraordinary powers. When they appeared before Abraham (Genesis 18:2), they were described as “three men” who ate and drank with him. Again and again “three men” play important roles in Biblical events. “Three men” repeatedly turn up in modern UFO events, too, and provide still one more puzzling aspect of the problem.
Misraki notes that the Church did not accept the spiritual nature of angels until the sixth century A.D. Before that, theologians considered angels to be physical beings. A few years ago the Reverend H. Wipprecht of Cobalt, Canada, stated that “the Bible’s description of angels fits ‘intelligent beings’ from other planets.” More aptly, the descriptions fit intelligent beings from this planet: beings that look like us but possess the peculiar special qualities of ultraterrestrials who share our world yet are a species apart from us.
We must also note that these “angels” were, according to the Bible, frequently concerned with the propagation of the human race. Abraham’s elderly wife, well past childbearing age, is said to have given birth to Isaac after a visit from the three men (Genesis, Chapter 21). So we are told that these “men” possess the power of life and death. They are credited with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, yet they restored Abraham’s Sarah to fertility.
The Book of Revelation, the last section of the New Testament, is especially important to this study. At first reading it may seem to be filled with vague poetry and may defy interpretation, but if you take many of the passages literally, and avoid a symbolic or religious interpretation, new meanings will open up to you. For example, in Chapter 4 we are told that “a door was opened in heaven,” and there is a description of the interior of a place occupied by creatures similar to those reported by Ezekiel, together with a throne apparently surrounded by glass (“And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal” [4:5]). Twenty-four beings in white robes sat around this “throne.” “They had on their heads crowns of gold” (4:4). We must remember that the men who wrote the Bible had no knowledge of machinery or technology, and so they were forced to describe things in terms that were familiar to them. Those “crowns of gold” could have been helmets of some kind. In Chapter 10, John declares, “And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven clothed with a cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.” It sounds as if he were describing a brilliantly glowing sphere surrounded by vapors (“cloud”) and colored lights (“a rainbow”) and two beams of light or flame were jetting down beneath it (“pillars of fire”).
A well-known astrophysicist, Morris K. Jessup, sought links between UFOs and religion in his book The UFO and the Bible. Were the flaming crosses and other objects seen in ancient skies really religious omens, he wondered, or were they actually machines from some alien civilization? Dr. Carl Jung, the celebrated psychiatrist, and astronomer Dr. Jacques Vallee also wondered if the historical reports of these objects might not have been distorted by interpretations created by the climate of the times Thus, in Biblical days when men were seeking some indication that there was a higher power, they almost automatically considered objects in the sky to be of religious import. During wartime, such objects were regarded with suspicion as possible weapons of the enemy. And in this present era, when space flight is the national goal of two major nations, there is a strong tendency to accept unidentified flying objects as extraterrestrial visitants.
Many of the Egyptian and Biblical accounts are supported by other histories written during the same period. Early Greek and Roman historians dutifully recorded many strange things seen in the sky. A light “so bright it seemed to be full day” descended over the temple in Jerusalem during the Feast of Unleavened Bread in A. D. 70, and Josephus describes a “demonic phantom of incredible size” that appeared in that same year on May 21. Before sunset on that date “there appeared in the air over the whole country [Jerusalem] chariots and armed troops coursing through the clouds…” Livy reported “phantom ships” in the sky in 214 B.C., and Pliny, the most notable of ancient historians, recorded several instances in which “three suns” were seen in the sky at one time. A “flaming cross” appeared over the heads of Constantine and his army in A.D. 312, and the army of Alexander the Great was thrown into a panic when two shining silvery “shields” spitting fire around the rims buzzed their encampment.
Scholars and researchers have now uncovered hundreds of ancient UFO accounts. Pick out any century and you will be able to find several good reports of disks, fireballs, and cigar-shaped objects in the sky. Historian W. R. Drake has unearthed references to “Magonia,” a strange country that was a legend among the peasants of medieval France. They believed that the Magonians rode about in “cloud ships” and frequently raided their crops. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, wrote that one of these ships is supposed to have fallen from the sky around A.D. 840, and its occupants, three men and a woman, were stoned to death by the angry farmers.
Italian ufologist Alberto Fengolio uncovered another intriguing “touchdown” story, which is supposed to have occurred near Alencon, France, at 5 A.M. on June 12, 1790. A police inspector named Liabeuf was sent from Paris to investigate, and his final report has been preserved. The witnesses, a group of French peasants, told him that an enormous globe had appeared that morning, moving with a rocking motion, and that it crashed into the top of a hill, uprooting the vegetation. Heat from the object started grass fires, and the peasants rushed to put them out before they spread. The huge globe was warm to the touch.
“The eyewitnesses of this event were two mayors, a physician, and three other local authorities who confirm my report,” Liabeuf wrote. “Not to mention the dozens of peasants who were present.”
As the crowd gathered around the mysterious object, “a sort of door opened, and there came out a person, just like us, but dressed in a strange manner, in clothes adhering completely to the body, and seeing this crowd of people, this person murmured something incomprehensible and ran into the wood.”
The peasants backed away from the object fearfully, and a few moments later it exploded silently and nothing was left but a fine powder. A search for the mysterious man was launched, “but he seemed to have dissolved in thin air.”
Here, in 1790, we have a description comparable to the modern ufonaut reports of a man wearing a tight-fitting coverall type of garment.
(According to a story filed by the Lusitania News Service in April 1960, hundreds of villagers in Beira, Mozambique, East Africa, saw a whistling orange object land in a field, and “tiny little men” leaped out of it and ran into the forest just as the thing exploded violently. Those “little men” could not be found, either.)
The Zurich Central Library has an old drawing of the strange event that took place over Germany on April 14, 1561. A large number of “plates,” “blood-colored crosses” and “two great tubes” staged an aerial dogfight on that date, enthralling and frightening the whole population of Nuremberg. Five years later a similar group of objects is said to have appeared over Basel, Switzerland. Some of them turned red and faded away, just as modern UFOs have been reported to do. A sketch of this incident is also in Zurich’s Wickiana collection.
The late Charles Fort, an eccentric but indefatigable researcher, spent much of his life wading through yellowing newspapers and forgotten history books to ferret out Ripleyesque items. Without realizing it, he became the first ufologist, and his Book of the Damned and other works are treasure troves of u
nexplained aerial phenomena. He discovered that 1846, for example, was a most peculiar year. It rained blood-real blood according to the newspaper accounts of the day—in several areas around the world. And all kinds of odd lights and shapes were seen in the sky. Some very peculiar people also turned up in Europe at that time, prancing around the English countryside in silver uniforms, capes, and helmets, with red lights on their chests. These beings were human in size but seemed to possess the ability to leap great distances. So the British newspapers referred to them as “spring-heeled Jacks.” Old Jack got plumb away from all those who turned out to search for him after each one of his puzzling appearances.
On Tuesday, October 3, 1843, a “remarkable cloud” passed over Warwick, England, and one Charles Cooper reported seeing three white, human-shaped figures in the sky. Another person, six miles away, is supposed to have also seen these flying beings. The sighting was added to the constantly growing “angel” lore.
A very important contact with ultraterrestrials took place in France in 1846, when a luminous being descended in a glowing sphere and passed along some prophecies that later proved to be very accurate. This case will be discussed in another chapter.
The whole nineteenth century was a busy one for unidentified flying objects. It was also the century in which man made his first faltering attempts to fly.
A French engineer, Henri Giffard, built the first controllable dirigible in 1852. Powered by a steam engine, it was 144 feet long and whizzed through the sky at a breathtaking seven miles per hour. Paul Haenlein, a German, built a gas-powered dirigible in 1872. And a Hungarian named David Schwartz constructed the first metal dirigible and took off from Berlin on November 13, 1897. He managed to fly several miles before a gas leak brought him down.
While these pioneers were struggling to go a few miles in their slow, clumsy, cigar-shaped machines, thousands of people around the world were reporting the presence of larger, faster dirigible-shaped objects. Astronomers, such as Trouvelot of the Observatory of Meudon, first claimed notice of the things in the early 1870’s. They were high in the atmosphere, he said, and didn’t resemble anything within his experience. Trouvelot described his August 29, 1871, sighting in L ‘Annee Scientifique and observed that one of a formation of objects appeared to descend “like a disk falling in water.” This was the first description of the “falling-leaf motion” that appears in so many modern reports and has even been recorded on film.
Newspaper accounts of these aerial objects were frequent and widespread during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. But the dam really broke in 1896-97 when giant cigars were reportedly viewed by thousands of people as they flew over many of the major cities on earth. Leading newspapers of the day carried extensive descriptions and drawings of them. Their mysterious journeys created the first important UFO flap and inspired H. G. Wells to write his classic novel, The War of the Worlds.
5
The Grand Deception
The “secret” of the flying saucers was exposed in 1896, not by the phenomenon itself but by the hidden patterns now revealed in UFO activity of a single week that November. The pattern was a classic of carefully planned confusion and deception.
Thanksgiving week 1896 marked the beginning of the great “airship mystery” in the United States. Strange luminous objects and cigar-shaped craft were first reported over California. The mayors of both Oakland and San Francisco went on record as having seen the things. All the descriptions as published by the San Francisco Call, San Francisco Chronicle, and other leading journals of the period fell into the now-familiar categories. Brilliant multicolored lights, bobbing and weaving as if they were on yo-yo strings, were seen over Sacramento. People in Oakland reported an egg-shaped vessel about 150 feet long with four rotor-like arms; a giant light mounted underneath. It lit up the ground below.
A San Jose, California, electrician named J. A. Heron claimed that the airship pilots enlisted him to make some repairs on the machine. He was taken to a desolate field north of San Francisco for the job and was rewarded by being taken on a flight to Hawaii. He said the craft made the 4,400-mile trip in twenty-four hours. Later his wife told reporters that he had been home in bed on the night of the alleged trip.
Another man, William Bull Meek of Comptonville, California, told reporters that the airship landed near his home and that he enjoyed a brief chat with the pilot—a bearded man who told him that the ship “had come from the Montezuma Mountains.”
Crews on ships were seeing glowing spheres and saucer-shaped machines rising out of the water and flying away while the Wright brothers were still fussing with gliders. These ocean-bound disks and “wheels” apparently concentrated their activities around the coasts of Japan and China throughout the Gay Nineties, but they were also seen in Europe. News traveled slowly in those days, so it is unlikely that the witnesses in one area had ever heard of the identical sightings that had occurred thousands of miles away. As is still the case today, no newspaper or journalist made an effort to collect all of these reports and collate them into a whole.
In March and April 1897, the airship reports began to spread across the country but seemed to concentrate in the Midwest from Texas to Michigan, the same areas that still account for the largest number of reports.
We are indebted to Dr. Jacques Vallee, Lucius Farish, Charles Flood, and Jerome Clark who have spent many tedious hours examining dusty newspaper files and microfilm collections throughout the country in their search for the published accounts of the 1897 flap. They have unearthed hundreds of forgotten reports, many of them quite startling in content. A study of these reports reveals the same patterns that seem to be present today. Many of the local newspapers assumed that only one airship was involved and that it was the product of some secret inventor who was taking it out for a trial run across the country. But we find that many of the airship sightings took place on the same day in dozens of widely scattered areas, indicating that a whole armada of these objects must have been in the air at the time.
Quite a few of these accounts are as incredible as the reports of modern witnesses. Yet many of the 1897 witnesses were distinguished members of their communities and often signed sworn affidavits to back up their beliefs in what they had seen. There were a number of remarkable consistencies in the reports, and many detailed contactee stories.
Judge Lawrence A. Byrne was, to quote a reporter for the Daily Texarkanian, Texarkana, Arkansas, “known here for his truthfulness by his fellowmen.” On April 25, 1897, that paper published this amazing story: “ I was down on McKinney bayou Friday looking after the surveying of a tract of land and, in passing through a thicket to an open space, saw a strange looking object anchored to the ground. On approaching I found it to be the airship I have read so much about of late. It was manned by three men who spoke a foreign language, but judging from their looks, would take them to be Japs. They saw my astonishment and beckoned me to follow them, and on complying, I was shown through the ship.”
The judge then explained “about the machinery being made of aluminum and the gas to raise and lower the monster was pumped into an aluminum tank when the ship was to be raised and let out when to be lowered.” There is no further description in the account. The most interesting thing about this story is that the judge mistook the pilots for Japanese, perhaps meaning that they were small men with Oriental features similar to the men described in the controversial modern contact story of Betty and Barney Hill.
Can we assume that Judge Byrne was a reliable and responsible witness? One yellowing newspaper clipping doesn’t offer much evidence. But his was not the only 1897 contactee tale. There were scores of others, although no one else reported meeting “Japs.”
Most of the people who claimed to glimpse the airship pilots described them as being bearded. Michigan was very much involved in the 1897 flap, and the Courier-Herald of Saginaw followed the reports closely. On April 16 it ran this story: “Bell Plains, Iowa, April 16—The citizens of Linn Grove declare the
re is no longer any doubt among them of the existence of an airship. Yesterday morning a large object was seen slowly moving in the heavens in a northerly direction and seemed to be making preparations to alight. James Evans, liveryman; F. G. Ellis, harness dealer; Ben Buland, stock dealer; David Evans, and Joe Croskey jumped into a rig and started in pursuit. They found the airship had alighted four miles north of town, and when within 700 yards, it spread its four monstrous wings and flew off toward the north. Its occupants threw out two large boulders of unknown composition, which were taken to the village and are now on exhibition.
“There were two queer looking persons on board, who made desperate attempts to conceal themselves. Evans and Croskey say they had the longest whiskers they ever saw in their lives. Nearly every Citizen in Linn Grove saw the airship as it sailed over the town, and the excitement is intense.”
The Argus-Leader of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, together with many other papers, ran an account on April 15 datelined Springfield, Illinois. Two farmhands, Adolph Winkle and John Hulle, signed affidavits stating that the airship had landed two miles outside of Springfield to repair some electrical apparatus on board. The farmhands said they talked to the occupants, two men and a woman. They were told that the machine had flown to Springfield from Quincy (a distance of about 100 miles) in thirty minutes and would “make a report to the government when Cuba is declared free.”
Two lawmen, Constable John J. Sumpter Jr., and Deputy Sheriff John McLemore of Garland County, Arkansas, signed affidavits on May 8, 1897, testifying that they had also conversed with the airship occupants. Their account was published in the Helena, Arkansas, Weekly World on May 13:
While riding northwest from this city on the night of May 6, 1897, we noticed a brilliant light high in the heavens. Suddenly it disappeared and we said nothing about it, as we were looking for parties and did not want to make any noise. After riding four or five miles around through the hills we again saw the light, which now appeared to be much nearer the earth. We stopped our horses and watched it coming down, until all at once it disappeared behind another hill. We rode on about half a mile further, when our horses refused to go further. About a hundred yards distant we saw two persons moving around with lights. Drawing our Winchesters—for we were now thoroughly aroused to the importance of the situation—we demanded, “Who is that, and what are you doing?” A man with a long dark beard came forth with a lantern in his hand, and on being informed who we were proceeded to tell us that he and the others—a young man and a woman—were traveling through the country in an airship. We could plainly distinguish the outlines of the vessel, which was cigar-shaped and about sixty feet long, and looking just like the cuts that have appeared in the papers recently. It was dark and raining and the young man was filling a big sack with water about thirty yards away, and the woman was particular to keep back in the dark. She was holding an umbrella over her head. The man with the whiskers invited us to take a ride, saying that he could take us where it was not raining. We told him we preferred to get wet.