by John A. Keel
“Many persons looked at the strange find yesterday. It was not generally denounced as a hoax, because as some observing men pointed out, anyone who had fancy airship cards printed was going to unnecessary expense to carry out a joke, while the package could just as well have been placed in some busy thoroughfare.”
Who, indeed, would go to such elaborate lengths to pull off another airship joke? Perhaps the Chicago prankster—if a prankster was responsible—was trying to outdo another prankster in Appleton, Wisconsin, who had planted a similar note only two days before.
The Grand Rapids, Michigan, Evening Press of April 16, 1897 carried this article: “Appleton, Wisconsin, April 15—Many persons in this city declare that they saw an airship pass over the city last Sunday night. Last night on the farm of N. B. Clark, north of the city, a letter was picked up attached to an iron rod eighteen inches long sticking in the ground. The letter, which was not signed, is as follows:
“’Aboard the airship Pegasus, April 9, 1897—The problem of aerial navigation has been solved. The writers have spent the past month cruising about in the airship Pegasus and have demonstrated to their entire satisfaction that the ship is a thorough success. We have been able to attain a speed of 150 miles an hour and have risen to a height of 2,500 feet above sea level.
“’The Pegasus was erected at a secluded point ten miles from Lafayette, Tennessee, and the various parts of the machine were carried overland from Glasgow, Kentucky to that point, being shipped from Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. We have made regular trips of three days each from Lafayette to Yaukon, and no harm has come to the Pegasus thus far.
“’Within a month our application for the patents for a parallel plane airship will be filed simultaneously at Washington and the European capitals. The ship is propelled by steam and is lighted by electricity, and has a carrying power of 1,000 pounds.’”
So now there were two airships—the noble Pegasus and the Saratoga. This second note confirmed what the contactees claimed they were being told—that it was a secret invention and soon patents would be filed and the whole world would know. Even today it would be difficult to build a steam-powered lighter-than-air-craft. For steam you need lots of water—well, apparently the airship crews were draining wells all around the country—but you also need lots of fuel: heavy coal or wood with which to heat the water. And if your airship can lift only 1,000 pounds, you wouldn’t be able to carry much of either. No, the story has the smell of dead fish to it.
The very day after the Grand Rapids Evening Press published the above, a new message from the airship turned up—in Grand Rapids. A man named C. T. Smith, an employee of a furniture company “who has always been considered honorable and truthful,” was on his way to work at 6:15 A.M. when he found a piece of stiff wire about five inches long. At one end was attached “one of the iron combination stoppers and bottle openers commonly used to open beer bottles,” apparently as a weight, and on the other end an envelope was fastened. “From the Airship Travelers” was scrawled on the outside, and it contained a piece of notepaper bearing a new message written in purple indelible pencil. It read:
To whoever finds this:
[We are] 2,500 feet above the level of the sea, headed north at this writing, testing the airship. Afraid we are lost. We are unable to control our engine. Please notify our people. Think we are somewhere over Michigan.
Arthur B. Coats, Laurel, Mississippi
C. C. Harris, Gulfport, Mississippi
C. W. Rich, Richburg, Mississippi
April 16, 1897. 9 P.M.
The Grand Rapids paper added:
That the airship is a wonderful reality is now assured, and that it passed through the vicinity of the corner of South Division and Williams streets is a fact that is founded upon the most irrefragable proof [that is apparently where the note was found]. Mr. Smith, who found the letter, positively avers that he is not a drinking man and never owned a beer stopper in his life.
Three of the night men employed by the Wallin Leather Company are very sure they saw the airship last night.
In Omaha, Nebraska, preparations were under way for a large Transmississippi Exposition, so it was only logical for the great airship inventor to bid for attention there. On April 13, the secretary of the Exposition received the following tidbit in his mail:
To the Exposition Director:
My identity up to date has been unknown, but I will come to the front now; i.e., if you will guarantee me 870,000 square feet of space. I am the famous airship constructor and will guarantee you positively of this fact in a week. The airship is my own invention and I am an Omaha man. I wish it to be held as an Omaha invention. It will safely carry twenty people to a height of from 10,000 to 20,000 feet. I truly believe I have the greatest invention and discovery ever made. Will see you April 17, 1897 at the headquarters.
[Signed] A. C. Clinton
Perhaps Mr. Clinton was aboard the ill-fated, out-of-control craft that sailed over Michigan into limbo. In any case, he didn’t show up on the seventeenth, but several UFOs and airships were busy in five states that night.
Aside from bottle openers and half-eaten lunches, a number of other odd objects were dumped by the mysterious airship pilots. A half-peeled potato fell overboard above Atchinson, Kansas, and a Canadian newspaper dated October 5, 1896, was dropped at the feet of Daniel Gray, a farmer, in Burton, Michigan. Gray said he had been working in his field on Friday, April 23, when he heard a rumbling sound in the sky and saw a dark object rushing past. The paper fluttered down from it and “was dry and well preserved and suffered little, if any, injury in its flight from the heavens.” (Saginaw, Michigan, Globe, April 26, 1897)
All of these things could have been simple hoaxes, of course, but in forthcoming chapters we will describe some uneasily similar incidents that have happened in more recent years. Part of my research in the past four years has been devoted to a reexamination of the alleged UFO hoaxes, and I am now convinced that many of these hoaxes were actually engineered deliberately—and successfully—to discredit the UFO phenomenon.
Let’s review briefly some of the salient points in this chapter:
(1) It is obvious that a great many unidentified flying objects were present in our skies in 1897.
(2) It is also obvious that they were manned by at least three different types of beings: (a) the regular types, some with beards and including women, as reported by several of the contactees of the period; (b) the Oriental type, the “Japs” as reported by Judge Byrne; (c) the unidentifiable creatures described by Alexander Hamilton.
(3) It sounds as if some of them, the stranger types, made a real effort to hide from witnesses who stumbled upon them accidentally.
(4) The occupants of these craft knew a great deal about us, were able to speak and possibly write our languages. If they were just fresh in from Mars, this would have been very unlikely.
Allow me now to do some educated speculating based upon my experiences with more recent situations. Let us assume that an unknown group of well-organized individuals, some of them quite alien from us in appearance, speech, etc., found it expedient to conduct a large-scale “survey” of the midwestern United States in 1897 by air. Because no aircraft existed in the United States at that time, they knew that they might attract undue attention, and attention was the one thing they did not want. They didn’t want us even to know that they existed, and if we became conscious of their aircraft, we would automatically become aware of them. So they had to devise a plan by which this “invasion” would go relatively unnoticed, or at least seem harmless.
In 1897, everyone had at least heard of lighter-than-air craft. Crude dirigibles had already been flown in Europe, and pictures and drawings had appeared in American newspapers and magazines. So the obvious ploy for the people I call ultraterrestrials would be to construct a few craft that at least resembled dirigibles and make sure that they were seen in several places by many people, such as Chicago. These decoys would get a lot of publicity, a
nd from then on everything that anyone saw in the sky would be classed as “the airship,” even if it were shaped like a doughnut and had a big hole in the middle.
Such a plan had to go further, however, because the aerial activity was going to be most intense in some areas. Some kind of explanation for the mystery airship had to be tendered. This could best be done by staging deliberate landings in relatively remote places and contacting a few random individuals, telling them the “secret invention” story, and letting them spread the word. To add support to it, notes would be dropped occasionally confirming what the contactees were saying, and even a few ordinary artifacts such as half-peeled potatoes and foreign newspapers could be added to the stew.
Because some—or maybe most—of the ultraterrestrials looked very much like us, they would be assigned to occupy the decoys. The other objects, the real vehicles to be employed in this operation, would carefully remain aloof.
To lend further confusion to the situation, some of the contactees would be told ridiculous things that would discredit not only them but the whole mystery. Knowing how we think and how we search for consistencies, the ultraterrestrials were careful to sow inconsistencies in their wake. And they staged some outrageous stunts, such as singing loudly as they flew over Farmersville, Texas, on April 19, or playing a phonograph or other instrument over Fontanelle, Iowa, on April 12. When the startled townspeople reported hearing an orchestra playing in the sky, newspapers whooped and heaped ridicule on the story.
Was there an airship or wasn’t there? Thousands saw it and became convinced, but millions read all of these conflicting tales and remained skeptical. Obviously, to the uninformed reader of 1897, there was only one airship and it was experimental—it was always breaking down somewhere. But what were those great, multilighted forms hurtling back and forth across the sky every night? Oh, just the airship.
Where were they going? Where were they coming from? Well, they were built by a secret inventor in Nebraska—or Tennessee—or Iowa—or Boston. Take your pick. That inventor kept his secret well. He never filed for his patents. Like a gentleman, he waited until Count Zeppelin took off in his first rigid airship on July 2, 1900, and flew 3.5 miles at 18 mph before his steering gear failed.
Recently a great British authority, Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, MA, FMA, stated: “Speaking as an aeronautical historian who specializes in the periods before 1910, I can say with certainty that the only airborne vehicles, carrying passengers, which could possibly have been seen anywhere in North America in 1897 were free spherical balloons, and it is highly unlikely for these to be mistaken for anything else. No form of dirigible [i.e., a gasbag propelled by an airscrew] or heavier-than-air flying machine was flying—or indeed could fly—at this time in America.”
But if there was no secret inventor, and if there’s no such thing as unidentified flying objects, then who or what was buzzing Eldora, Iowa, in 1897? And why have they chosen to go back there again and again ever since?
If I lived in Eldora, I’d sure as hell demand that somebody find out.
6
Flexible Phantoms of the Sky
The Wednesday phenomenon is quite evident in the historical events as well as in the contemporary sightings. A disproportionate number of UFO events seem to be concentrated on Wednesdays and Saturdays, particularly the landing and contact cases. The frequency of the Wednesday/Saturday events immediately removes the phenomenon from a framework of chance or coincidence. After I discovered this basic pattern in 1966-67, other researchers checked it with their own data and verified it. Historian Lucius Farish uncovered a number of early statements and cases which further indicated that this Wednesday phenomenon had been observed and reported upon long ago.
In Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel by Angelo S. Rappaport, the following statement appears: “Concerning ‘demons:’ They lodge in trees, caper bushes, in gardens, vineyards, in ruined and desolate houses, and dirty places. To go alone into such places is dangerous, and the eves of Wednesday and Saturday were considered dangerous times. Agrath [daughter of the she-demon Makhlath] commands hosts of evil spirits and demons and rides in a big chariot. Her power is paramount on Wednesdays and Saturdays, for on these days Agrath, the daughter of Makhlath, roves about in the air accompanied by eighteen myriads of evil spirits.”
Not only do our unusual events show a decided preference for Wednesdays and Saturdays, but the early cases contain many of the same features found in the modern events. Blinding searchlights were frequently described in the reports of the nineteenth century, and such searchlights remain one of the consistent features of the modern sightings. The arc light had been invented in the nineteenth century, but searchlights utilizing it required considerable power either in the form of many heavy batteries or a powerful generator driven by a steam or gasoline engine. This kind of equipment would add too much weight to any known aircraft of the period and would have been completely impractical. The only available lights in the 1890s and early 1900s were dim incandescent lights, and they would not have produced the blinding glare so often described in these reports. The few automobiles of that time used kerosene or gasoline lanterns as headlights. It was not until the middle 1960s that airliners and military planes began regularly to employ powerful strobe lights and new, more brilliant landing lights. The landing lights are, of course, used only during takeoffs and descents. The strobe lights are now often mounted on the tops and bottoms of the fuselage and flash off and on with a brilliant white glare. They are easily recognizable and seldom mistaken for the prismatic UFO lights. There has also been some recent experimentation with searchlights mounted on helicopters. Let’s compare a searchlight story of 1875 with a more recent one.
Harold I. Velt’s The Sacred Book of Ancient America quotes from a contemporary account by J. J. Cornish:
On account of working at daily labor this baptism was performed on Wednesday, late in the evening of December 29, 1875, an intensely dark night. After our prayer meeting Mrs. John Taylor and Miss Sarah Lively were baptized by me in the River Thames in London, Ontario, Canada[6] when suddenly there came a very beautiful light from heaven, which rested on all—both members and nonmembers—brighter than the sun at noonday… It came down with a sound like a mighty rushing wind. We could hear it far above in the distance, and as it reached the place where we stood we were enveloped in the brightest and most beautiful light I ever saw—the glory of the Lord. The light was round, straight up and down, like a shaft from heaven to earth, and just as bright on the inside edge as it was in the center, and so far as we could see it was just as dark on the outer edge as it was a mile away… After baptism and dismissal the light did not go out, but gradually went up until it vanished from our sight…
Here we seem to have had a directed and controlled beam of electromagnetic energy (which is what light is) that did not reflect on the area outside of the immediate beam. This is commonly described by UFO witnesses. The witnesses to the Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, landing in 1966 reported that the angular object which settled onto a beach was projecting several beams of concentrated light in all directions. The peculiar thing about these beams was that they seemed to go out from the object and extend to different lengths, not fading into the darkness but terminating suddenly like poles or rods of light. Some of these beams were said to have darted into the forests on the edge of the beach as if they were “looking for something.”
In April 1966, Robert Howard was visiting some friends on a farm outside Sinclairville, New York, when a UFO showed up at 8:30 P.M. on a Sunday evening. Howard and several others stepped outside to watch what they described as “a saucer-shaped object about 12 feet in diameter, with flashing red lights set in its edge.” It settled in a nearby swamp. Howard headed across the fields toward the object while more people gathered. The thing appeared to be beaming a very narrow stream of brilliant white light into a nearby woods. As Howard neared it, he says it bobbed to the right and took off over the treetops. For days after the incident his right ey
e was puffy, bloodshot, and watery.
Cherry Creek, New York, only a few miles from Sinclairville, was the site of an alleged landing on Thursday, August 19, 1965. Presque Isle in Erie, Pennsylvania, is just south of this area.
The UFO wave in Australia and New Zealand has been most intense, and another interesting “light beam” story was investigated there by researcher Dr. Paul Zeck, a psychiatrist, in 1967. The witness, a prominent businessman named A. R. Spargo (“an employer of a large labor force”), was driving alone near Boyup Brook in Western Australia when the incident reportedly occurred. It was about 9 P.M. on the night of Monday, October 30, 1967. Suddenly his car stopped, and his lights and radio went dead. A brilliant beam of light seemed to be focused upon him. It came from “a mushroom-shaped craft, 30 feet or more in diameter, hovering above the treetops at an estimated 100 feet above the ground.” The object itself was glowing with an iridescent bluish light. The beam seemed to be coming from the underside at an angle of 40 degrees.
“I seemed to be surrounded by the beam,” Spargo said. “It was two to three feet in diameter, and brilliant on the outside. Yet I could see up it, and there was no glare or anything inside the tube… I had the most extraordinary feeling that I was being observed through the tube. I couldn’t see anyone—I could just make out the shape of the glowing craft. I felt compelled to look up the tube. But I didn’t feel any fear, and I don’t remember thinking of anything in particular.
“After about five minutes it was switched off—just like someone switching off an ordinary electric light. The color of the craft seemed to darken, then it accelerated very swiftly and disappeared toward the west at terrific speed.”