19th Century Chupacabras

While thumbing through one of my paranormal books the other night, I came across a familiar story. A group of sheep farmers were upset because something was attacking and killing their livestock. The creature was not, however, eating the sheep. According to witnesses,  it was biting their jugulars and, apparently, draining them of blood. If this sounds familiar to you, hold your assumptions for just a second. The above the story comes not from Puerto Rico in 1995, instead Charle Fort relates the account in his book Lo! (which I of course read in The Book of the Damned) written in 1931. Fort tells readers:

In the month of May, 1810, something appeared at Ennerdale, near the border of England and Scotland, and killed sheep, not devouring them, sometimes seven or eight of them in a night, but biting into the jugular vein and sucking the blood.

As far back as 1810, something  was roaming the countryside, draining livestock of blood. Fort goes on to describe how a large “dog” was killed. At which point the killings ceased. That this is anything more than a convenient explanation seems obvious to Fort. He has already spent much of Lo! showing readers how a satisfying answer to a problem, no matter how much data is ignored, is almost always preferable to a real mystery. He tells of more sheep killings in the same manner:

For about four months, in the year 1874, beginning upon January 8th, a killer was abroad, in Ireland. In Land and Water, March 7, 1874, a correspondent writes that he had heard of depredations by a wolf, in Ireland, where the last native wolf had been killed in the year 1712. According to him, a killer was running wild, in Cavan, slaying as many as 30 sheep in one night. There is another account, in Land and Water, March 28. Here, a correspondent writes that, in Cavan, sheep had been killed in a way that led to the belief that the marauder was not a dog.

This correspondent knew of 42 instances, in three townlands, in which sheep had been similarly killed—throats cut and blood sucked, but no flesh eaten. The footprints were like a dog's, but were long and narrow, and showed traces of strong claws. Then, in the issue of April 11th, of Land and Water, came the news that we have been expecting. The killer had been shot. It had been shot by Archdeacon Magenniss, at Lismoreville, and was only a large dog.

Other towns seemed to have encounters with a same, or similar, creature. This time it was a bit different in that no matter how many “dogs”, who were most assuredly the culprit, were shot it did not stop the killings. Fort tells us:

See the Clare Journal, issues up to April 27th—the shooting of the large dog, and no effect upon the depredations—another dog shot, and the relief of the farmers, who believed that this one was the killer—still another dog shot, and supposed to be the killer—the killing of sheep continuing. The depredations were so great as to be described as "terrible losses for poor people." It is not definitely said that something was killing sheep vampirishly, but that "only a piece was bitten off, and no flesh sufficient for a dog ever eaten."

The scene of the killings shifted.

Cavan Weekly News, April 17—that, near Limerick, more than 100 miles from Cavan, "a wolf or something like it" was killing sheep. The writer says that several persons, alleged to have been bitten by this animal, had been taken to the Ennis Insane Asylum, "laboring under strange symptoms of insanity."

It seems that some of the killings were simultaneous near Cavan and near Limerick. At both places, it was not said that finally any animal, known to be the killer, was shot or identified. If these things that may not be dogs be, their disappearances are as mysterious as their appearances.

The creature’s reign of terror was far from over. By 1905, similar attacks were occurring in England. Fort relates:

There was a marauding animal in England, toward the end of the year 1905. London Daily Mail, Nov. 1, 1905—"the sheep-slaying mystery of Badminton." It is said that, in the neighborhood of Badminton, on the border between Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, sheep had been killed. Sergeant Carter, of the Gloucestershire Police, is quoted—"I have seen two of the carcasses, myself, and can say definitely that it is impossible for it to be the work of a dog. Dogs are not vampires, and do not suck the blood of a sheep, and leave the flesh almost untouched."

It’s not hard to see the similarities between the nature of the attacks on these sheep and the later attacks by the ‘Chupacabra’. Is it possible that this could have been done by the same kind of creature? In some of the cases sighted by Fort, the mysterious phenomena went away without the “resolution” of having killed a dog or wolf. Ending as strangely as it began. This habit of mysterious phenomena starting and stopping suddenly is really par for the course. UFOs are often sighted in “Flaps” or “Waves”, so to is Bigfoot. Perhaps we are dealing with some kind of natural phenomena which is cyclical in nature? This idea is certainly not unique to me and in fact I believe I first read it in Keel’s books.

Could the above reports be of an actual Chupacabra in the 19th century? By all accounts it certainly bears a strong resemblance. As with most of this Fortean/Paranormal stuff, we are left only to wonder and marvel at the interesting accounts left to us. 

Charles Fort's X-Men

One of Charles Fort’s books which I haven’t spent a lot of time with in the past is his final one; Wild Talents. In this work, Fort collects reports and accounts of human beings with occult or paranormal gifts or powers. If he had been so inclined, Fort might have collected these individuals together and formed his own ‘School for Gifted Youngsters’. For those not aware, the school is the headquarters and training grounds of Marvel’s X-Men. At this school, Charles Xavier (Professor X) recruits mutants, beings with incredible powers, and teaches them to harness and control their powers so that they can live in harmony with human beings.

Though Professor X and his school may be fictional, Fort documents case after case of people in the real world who exhibit similar kinds of amazing feats. OK, so you don’t have a guy with claws coming out of his hands who also  has an amazing regenerative abilities, but you get the idea. I’ve picked out a few to highlight, though I highly suggest you read his book for yourself.  In some of the instances cited below, it might be more appropriate to label the perpetrators as “super-villains” rather than “super-heroes” as many of the persons used(abused) their “powers” for more material gains.

First up, Fort talks about a bank which was robbed. In broad daylight. In front of multiple witnesses. By an unseen, or invisible, criminal. The story is as follows;

"A bank in Blackpool was robbed, in broad daylight, on Saturday, in mysterious circumstances"—so says the London Daily Telegraph, Aug. 7, 1926. It was one of the largest establishments in town—the Blackpool branch of the Midland Bank. At noon, Saturday, while the doors were closing, an official of the Corporation Tramways Department went into the building, with a bag, which contained £800, in Treasury notes. In the presence of about twenty-five customers, he placed the bag upon a counter. Then the doorman unlocked the front door for him to go out, and then return with another amount of money, in silver, from a motor van. The bag had vanished from the counter. It was a large, leather bag. Nobody could, without making himself conspicuous, try to conceal it. Nobody wearing a maternity cloak was reported.

In the afternoon, in a side street, near the bank, the bag was found, and was taken to a police station. But the lock on it was peculiar and complicated, and the police could not open it. An official of the Tramways Department was sent for. When the Tramways man arrived with the key, no money was found in the bag. If a bag can vanish from a bank, without passing the doorman, I record no marvel in telling of money that vanished from a bag, though maybe the bag had not been opened.

Fort tells of more burglaries committed by person’s who could neither be seen nor apprehended by the police:

New York Evening Post, March 14, 1928—people in a block of houses, in the Third District of Vienna, terrorized. They were "haunted by a mysterious person," who entered houses, and stole small objects, never taking money, doing these things just to show what he could do. Then, from dusk to dawn, the police formed in a cordon around this block, and at approaches to it stationed police dogs. The disappearances of small objects, of little value, continued.

Two more strange thefts before we move on to other display’s of occult power:

Upon the afternoon of June 18, 1907, occurred one of the most sensational, insolent, contemptible, or magnificent thefts in the annals of crime, as viewed by most Englishmen; or a crime not without a little interest to Americans. On a table, on the lawn back of the grandstand, at Ascot, the Ascot Cup was upon exhibition, 13 inches high, and 6 inches in diameter; 20-carat gold; weight 68 ounces. The cup was guarded by a policeman and by a representative of the makers. The story is told, in the London Times, June 19th. Presumably all around was a crowd, kept at a distance by the policeman, though, according to the standards of the Times, in the year 1907, it was not dignified to go into details much. From what I know of the religion of the Turf, in England, I assume that there was a crowd of devotees, looking worshipfully at this ikon. It wasn't there.

About this time, there were a place and a time and a treasure that were worthy the attention of, or that were a challenge to, any magician. The place was Dublin Castle. Outside, day and night, a policeman and a soldier were on duty. Within a distance of fifty yards were the headquarters of the Dublin metropolitan police; of the Royal Irish Constabulary; the Dublin detective force; the military garrison.

It was at the time of the Irish International Exhibition, at Dublin. Upon the 10th of July, King Edward and Queen Alexandra were to arrive to visit the Exhibition. In a safe in the strong room of the Castle had been kept the jewels that were worn by the Lord Lieutenant, upon State occasions. They were a barbaric pile of bracelets, rings, and other insignia, of a value of $250,000. And of course. They had disappeared about the time of the disappearance of the Ascot Cup: sometime between June firth and July 6th.

Within the Marvel universe there are a number of super-powered persons that have fire as their source of power. So too in reality do we have a few accounts of pyrokinetics. Fort tells us about the following cases:

New Zealand Times, Dec. 9, 1886—copying from the San Francisco Bulletin, about October 14—that Willie Brough, 12 years old, who had caused excitement in the town of Turlock, Madison Co., Cal., by setting things afire, "by his glance," had been expelled from the Turlock school, because of his freaks.

His parents had cast him off, believing him to be possessed by a devil, but a farmer had taken him in, and had sent him to school. "On the first day, there were five fires in the school: one in the center of the ceiling, one in the teacher's desk, one in her wardrobe, and two on the wall. The boy discovered all, and cried from fright. The trustees met and expelled him, that night." For another account, see the New York Herald, Oct. 16, 1886.

Another:

New York Herald, Jan. 6, 1895—fires in the home of Adam Colwell, 84 Guernsey Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn—that, in 20 hours, preceding noon, January 5th, when Colwell's frame house burned down, there had been many fires. Policemen had been sent to investigate. They had seen furniture burst into flames. Policemen and firemen had reported that the fires were of unknown origin. The Fire Marshal said: "It might be thought that the child Rhoda started two of the fires, but she cannot be considered guilty of the others, as she was being questioned, when some of them began. I do not want to be quoted as a believer in the supernatural, but I have no explanation to offer, as to the cause of the fires, or of the throwing around of the furniture."

….

Captain Rhoades, of the Greenpoint Precinct, said: "The people we arrested had nothing to do with the strange fires. The more I look into it, the deeper the mystery. So far I can attribute it to no other cause than a supernatural agency. Why, the fires broke out under the very noses of the men I sent to investigate."

Sergeant Dunn—"There were things that happened before my eyes that I did not believe were possible."

We shall end our tour of Fort’s X-Men with his musings on the ‘poltergeist’ phenomena and how it may actually represent a kind of occult power or a re-imagining of the old stories of “witchcraft”. Fort tells us:

My general expression is against the existence of poltergeists as spirits—but that the doings are the phenomena of undeveloped magicians, mostly youngsters, who have no awareness of their powers as their own—or, in the cases of mischievous, or malicious, persecutions, are more or less consciously directed influences by enemies—or that, in this aspect, "poltergeist disturbances" are witchcraft under a new name.

He then provides us with some accounts which seem to suggest that witchcraft may still be alive and well:

New York newspapers reported three cases, close together, in the year 1927. New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 12, 1927—Fred Koett and his wife compelled to move from their home, near Ellenwood, Kansas. For months this house had been bewitched—pictures turned to the wall—other objects moving about—their pet dog stabbed with a pitchfork, by an invisible.

New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 12, 1927—Frank Decker's barn, near Fredon, N. J., destroyed by fire. For five years there had been unaccountable noises, opening and shutting doors, and pictures on walls swinging back and forth.

Home News (Bronx), Nov. 27, 1927—belief of William Blair, County Tyrone, Ireland, that his cattle were bewitched. He accused a neighbor, Isabella Hazelton, of being a witch—"witch" sued him for slander—£5 and costs.

And lastly:

An elderly woman, Mme. Blerotti, had called upon the Magistrate of the Ste. Marguerite district of Paris, and had told him that, at the risk of being thought a madwoman, she had a complaint to make against somebody unknown. She lived in a flat, in the Rue Montreuil, with her son and her brother. Every time she entered the flat, she was compelled by some unseen force to walk on her hands, with her legs in the air.

The woman was detained by the magistrate, who sent a policeman to the address given. The policeman returned with Mme. Blerotti's son, a clerk, aged 27. "What my mother has told you, is true," he said. "I do not pretend to explain it. I only know that when my mother, my uncle, and myself enter the flat, we are immediately impelled to walk on our hands." M. Paul Reiss, aged fifty, the third occupant of the flat, was sent for.

"It is perfectly true," he said. "Everytime I go in, I am irresistibly impelled to walk around on my hands." The concierge of the house was brought to the magistrate. "To tell the truth," he said, "I thought that my tenants had gone mad, but as soon as I entered the rooms occupied by them, I found myself on all fours, endeavoring to throw my feet in the air."

The magistrate concluded that here was an unknown malady. He ordered that the apartments should be disinfected.

As someone who grew up on comic books and various other forms of fantasy, it doesn’t take much to convince me that some people, consciously or unconsciously, have access to abilities or powers beyond what the rest of us have. Could there be more prosaic explanations for these accounts, possibly. I certainly don’t rule it out. But the sheer volume of the reports, many which have similar circumstances, seem to suggest that something else is going on. Perhaps these powers or abilities are vestigial remains from pre-history, as Fort has suggested in Lo!. Maybe they represent the next step in gradual human evolution, not unlike the X-Men comics.

High Strangeness

A good portion of my childhood, and most of the origins for my interest in paranormal/fortean topics, stems from The X-Files. So most weekends while doing homework, I have the show on in the background thanks to it being on Netflix.  I watched one of my favorite episodes this past weekend. The episode is called ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’. It centered around an author, Jose Chung played by the late Charles Nelson Reilly, who was sent by his publisher to write a book on an alleged alien abduction event which Mulder and Scully had also investigated. The episode is not only a fantastic example of what makes the X-Files great; it has humor, mystery, celebrity guest stars, but it is also does a great job representing all of the related weirdness which is inexplicably related to the UFO enigma.

In the episode, which I highly recommend you watch, you have military abductions, alien abductions, inner earth new-age religions being founded, military personnel impersonating aliens and flying “UFOs”, and Men in Black! About the only thing not included, probably because it was already a jam packed episode, is the poltergeist or “ghost” activity that sometimes follows or precedes UFO encounters.  A good catch-all term for the related phenomena which occurs in tandem with UFO sightings and alien abductions is ‘High Strangeness’.

Dr. J Allen Hynek, of “swamp gas” fame, first used the term in a paper which he presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1969. Hynek assigned cases a “strangeness” index as means of offering some kind of classification for UFO reports. Hynek further clarifies and defines this concept in his 1974 book The UFO Experience wherein he states that high strangeness is “a measure of the number of information bits the report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common-sense terms.”  

Stories and personal accounts which involve “High Strangeness” have always fascinated, especially when it comes to the investigators responses towards this aspect of the phenomenon. I was looking over some specific MUFON case files from the 90’s when I came across a really weird encounter which someone had, related below, but there was a caveat before the report which bothered me. In setting up the witnesses encounters, the investigators note that “Background paranormal events have not been included in this report.” I don’t wish to go off on a tangent, but since we know nothing about what may or may not be behind this phenomena, why not include all points of data? (I suppose that is the Fortean in me coming out).

Anyway, after reading some of the witnesses experiences, I couldn't help but wonder what in the world they had left out? As it stands some of her stories certainly qualify as high strange even with MUFON investigators leaving out the “background paranormal” events. Here’s a link to all of her experiences, but I wish to focus on one really bizarre encounter the witness had with an entity she called “Marcus”. Her account is as follows:

The witness was awakened to see an entity, in the form of a human(oid) male floating to the right side of the foot of her bed.  She indicated that when she saw the entity she knew that it was male, and that she knew who he was.  She was told, in a nonverbal manner, that his name was "Marcus", and he was there for her. She felt that their relationship was, in some way, very close.

She described the entity as being tall, and approximately human in appearance, but with a catlike face.  She described his appearance as "a cross between Worf (on Star Trek) and the beast "Vincent" in the TV show Beauty and the Beast". He appeared to be dressed in a manner that suggested to her a military officer from an earlier time period, with an apparent breast plate arranged in a chevron design.

The entity held his hands out to her, palms up, and she instinctively knew to put her hands in his.  She indicated that she then rose up, and he pulled her in closer to him.  [CL Note: She indicates that she was under the covers when the entity appeared.  If this was a physical movement, it is not clear how the bed covers were removed.]

At that point she felt that they were within a ball of light, and as if they were "dancing".  She didn't remember any sound, and was not sure whether or not they were still within the room, but felt that
there was not enough space within the room to have "danced" in the manner which they presently were.  Thus, she feels that they must have been somewhere else while this interaction occurred.  She indicates that this "dance" felt more like a "complete spiritual union", than physical motion to music (the traditional definition of dance). She did not feel that there was music present.

The witness sketched “Marcus” for our benefits, I admit I do enjoy seeing the person’s representation of the figures they have allegedly seen. Here is here sketch:

I would like to highlight the “aftermath” as the investigators labeled it, because I think it is an important detail which crops up in a lot of these kinds of reports. It’s something which Jacques Vallee pointed out in a number of his books. The investigators relate:

This event appears to be the start of her consciously remembered experiences.  She indicates that since that time, she has been very interested in spiritual topics, reading extensively in the area religion and spirituality, with subsequent interest in the field of UFOs and close encounters.

I don’t know what to make of cases such as this one. It wanted to dance with her? Let’s assume for a moment that it was an ET, could it not find a dance partner on it’s home planet? I’m slightly joking of course, I don’t mean to belittle the witness or her account. Honestly, I’m perplexed by what it is she allegedly experienced. Though she is not the only one. John Keel’s books are full of high strangeness encounters which people have purportedly had. I recently spoke about The Case of Indrid Cold, which is but one example of the variety of high strangeness reports which Keel spoke about.

In his book Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places, author Brad Steiger relates another classic example of high strangeness which accompanies a, relatively, mundane UFO sighting. The story is below:

An Iowa farmer named Gary C. saw a UFO one night as he was working late in the field during spring plowing. The next morning over breakfast, he learned that his wife, Melanie, 14-year-old son Jake, and 12-year-old daughter Lisa had also seen the bright object as the kids were getting ready for bed.

That day at school, a man who claimed to be from the state board of education asked to interview Jake. He told the principal of the junior high school that the boy had attracted attention because of his high scores in the state tests and that Jake had been selected to participate in a special educational project ... A call to the state office revealed that they had no one on their staff by the man’s name, and they had no special project for junior high students in progress.

When the principal entered the private room to confront the imposter, he found a puzzled Jake sitting alone. The teenager could only shrug that the special state project must be about space travel, for all the man asked him were questions about UFOS, aliens, and life on other planets. Jake had glanced away from his interrogator for just a moment, and when he looked back at him, he seemed to have vanished.

About the time that Jake was being interviewed by the mysterious stranger at school, out on the farm Gary and Melanie received a visit from two men dressed in black while they were eating lunch. The men identified themselves as agents of a special government task force investigating UFOS and said they had learned that the family had sighted a bright object in the sky on the previous evening.

Melanie and Gary were puzzled, since they had not told anyone of their sighting. The alleged government agents suddenly adopted a threatening manner and demanded that Melanie and Gary turn over any photographs they may have taken of the UFO. The farm couple said that they had taken no photographs, but the two agents refused to accept their denials and threatened that they had better cooperate if they knew what was good for them. “You must cooperate,” the taller of the two men said, “for your own good, the good of your country, the good of your world.”

Later that afternoon, Gary was certain that he saw the two men watching him from the shadows of his machine shed while he fed the cattle on the feedlot. In the farmhouse, Melanie answered the telephone on four occasions to hear nothing but a peculiar static. Finally, on the fifth ring, a voice in a strange accent told her to forget all she knew about UFOs or terrible things would happen to her entire family.

That night, shortly after the children went to bed, Lisa began screaming that some animal had crawled under her covers. When Gary and Melanie investigated, they found nothing, but then Jake yelled that his bed was jumping up and down. As they ran to his room, they could hear the thumping sounds of his bed lifting and slamming to the floor. Such poltergeistic disturbances continued on a nightly basis for nearly a week before dissipating.

What are we to make of these strange tales? Why would strange “government” agents show up after a sighting of a light in the sky? Why would the family see strange creatures and experience poltergeist-like activity following the sighting? It seems obvious that something peculiar is going on. I remain unconvinced that we will ever have an “answer” or solution to the UFO enigma, but I think that by looking into the High Strangeness reports (or the “damned data”) we may come closer to an understanding. Otherwise we will have failed to learn the lesson which Charles Fort attempted to teach. Data, no matter how bizarre or strange, needs to be taken into account. 

Airships and Secret Inventors

That the UFO enigma didn’t start in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold’s Mt. Rainier sighting is fairly obvious to anyone who has read any UFO literature. The same, or very similar, phenomena has taken a variety of forms over the past hundred years or so. In the 1930’s Scandinavia was home to the so-called ‘Ghost Fliers’ which John Keel wrote about in his book Our Haunted Planet. These Ghost fliers would perform a variety of maneuvers which would seem to defy conventional wisdom; flying at night with no lights, flying in dangerous weather conditions, or killing their engines and seeming to glide before having the engine turn back on. Some time later you had the Ghost Rockets in Sweden in the mid to late 40’s which were whipping and zipping throughout the skies. Micah Hanks has recently written a book which discusses Ghost Rockets in detail, appropriately titled The Ghost Rocket Mystery.

These mysteries are all well and good, representing strange objects occupying our skies for reasons completely unknown to us. Today however I would like to turn the clock back and look at a mystery which occurred some 30 or 40 yrs before the coming of the phantom planes, when our skies hosted another kind of technology that seemed to be just outside of what conventional technology might have allowed. I’m speaking about the great airship mystery of the 19th century, and some in the 20th century, which flew all over parts of the US, Canada, and eventually made its way to Europe.

Jerome Clark discusses the Airship mystery in his, oft cited by me, Unexplained!. He points out something that I think is worth noting;

An outbreak of airship reports occurred along the border of Germany and Russian Poland in early 1892. As would be the case with later airship scares, the Germans were thought to have developed advanced aircraft that could fly against the wind (unlike balloons) and hover for extended periods of time. No such aircraft existed at the time

This idea that, so far as we are aware, no aircraft like those that were reported existed really fascinates me. It’s an idea which we will return to at the end of the post. For now, let us head to California in 1896 where the great airship flap is about to begin. Clark continues;

Beginning in mid-November 1896, numerous witnesses in both urban and rural portions of the state reported seeing fast-moving or stationary nocturnal lights assumed to be connected to airships. Daylight sightings typically were of a device that “somewhat resembled a balloon traveling end on ... and with what appeared to be wings both before and behind the [bottom] light,” as the San Francisco Call  of November 22 put it, or of a “great black cigar with a fishlike tail … at least 100 feet long” with a surface that “looked as if it were made of aluminum,” as the Oakland Tribune of December 1 had it. In some cases, observers reported seeing propellers.

Not surprising to anyone, in his book New Lands (which I read in Steinmeyer’s version of Fort’s The Book of the Damned.), Fort took an interest in sightings of supposed “mystery airships” (as he referred to them) and in one instance he remarked about something which I found rather amusing;

Upon the 28th of April, 1897, Venus was in inferior conjunction. In Popular Astronomy, 555, it is said that many persons had written to the Editor, telling of “airships” that had been seen about this time. The Editor writes that some of the observations were probably upon the planet Venus, but that others probably related to toy balloons, “which were provided with various colored lights”

Evidently, Venus has always been to blame for strange things spotted in the sky! Fort goes on to relate newspaper accounts of an interesting aspect of this phenomena. Fort shows readers;

The first group of our data, I take from dispatches to the New York Sun,  April 2, 11, 16, 18. First of April - “the mysterious light” in the sky of Kansas City - something like a powerful searchlight. "It was directed toward the earth, traveling east at a rate of sixty miles an hour."

About a week later, something was seen in Chicago. "Chicago's alleged airship is believed to be a myth, in spite of the fact that a great many persons say that they have seen the mysterious night-wanderer.

A crowd gazed at strange lights, from the top of a downtown skyscraper, and Evanston students declare they saw the swaying red and green lights." April 16—reported from Benton, Texas, but this time as a dark object that passed across the moon. Reports from other towns in Texas: Fort Worth, Dallas, Marshall, Ennis, and

Beaumont—"It was shaped like a Mexican cigar, large in the middle, and small at both ends, with great wings, resembling those of an enormous butterfly. It was brilliantly illuminated by the rays of two great searchlights, and was sailing in a southeasterly direction, with the velocity of the wind, presenting a magnificent appearance."

Along with the reports of these airships were reports of their, mostly human, “secret inventors”. Whenever an airship was sighted, it could almost be guaranteed that someone would step forward having claimed to have met the inventor of these crafts. In his, newly republished, book Operation Trojan Horse John Keel relates a story of one such person who claimed to have met the pilot of the airship. Keel says;

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. His wife later told reporters that he had been home in bed on the night of the alleged trip.

While I don’t rule out the possibility that people could have made these craft, after all the craft seemed to be just within reach of the technology of the time, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support this idea. What are we dealing with in this case then? Are they all hoaxes? Some of them certainly were, it seems that the Aurora, Texas “crash” of an Airship is widely regarded as a hoax. It is also known that there were liar’s clubs and so it’s likely that some of the stories were probably made up. However there seems to be an underlying phenomena that a large number of people experienced at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

One theory for what these “airships” are, is that the Non-Human intelligence which has been interacting with humanity since recorded history (whether they be Ultraterrestrials, Extraterrestrials, or Cryptoterrestrials) have, overtime, adapted their conveyances in such a way as to shape our perception of them. This idea is largely the premise of Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse. The other idea is that perhaps, not entirely unlike a rorschach test, we are projecting our expectations onto a relatively malleable phenomena which is shaped based upon the viewers perception.

I haven’t decided where I land on this issue just yet. I fluctuate between the last two theories I mentioned, and perhaps the reality is somewhere in between the two. The only thing which I can say for certain is that the airship mystery is a fascinating footnote within the overall history of UFOs and Fortean phenomena.