Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: THREE MYSTERIOUS STRANGERS – A Pantomime of Unrealities
For a few hundred years, rumours persisted that a strange group of people, who kept their distance from the local populace, resided in the vicinity of California’s majestic Mount Shasta. In the late nineteenth century, there were sporadic reports of individuals seen emerging from the forests in the vicinity of Shasta to visit local towns and trade nuggets and gold dust in exchange for basic commodities. Described as tall, graceful and agile, with distinctive features such as large foreheads and long curly hair, the strangers wore unusual clothes, including headdresses with a special decoration that came down from the forehead to the bridge of the nose.
On some occasions, powerful illuminations were observed in the forests, and strangely beautiful music could be heard. Invariably, when an investigator approached the area, he would be met by a ‘heavily covered and concealed person of a large size who would lift him up and turn him away’ from the area. Other intruders reportedly were affected by some invisible influence, causing them to become temporarily paralysed.
All attempts by the local community to get close to or photograph these mysterious individuals proved fruitless. On some such occasions, it was alleged, the strangers would either run away or suddenly vanish into thin air. ‘Those who have come to stores in nearby cities, especially at Weed,’ reported author Wishar Cerve, ‘have spoken English in a perfect manner with perhaps a tinge of the British accent, and have been reluctant to answer questions or give any information about themselves. The goods they have purchased have always been paid for in gold nuggets of far greater value than the article purchased, and they have refused to accept any change, indicating that to them gold was of no value and that they had no need for money of any kind.’
Not only were powerful lights often seen emanating from certain areas — years before electricity was in use — but there were also reports, in the early twentieth century, of cars that stalled on approaching the remote area apparently inhabited by these beings; a curious circumstance that was to become common during close encounters with UFOs reported years later. ‘At an unexpected point where a light flashed before them the automobile refused to function properly,’ commented Cerve in 1931, ‘for the electric circuit seemed to lose its power and not until the passengers emerged from the car and backed it on the road for a hundred feet and turned it in the opposite direction, would the electric power give any manifestation and the engine function properly.’
Still others reported encountering strange cattle, ‘unlike anything seen in America’, which would run back towards the area inhabited by the mysterious group. Of particular relevance are the (undated) sightings of peculiar aerial vessels:
There are hundreds of others who have testified to having seen peculiarly shaped boats which have flown out of this region high in the air over the hills and valleys of California and have been seen by others to come on to the waters of the Pacific Ocean at the shore and then continue out on the seas as vessels . . . and others have seen these boats rise again in the air and go upon the land of some of the islands of the Pacific . . . Only recently a group of persons playing golf on one of the golf links of California near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range saw a peculiar, silver-like vessel rise in the air and float over the mountaintops and disappear. It was unlike any airship that has ever been seen and there was absolutely no noise emanating from it to indicate that it was moved by a motor of any kind.
Were these mysterious people the survivors of the mythical lost continent of Lemuria — a theory espoused by Rosicrucian mystics, including Wishar Cerve — or might they have been of extraterrestrial origin? I do not have the answer to these questions, but evidently there are parallels with other, later accounts.