UFO Encounters, Sightings, Visitations, and Investigations: THE ARRIVAL OF UFOs
In the 19th century, however, accounts of UFOs took on a more believable tone. As day dawned June 1, 1853, students at Burritt College in Tennessee noticed two luminous, unusual objects just to the north of the rising sun. One looked like a “small new moon,” the other a “large star.” The first one slowly grew smaller until it was no longer visible, but the second grew larger and assumed a globular shape. (Probably the objects were moving in a direct line to and from the witnesses or remaining stationary but altering their luminosity.) Professor A. C. Carnes, who interviewed the students and reported their sighting to Scientific American, wrote, “The first then became visible again, and increased rapidly in size, while the other diminished, and the two spots kept changing thus for about half an hour. There was considerable wind at the time, and light fleecy clouds passed by, showing the lights to be confined to one place.”
Carnes speculated that “electricity” might be responsible for the phenomena. Scientific American believed this was “certainly” not the case; “possibly,” the cause was “distant clouds of moisture.” As explanations go, this was no more compelling than electricity. It would not be the last time a report and an explanation would make a poor match. Unspectacular though it was, the event was certainly a UFO sighting, the type of sighting that could easily occur today. It represented a new phenomenon astronomers and lay observers were starting to notice with greater frequency in the Earth’s atmosphere. And some of these sights were startling indeed.
On July 13, 1860, a pale blue light engulfed the city of Wilmington, Delaware. Residents looked up into the evening sky to see its source: a 200-foot-long something streaking along on a level course 100 feet above. Trailing behind it at 100-foot intervals cruised three “very red and glowing balls.” A fourth abruptly joined the other three after shooting out from the rear of the main object, which was “giving off sparkles after the manner of a rocket.” The lead object turned toward the southeast, passed over the Delaware River, and then headed straight east until lost from view. The incident—reported in the Wilmington Tribune, July 30, 1860—lasted one minute.
During the 1850s and 1860s in Nebraska, settlers viewed some rather unnerving phenomena. Were they luminous “serpents”? Apparently not, but instead elongated mechanical structures. A Nebraska folk ballad reported one such unusual sighting:
Twas on a dark night in ’66 When we was layin’ steel We seen a flyin’ engine Without no wing or wheel It came a roarin’ in the sky With lights along the side And scales like a serpent’s hide.
Something virtually identical was reported in a Chilean newspaper in April 1868 (and reprinted in Zoologist, July 1868). “On its body, elongated like a serpent,” one of the alleged witnesses declared, “we could only see brilliant scales, which clashed together with a metallic sound as the strange animal turned its body in flight.” Lexicographer and linguist J.A.H. Murray was walking across the Oxford University cam¬ pus on the evening of August 31, 1895, when he
saw a:
brilliant luminous body which suddenly emerged over the tops of the trees before me on the left and moved eastward across the sky above and in front of me. Its appearance was, at first glance, such as to suggest a brilliant meteor, considerably larger than Venus at her greatest brilliancy, but the slowness of the motion . . . made one doubt whether it was not some artificial firework… I watched for a second or two till [sic] it neared its culminating point and was about to be hidden from me by the lofty College building, on which I sprang over the corner . . . and was enabled to see it through the space between the old and new buildings of the College, as it continued its course toward the eastern horizon. . . . [I]t became rapidly dimmer . . . and finally disappeared behind a tree. . . . The fact that it so perceptibly grew fainter as it receded seems to imply that it had not a very great elevation. . . . Its course was slower than [that of] any meteor I have ever seen.
Some 20 minutes later, two other observers saw the same or a similar phenomenon, which they viewed as it traversed a “quarter of the heavens” during a five-minute period. But in 1896 events turned up a notch: The world experienced its first great explosion of sightings of unidentified flying objects. The beginning of the UFO era can be dated from this year. Although sightings of UFOs had occurred in earlier decades, they were sporadic and apparently rare. Also, these earlier sightings did not come in the huge concentrations (“waves” in the lingo of ufo logists, “flaps” to the U.S. Air Force) that characterize much of the UFO phenomenon between the 1890s and
the 1990s.
Between the fall of 1896 and the spring of 1897 people began sighting “airships,” first in California and then across most of the rest of the United States. Most people (though not all) thought the airships were machines built by secret inventors who would soon dazzle the world with a public announcement of a breakthrough in aviation technology leading to a heavier-than-air flying machine.
More than a few hoaxers and sensation-seeking journalists were all too happy to play on this popular expectation. Newspaper stories quoted “witnesses” who claimed to have seen the air¬ ships land and to have communicated with the pilots. The pilots themselves were quoted word for word boasting of their aeronautical exploits and, in some instances, of their intention to drop “several tons of dynamite” on Spanish fortresses in Cuba. Any reader with access to more than one newspaper account could have seen that the stories conflicted wildly and were inherently unbelievable. We now know that no such ships existed in human technology, and no standard history of aviation ever mentions these
tall tales.
But other sightings appear to have been quite real. Most descriptions were of a cylindrical object with a headlight, lights along the side, and a brilliant searchlight that swept the ground.
Sometimes the objects were said to have huge wings. An “airship” was observed over Oakland, California, just after 8 P.M. on November 26. One witness said the object resembled “a great black cigar. . . . The body was at least 100 feet long and attached to it was a triangular tail, one apex being attached to the main body. The sur¬ face of the airship looked as if it were made of aluminum, which exposure to wind and weather had turned dark. . . . The airship went at tremendous speed” (Oakland Tribune, December 1, 1896). Witnesses in California numbered in the thousands, partly due to the objects’ appearances—sometimes in broad daylight—over such major cities as Sacramento and San Francisco.
By February 1897 meandering nocturnal lights were also sighted in rural Nebraska. One of these lights swooped low over a group of worshippers leaving a prayer meeting: It turned out to be a cone-shaped structure with a head¬ light, three smaller lights along each side, and two wings. Such reports became the subject of newspaper articles around the state, leading the Kearney Hub on February 18 to remark that the “now famous California airship inventor is in our vicinity.” In short order sightings were logged in Kansas, and by April across a broad band of middle America—from the Dakotas and Texas in the west to Ohio and Tennessee in the east—the skies were full of UFOs.
But the skies were also full of planets, stars, lighted balloons, and kites, which impressionable observers mistook for airships. Newspapers were full of outrageous yarns: A Martian perished in an airship crash in Texas. “Hideous” creatures lassoed a calf and flew off over Kansas with it. A “bellowing” giant broke the hip of a farmer who got too close to his airship after it landed in Michigan. These stories reflect a powerful undercurrent of speculation about extraterrestrial visitors.
The wave had run its course by May 1897, but cylindrical UFOs with searchlights would continue to be seen periodically for decades to come. A worldwide wave of sightings took place in 1909 in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the eastern United States. As late as 1957 an “airship” was seen over McMinnville, Oregon.
Witnesses reported other kinds of UFOs, too.
One such report came from U.S. Navy Lieutenant Frank H. Schofield, who served as the Pacific Fleet’s commander-in-chief in the 1930s. Standing on the deck of the USS Supply on February 28, 1904, Schofield and two other sailors watched “three remarkable meteors,” bright red in color, as they flew beneath the clouds toward their ship. The objects then “appeared to soar, passing above the broken clouds . . . moving directly away from the Earth. The largest had an apparent area of about six suns. It was egg-shaped, the larger end for¬ ward. The second was about twice the size of the sun, and the third, about the size of the sun. . . . The lights were in sight for over two minutes.” (Monthly Weather Review, March 1904)
Far eerier stories lurked in the background. Only years later, when it was possible to talk about such things, did they come to light. One account surfaced more than 70 years later. In the summer of 1901, a 10-year-old Bournbrook, England, boy encountered something that looked like a box with a turret. Two little men clad in “military” uniforms and wearing caps with wires sticking out of them emerged through a door to wave him away. They then reentered the vehicle and flew away in a flash of light.
Similar events seem to have been occurring regularly over the early decades of the 20th century along with the less exotic sightings of strange aerial phenomena. These pre-1947 “close encounters of the third kind” were remarkably identical to the post-1947 reports in that the creatures who figured in the encounters were almost always held to be human or humanoid in appearance. In Hamburg, Germany, in June 1914, several “dwarfs” about four feet tall were seen milling around a cigarshaped vessel with lighted portholes; they then ran into the vessel and flew away.
In Detroit during the summer of 1922, through windows along the perimeter of a hovering disc-shaped object, 20 bald-headed figures stared intently at a suitably bewildered young couple. At Christchurch, New Zealand, in August 1944, a nurse at a train station noticed an “upturned saucer” nearby. She approached it, looked through a rectangular window, and spotted two humanoid figures not quite four feet tall. A third figure stood just outside an open door. When this humanoid saw her, the being “drifted” through an open hatchway, and the “saucer” shot straight upward.