extraordinary%20encounters

272 Wilson
crew members asked if they could draw water
from his well. Afterward, they invited him
into the craft, which had a six- or eight-man
crew. One told him that “highly condensed
electricity” powered it. It was one of five built
in a small Iowa town.
The following evening an airship landed at
Ko u n t ze, twenty miles nort h west of Be a umont.
Onlookers talked with its pilots, Wi l s o n
and Jackson, who said it would take a few days
to complete necessary repairs. The Ho u s t o n
Daily Po s t ( April 25) assured readers that anyone
who wanted to see the marvelous machine
“may do so by coming to Ko u n t ze any time
b e f o re Monday night.” This is the one Wi l s o n
s t o ry that was an obvious practical joke.
On April 30, the Daily Post carried a letter
from H. C. Legrone of Deadwood, 130 miles
north of Beaumont. Legrone wrote that after
something disturbed his horses on the evening
of April 28, he stepped outside to observe an
approaching airship. It descended on a nearby
field. He related,
Its crew was composed of five men, three of
whom entertained me, while the other two
took rubber bags and went for a supply of
water at my well, 100 yards off. They informed
me that this was one of five ships that had been
traveling the country over recently, and that
this individual ship was the same one recently
landed near Beaumont . . . after having traveled
pretty well all over the Northwest. They
stated that these ships were put up in an interior
town in Illinois. They were rather reticent
about giving out information in regards to the
ship, manufacture, etc., since they had not yet
secured everything by patent.
W h a t e ver the airships may or may not
h a ve been, they we re nobody’s inve n t i o n s ,
and the name of the mysterious Mr. Wilson is
not to be found in any history of aviation.
Put bluntly, the stories make no sense. T h e y
could not have happened in any way in
which the verb “happened” is ordinarily understood.
In light of the numerous hoaxe s ,
journalistic and other, the Wilson stories,
h owe ver intriguing, must be viewed with a
fair degree of suspicion. Nonetheless, occultoriented
writers such as John A. Keel argue
that the seemingly normal American pilots
re p o rted in 1897 press accounts we re actually
supernatural entities—Keel calls them ultrat
e r restrials—in disguise. Ac c o rding to Ke e l ,
the ultraterrestrials staged encounters “in re la
t i vely remote places,” contacting a few witnesses
and passing on bogus tales “w h i c h
would discredit not only them but the whole
m y s t e ry. Knowing how we think and how we
s e a rch for consistencies, the ultraterre s t r i a l s
we re careful to sow inconsistencies in their
w a k e” (Keel, 1970).
See Also: Keel, John Alva; Smith; Ultraterrestrials
Further Reading
Bullard, Thomas E., ed., 1982. The Airship File: A
Collection of Texts Concerning Phantom Airships
and Other UFOs, Gathered from Newspapers and
Periodicals Mostly during the Hundred Years Prior
to Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting. Bloomington, IN:
self-published.
Chariton, Wallace O., 1991. The Great Texas Airship
Mystery. Plano, TX: Wordware Publishing.
Cohen, Daniel, 1981. The Great Airship Mystery: A
UFO of the 1890s. New York: Dodd, Mead, and
Company.
Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.