extraordinary%20encounters

At that moment he heard a voice to his
right and just a little behind him. It said,
“T h a t’s a machine to go through the air.” T h e
speaker was someone Birmingham thought of
as a “spirit,” looking like a “neutral shade and
the shape of a man.” The ark was brown in
color “with faint, flitting shades of steel
b l u e . . . like . . . magnified scales on a large
fish.” After a while Birmingham replied to
the spirit. He re m a rked that the ark looked
m o re like a ship meant for sailing on water;
in any event, he had never seen anything so
b e a u t i f u l .
He accepted an invitation to board the vehicle.
He found himself floating through the
air in the spirit’s company. When they reached
the upper part of the ark, they entered the
“pilot house” by walking down three steep
steps. Inside the barely furnished room was a
table situated two feet from the wall. Something
like an oilskin covered the table. Birmingham
stood at the rear end, and, not far
away, the spirit held papers in its hand. One
paper was covered with “figures and formulae.”
After Birmingham asked if the papers
were for him, the spirit replied slowly and emphatically,
“It is absolutely necessary that you
should know these things, but you can study
them as you go on.”
Birmingham, apparently not knowing
what to say, looked down at his hands. When
he raised his head, the spirit was gone. He
stood alone inside the strange ship. In his
manuscript he recorded this ambiguous conclusion
to the encounter: “So I fell, I suppose,
into my usual sleeping state, and waking next
morning deeply impressed with that vision of
the night.”
The following January, at work on an engineering
problem, Birmingham was surprised
to see a formula that he had first seen on the
paper the spirit had shown him. It had to do
with centrifugal pumps.
One day in 1873, at sunset, Birmingham
saw three small “clouds” suddenly appear. Two
“screws” extended from one. Between them, a
shape “like two flat necks on a turtle-shaped
body” came into view, then disappeared, only
Blowing Cave 45
to reappear soon afterward. Finally, “the two
big . . . screws folded up like the arms of a
bear and lost their shape in the middle cloud”
(Chalker, 1996).
The manuscript indicates that Birmingham
had become obsessed with the ark and its secrets.
He died in 1893, however, without ever
being able to unlock them.
See Also: Contactees
Further Reading
Chalker, Bill, 1996. The Oz Files: The Australian
UFO Story. Potts Point, New South Wales, Australia:
Duffy and Snellgrove.
———, 1992. “UFOs in Australia and New Ze a l a n d
t h rough 1959.” In Je rome Clark. The Em e r g e n c e
of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Be g i n n i n g
T h rough 1959—The UFO En c yclopedia, Vo l u m e
Tw o, 333–356. De t roit, MI: Om n i g r a p h i c s .
Blowing Cave
One of the odder stories related to hollow
earth lore is set in Blowing Cave, near Cushman,
Arkansas, where a man named George
D. Wight is said to have found a subterranean
civilization and proven the Shaver Mystery.
Though Wight disappeared, his story survives
in a diary he allegedly wrote.
In the 1950s, Wight was a UFO buff from
Michigan. Wight knew of Richard Shaver’s
claims, published in the 1940s in the Ziff-
Davis science-fiction magazines Amazing Sto -
ries and Fantastic Adventures, that the remnants
of two advanced races, tero and dero
(good and evil respectively), lived in vast caverns
under Earth’s surface. Though Wight was
skeptical of these claims, he had an interest in
cave-exploring that he indulged with David
L., for whose mimeographed saucer newsletter
Wight contributed a regular column. They
did their spelunking with three other men. All
of them were acquainted with Charles A.
Marcoux, another columnist for the magazine.
Unlike the others, Marcoux was an obsessed
believer in Shaverian concepts, to the
extent that he gave occasional public lectures
on the subject. The spelunkers sometimes attended
those lectures but considered his beliefs
absurd.