extraordinary%20encounters

Calf-rustling aliens
On April 23, 1897, a Kansas newspaper, the
Yates Center Farmers Advocate, printed an affidavit
attesting to an instance of interplanetary
calf-rustling. There were three witnesses, the
most prominent of whom was Alex Hamilton,
a rancher from LeRoy, who soberly related
the following:
We we re awakened by a noise among the
c a t t l e . . . . Upon going to the door I saw to my
utter amazement that an airship was slowly descending
upon my cow lot about forty rods [six
h u n d red feet] from the house. Calling my tenant,
Gid He s l i p, and my son Wall, we seize d
some axes and ran to the corral. Meanwhile the
ship had been gently descending until it was
not more than thirty feet above the ground and
we came within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a
g reat cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hund
red feet long, with a carriage underneath. T h e
carriage was made of glass or some other transp
a rent material. It was brightly lighted within
and eve rything was plainly visible—it was occupied
by some of the strangest beings I ever saw.
T h e re we re two men, a woman, and three child
ren. They we re jabbering together but we
could not understand a syllable they said.
The occupants suddenly turned a searchlight
on the trio, and the ship got closer to
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them. The witnesses then noticed a calf
caught in the fence, with “a cable . . . fastened
in a slip knot around her neck one end passing
up to the vessel and tangled in wire.” They
tried to cut the cable, but when they failed,
they watched as it and the ship sailed away.
The following day a neighbor found the calf ’s
butchered remains in a field where there was,
Hamilton said, no “track of any kind on the
soft ground.”
Appended to the published account was a
statement by some of the county’s leading citizens
who attested to Hamilton’s truthfulness
and good character. The story was published
during a nationwide wave of sightings of mysterious
“airships” (UFOs). Some newspapers
had speculated, seriously or otherwise, that
extraterrestrial visitors were flying the ships.
When Hamilton’s story was rediscovered
decades later, after UFOs had entered popular
consciousness, it was widely published in the
UFO literature, which cited it as an example
of an early close encounter of the third kind.
In 1976, however, writer Jerome Clark collected
testimony from an elderly woman who
had known the Hamilton family. She recalled
hearing the elder Hamilton tell his wife that
he and his friends from a local liars’ club, one
of them the newspaper editor, had made up
the story. Several years later UFO historian