Empire unusual suggested

140 PASSPORT TO MAGONIA
1897. And the rediscovery of the remarkable wave of reports it
generated has provided a crucial missing link between the apparitions
of older days and modern saucer stories.
On Donald Hanlon's map reproduced with the photographs, all
the airship reports have been plotted, with a special sign to denote
landings. This map perhaps gives a measure both of the volume
of data the students of American folklore have been missing and
of the amount of work done in the last three years by researchers
such as Hanlon, Jerome Clark, and Lucius Farish. The result of
their investigations is astonishing.
In California, in November, 1896, hundreds of residents of the
San Francisco area saw a large, elongated, dark object, which
carried brilliant searchlights and was capable of flying against the
wind. Between January and March, 1897, it vanished entirely.
And suddenly a staggering number of observations of an identical
object were made in the Midwest. Earlier in the book, we have seen
how Alexander Hamilton described it: a craft with turbine wheels
and a glass section with strange beings aboard looking down, a
description not unlike that given by Barney Hill. In March, an
object of even stranger appearance was seen by Robert Hibbard, a
farmer living fifteen miles north of Sioux City, Iowa. Ilibbard not
only saw the airship, but an anchor hanging from a rope attached
to the mysterious craft caught his clothes and dragged him several
dozen feet, until he fell back to earth.
To present in an orderly fashion all the accounts of that period
would itself take a book. My object here is only to review the most
detailed observations of the behavior of the airship's occupants
on the ground. But first, how did the object itself behave? It
maneuvered very much in the way UFO's are said to maneuver,
except that airships were never seen flying in formation or performing
"aerial dances." Usually, an airship flew rather slowly
and majestically—of course, such an object, in 1897, ran no risk
of being pursued—except in a few close-proximity cases when it
was reported to depart "as a shot out of a gun." Another difference
from modern UFO's lies in the fact that its leisurely trajectory
often took it over large urban areas. Omaha, Milwaukee, Chicago,
and other cities were thus visited; each time, large crowds gathered
to watch the object. Otherwise, the airship exhibited all the
NURSLINGS OF IMMORTALITY 141
typical activities of UFO's: hovering, dropping "probes"—on
Newton, Iowa, on April 10, for example—changing course
abruptly, changing altitude at great speed, circling, landing and
taking off, sweeping the countryside with powerful light beams.
The occupants of the airship were as variously described as arc
UFO operators. Several reports could be interpreted to mean
that dwarfs were among them, but it was not—to my present
knowledge, at least—stated in so many words by witnesses. Alexander
Hamilton says that the beings were the strangest he had
ever seen, and that he did not care to sec them again. I am not
aware of any detailed portrait of the creatures by the witnesses in
the Leroy case. They were "hideous people": two men, a woman,
and three "children," jabbering together.
All the operators who engaged in discussions with human witnesses
were indistinguishable from the average American population
of the time, This, for instance, is the experience related by
Captain James Hooton (described in the Arkansas Gazette as
"the well-known Iron Mountain railroad conductor"): 7
I had gone down to Texarkana to bring back a special, and knowing
that I would have some eight to ten hours to spend in Texarkana,
I went to I Ionian (Arkansas) to do a little hunting. It was
about 3 o'clock in the afternoon when I reached that place. The
sport was good, and before I knew it, it was after 6 o'clock when I
started to make my way back toward the railroad station. As I was
tramping through the bush my attention was attracted by a familiar
sound, a sound for all the world like the working of an air pump on
a locomotive.
I went at once in the direction of the sound, and there in an open
space of some five or six acres, I saw the object making the noise. To
say that I was astonished would but feebly express my feelings. I
decided at once that this was the famous airship seen by so many
people about the country.
There was a medium-size looking man aboard and I noticed that
he was wearing smoked glasses. lie was tinkering around what
seemed to be the hack end of the ship, and as I approached I was
too dumbfounded to speak. He looked at me in surprise, and said:
"Good day, sir; good day." I asked: "Is this the airship?" And he
replied: "Yes, sir," whereupon three or four other men came out of
what was apparently the keel of the ship.
A close examination showed that the keel was divided into two
parls, terminating in front like the sharp edge of a knife-like edge,