[SPEAKER_00]: Sacramento, California, 1896. [SPEAKER_00]: On a quiet night, the city is only slightly illuminated by gaslight moonlight and the soft glow of electricity which had only recently come to the state's capital the year before. [SPEAKER_00]: And then a strange light appeared in the sky, like a spotlight. [SPEAKER_00]: and it began slowly moving over the city. [SPEAKER_00]: A few witnesses said they noticed a dark, elongated body.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the next day, newspapers ran headlines like people claimed they saw a flying airship and that mysterious like. [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever it was, people were describing this as a machine. [SPEAKER_00]: And keep in mind, this is years before the Wright brothers would make their first power flight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're thinking to yourself, this could have been a derogable or an airship, those did exist, but they weren't reliable or prolific, at least until the Zeppelin about four years later, and they were predominantly in Europe. [SPEAKER_00]: And then things get stranger, because the sightings spread beyond sacrament, and people in Oakland, San Francisco and other California towns began reporting similar strange lights and cigar-shaped crafts.
[SPEAKER_00]: and in the story moved east across Nebraska Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, and beyond. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1897, one Texas newspaper reported that a mysterious airship had crashed into a windmill in the town of Aurora, leaving behind wreckage and a dead pilot who was supposedly not from this world. [SPEAKER_00]: Fifty years before Roswell. [SPEAKER_00]: America already had a crash due a foe store. [SPEAKER_00]: But this episode is about more than the airships in 1896.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just one of many sightings of mysterious flying objects before Roswell. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a study of strange. [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: I am Michael May. [SPEAKER_00]: Before I dive into today's topic, if you have experienced something strange unusual or scary and you may want to share that on this show, email me at a study of strange at gmail.com. [SPEAKER_00]: We would love to hear your scary stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now let's hear about some strange things seen in the sky years before we think about UFOs. [SPEAKER_00]: Number 1. [SPEAKER_00]: The 1561 Nuremberg Sky Phenomena Nuremberg was a major city in the Holy Roman Empire at the time comets eclipses halos around the sun on usual clouds or any strange atmospheric display was often interpreted as signs. [SPEAKER_00]: They could be a warning from God, omens of war, or messages about the moral state of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: and according to a broadsheet printed the same month by a local printer and artist named Hans Glasser, something extraordinary appeared over the city at dawn.
[SPEAKER_00]: The image is still very famous today, it appears in many documentaries TV shows discussing UAPs and UFOs, and it shows the sun over Nuremberg, but the sky around it is filled with strange forms, steers, crosses, rods, [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the objects appear to be emerging from tubes, others seem to be fighting each other. [SPEAKER_00]: And to a modern eye it certainly looks like an aerial battle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The original account was not written by someone trying to describe a spacecraft. [SPEAKER_00]: It came from a 16th century heavily religious world and community. [SPEAKER_00]: So the message was not aliens are here. [SPEAKER_00]: It was closer to repent, pay attention and understand that God can do crazy things. [SPEAKER_00]: but that does not mean that nothing happened. [SPEAKER_00]: So here are some selected quotes from the text on the broad sheet.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the morning of April 14th, 1561, at Daybreak, between four and five on the small clock, a dreadful apparition was seen by many men and women. [SPEAKER_00]: At first they appeared in the middle of the sun to blood-red, semi-circular arcs. [SPEAKER_00]: black wise there stood on both sides other balls in large number and three in a line and four in a square. [SPEAKER_00]: In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses between which there were blood-red strips.
[SPEAKER_00]: These all started to fight amongst themselves, fought vehemently with each other for over an hour, and when the conflict ended again, out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all as set [SPEAKER_00]: fell from the sun down upon the earth as if they all burned and then they wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. [SPEAKER_00]: That certainly sounds like flying jets or ships fighting each other in the sky and getting shot down.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that seems a little ridiculous, doesn't it? [SPEAKER_00]: was this just an account that was sharing some sort of morality tale about God? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, if we take the account at its word, something may have been seen. [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe it was natural, maybe it was a solar halo, it could have been ice crystals in the atmosphere, some other rare optical effect. [SPEAKER_00]: And then the story gets exaggerated for the purposes of sharing a story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And most people at the time didn't understand what it was, so they tried to assign it meaning and understand it. [SPEAKER_00]: And in 1561 Nuremberg, that language was religion. [SPEAKER_00]: and that is mentioned in the broad sheet. [SPEAKER_00]: It also says, the godfaring will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father and Heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Centuries later, the same image would be pulled into UFO culture, in those fears and cylinders would become evidence or alleged evidence of something intelligent visiting Earth. [SPEAKER_00]: Not to sound like the TV show ancient aliens, but ancient alien theorist, believe that the Nuremberg Broadsheet is evidence of an ancient race with advanced technology visiting Earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: 2. [SPEAKER_00]: The 1801 Moon Incident [SPEAKER_00]: June 19th, 1801, in Kingston, upon whole, a port city on the east coast of Britain, witnesses that night noticed the moon. [SPEAKER_00]: But something about it was different. [SPEAKER_00]: It was larger, brighter than normal. [SPEAKER_00]: However, there was a dark bar seen across the moon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's a quote from the author, Mike Covell, an author and historian who was researching old newspapers from the 19th century and discovered a written description in the newspaper, [SPEAKER_00]: It seems then deform itself into seven small distinct moons or globes of fire, which disappeared for the space of a few seconds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its reappearance was equally brilliant, at first showing itself like the face of the moon, afterwards in five circular balls, and lastly like several small stars which gradually faded away, leaving the whole atmosphere brilliantly illuminate. [SPEAKER_00]: So what was this? [SPEAKER_00]: It could have been a meteor breaking apart. [SPEAKER_00]: It could have been an atmospheric optical effect. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it was something else entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did come across this story with a headline of, here's one of the earliest UFO accounts. [SPEAKER_00]: However, that wording, that phrasing, is obviously a 20th century take on this story. [SPEAKER_00]: And these surviving accounts of this are, [SPEAKER_00]: They're just very difficult to trace back cleanly to original sources. [SPEAKER_00]: It's basically that newspaper account, and the rest of the mentions are all modern.
[SPEAKER_00]: People on blogs and articles today saying it was UFOs, but we don't have a lot of details about this account. [SPEAKER_00]: But what is intriguing about this incident is that even as a skeptic like myself, I feel like something strange happened that people of Kingston upon whole witnessed and we don't have an explanation for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number 3. [SPEAKER_00]: The 1883's Sacaticus Observatory Objects [SPEAKER_00]: This story involves not some vague old newspapers, but in a astronomer and observatory and pictures. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1883, Mexican astronomer Jose Bonilla was working at the Observatory in Psychotechist, Mexico. [SPEAKER_00]: On August 12th and 13th, he observed hundreds of dark objects crossing the face of the sun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bonilla described the objects as dark against the solar disc like silhouettes. [SPEAKER_00]: Some appeared surrounded by a misty or hazy glow, and he took more than 400 photographs of this event. [SPEAKER_00]: The observations were later published in a French astronomy journal and from there, the case took on a second life. [SPEAKER_00]: For some UFO researchers, Bony's photographs became a kind of holy grail.
[SPEAKER_00]: Possible images unidentified objects taken from the 19th century, long before the term flying saucer was used and captured by a scientist, a very credible witness. [SPEAKER_00]: and Bonyas Pears and many other curious people were trying to figure out what these objects could be. [SPEAKER_00]: And astronomers at the time and in modern day have suggested that Bonya may have seen birds insects or dust close to the telescope.
[SPEAKER_00]: That may sound dismissive of this event, but you have to test and consider all the practical explanations. [SPEAKER_00]: And more recently, a group of researchers [SPEAKER_00]: So what do we do with Bony as observation? [SPEAKER_00]: He might have caught a unique celestial event in these photographs that is natural, but gets still amazing with happenings that we don't even fully understand yet, or he caught a glimpse of something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even today, with everyone carrying a camera around in their pockets, high-deft cameras mind you, it is still really hard to come by good on identified flying object pictures, and yet here are many photographs taken from 1883. [SPEAKER_00]: 4. [SPEAKER_00]: The 189697 Mysterious Airship Historia [SPEAKER_00]: In November 1896, starting in Sacramento, witnesses described a bright light moving through the night sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some said it was attached to a darker shape, usually described very similar to the shape of a cigar or a blimp. [SPEAKER_00]: The most colorful account came from R.L. [SPEAKER_00]: Lowry, who said that he heard a voice from above warn that the craft needed to rise or it would strike a steeple.
[SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers were soon reporting sightings across northern California and towns like Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco, surrounding communities that were literally thousands of witnesses. [SPEAKER_00]: The object was described slightly differently at each sighting, but with some similarities.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was often cigar-shaped, sometimes it had wings, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it had propellers, sometimes it didn't, some witnesses saw or heard people on the aircraft talking, sometimes it was humans speaking English, sometimes it was unidentified beings. [SPEAKER_00]: with many describing them as Martians. [SPEAKER_00]: And because this is 1896, most people did not immediately jump to aliens. [SPEAKER_00]: The late 19th century was an age of invention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Electric lights were transforming cities. [SPEAKER_00]: The telephone was changing communication. [SPEAKER_00]: Automobiles are beginning to appear. [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers are full of machines and patents and scientific claims and entrepreneurs who promised the next big thing. [SPEAKER_00]: flight was close, and everybody could feel it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So most accounts claimed to be what people were reading about, seeing drawings of, and those are early human-built, flying apparatuses. [SPEAKER_00]: And that theory seemed to find an explanation when a San Francisco attorney named George D. Collins was reported to represent the secret inventor behind this mysterious craft. [SPEAKER_00]: According to newspaper accounts, Collins claimed that a successful airship did exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: His client built it, and the alleged machine was described as roughly 150 feet long, made of metal, able to carry passengers and equip with wings and a rudder. [SPEAKER_00]: So that starts to make some sense, but almost immediately, the story doesn't hold up. [SPEAKER_00]: The inventor never came forward. [SPEAKER_00]: There weren't any patents, and no one saw this 150-foot craft during the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, how is it traveling around the country without anyone noticing because it's not going to be flying the entire time? [SPEAKER_00]: It's not [SPEAKER_00]: landing anywhere, it's not being taken apart and loaded on trains to new destinations. [SPEAKER_00]: And I say all that because in 1897, a similar object was seen in Nebraska that in Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Texas.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the spring of 1897, this airship was no longer just random sightings. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a national fever, and anyone who saw something odd in the sky immediately assumed it was a giant cigar shaped ship. [SPEAKER_00]: It's very similar to the flying saucer craze that happened right after the famous Kenneth Arnold incident in 1947, which I've covered on the show, please go back and listen to that episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: And nobody can easily separate the original mystery which began at Sacramento from the mythology around the airship craigs. [SPEAKER_00]: And that brings us to the number five Aurora Texas, the crash before Roswell. [SPEAKER_00]: connected to this airship craze. [SPEAKER_00]: On April 19th, 1897, the Dallas Morning News published a story from Aurora, a small town in North Texas.
[SPEAKER_00]: The report claimed that two days earlier, on April 17th, an airship had passed over the town early in the morning, but something was wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: Here are select quotes from the newspaper article that started this whole thing. [SPEAKER_00]: About 6 o'clock this morning, the early risers of Aurora were astonished at this sudden appearance of the hership, which had been sailing through the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was traveling due north and much near the earth than ever before. [SPEAKER_00]: Evidently, some of the machinery was out of order for it was making a speed of only 10 or 12 miles an hour and gradually settling toward the earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sailed directly over the public square and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's Windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judges' flower garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this war. [SPEAKER_00]: Mr. TJ Weems, the United States Signals Service Officer at this place and authority on astronomy, gives it his opinion that he was a native of the planet Mars.
[SPEAKER_00]: The papers found on his person evidently the record of his travels are written in some unknown hyeroglyphics and cannot be deciphered. [SPEAKER_00]: The ship was too badly wrecked a form in a conclusion as to its construction. [SPEAKER_00]: It was built of an unknown metal resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver. [SPEAKER_00]: The town is full of people today who are viewing the wreck and gathering specimens of the strange metal from the debris.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot's funeral will take place at noon tomorrow. [SPEAKER_00]: The pilot that was, quote, not of this world, was given a Christian burial in the local cemetery. [SPEAKER_00]: This has to be one of the greatest legends in UFO lore and it's one of my favorite stories. [SPEAKER_00]: It's both before the top culture and collective conscious thought about aliens that we have now. [SPEAKER_00]: It also could have helped shape our modern beliefs in this subject.
[SPEAKER_00]: and also blends the small town Texas culture into this like sci-fi event, which to me makes it feel more real. [SPEAKER_00]: And Aurora happened 50 years before Roswell. [SPEAKER_00]: When most might assume the aliens and strange beings in the sky really started to spread and appear. [SPEAKER_00]: As a skeptical person, I can't help but share some details about the follow-up after this.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a theory that this is all a hoax, and this comes about from a handful of different interviews from people who were alive at the time that they shared later, including a 1980 Times magazine interview with HetaPague, who was 86 years old at the time of the interview. [SPEAKER_00]: She claimed that the entire story was made up. [SPEAKER_00]: It was written sort of as a joke. [SPEAKER_00]: But also as a way to draw some attention to the town of Aurora, it was a small town.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't doing well. [SPEAKER_00]: The railroad was going off to different towns. [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't passing through Aurora. [SPEAKER_00]: So this is a way to draw some attention. [SPEAKER_00]: And we would call it like a clickbait kind of thing today. [SPEAKER_00]: There have also been various investigations over the years by both Mufan and Hans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Love UFO television shows and documentaries where they've found metal and gone to the, well, where the crash material was supposedly stored, they've looked in the graveyard to try to find out if this is an alien actually buried in the ground and all of the evidence collected has been inconclusive and move on even reported that it might have been a hoax.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, 50 years before World War II and flying saucers and all of that catches everybody's attention, this story felt new. [SPEAKER_00]: But it wasn't. [SPEAKER_00]: As we have all been here before, watching the sky and seeing strange things for all of human existence, and the more we learn about science and cosmos, there are always new mysteries and things that we can't explain. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to a study of strange.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, if you've experienced something strange or unusual and you want to share your story, email a study of strange at GML.com. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you need here, give us a like or rating on whatever platform you listen to the showman. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you and stay strange.