Flight Risk

Frederick wanted one thing to fly. When he came of age, he tried to enlist in the Royal Australian Air Force, but was turned away twice. In fact, it might have been his poor educational history, or maybe he was just a bad test taker, because no matter where he went, no one would let him inside the cockpit of an aircraft. After failing to join the r a a F, Frederick attempted to work his way to a commercial pilot's license. Sadly, he failed the five subjects that made up the exam twice.

He had also been investigated by aviation authorities for dangerous incidents such as flying into restricted areas and through thick cloud formations. But it wasn't Frederick's fault, at least not entirely. According to his father, Frederick believed that he was in danger whenever he took to the air from UFOs. He was obsessed with them. That might have explained his insistence to get his pilot's license so that he could get closer to the subject that he wanted to study. However,

there was no explanation for what would happen next. On the evening of October twenty one, twenty year old Frederick was on a training flight over the Bass Strait in southern Australia. He was piloting a small Cessna airplane when he radioed traffic control around seven pm. There was something following him, he told them, an unidentified aircraft. Traffic Control didn't know what he was talking about. According to their readings, there was no one else in the air at that

location or altitude. Frederick disagreed, and so did the four bright lights at the bottom of the other craft outside his window. He asked if there were any military planes in the vicinity, like a fighter jet or stealth bomber of some sort. Traffic control responded in the negative. Whatever it was, it was a thousand feet above him and lightning fast. Then it was on his right before it shot above him again, like it was plane with him or trying to scare him. As Frederick talked through the

incident with traffic control, more details came to light. The unidentified object was shiny, metallic and long, with bright green landing lights on its underside. As the two flew together, the other aircraft would, in Frederick's words, orbit his plane, first on one side and then above him, and then on the other. Traffic control asked Frederick where he was headed. The pilot replied King Island, roughly on nautical miles away

from his takeoff points back in Melbourne. The entire exchange lasted seventeen seconds, and at the very end, traffic control noticed metallic scraping sounds on Frederick's side before the line cut out, and that was it for Frederick. The plane had disappeared with the pilot inside. Rescue teams scoured a thousand square miles of water looking for them both but found nothing. Some believed that he had faked his own death or took his own life, despite their not being

any evidence for a motive. Another theory proposed that the pilot had found himself upside down and disoriented, confusing the reflection of his own lights as those of an unidentified aircraft, but his father believed it was something else, the one thing his son was both fascinated and terrified by more than anything else in the universe, and for those who study UFOs all over the world, it seemed the most

plausible explanation. As well. It probably helped that Australians citizens had called in over fifty UFO sightings on just that day. But one piece of evidence, a photo taken by a local plumber, would lend credibility to the otherwise incredible story. Roy Manifold had set up a camera on the beach near where Frederick had taken off. He'd wanted to capture a stunning time lapse of the Australian sunset. Instead, he caught possible evidence of what might have spirited away a

petrified pilot. Though the object in the image is blurry, u apologists have examined the photo and concur that whatever it was, it was traveling at a speed of at least two hundred miles per hour, much faster than the vanished Cessna. Could an unidentified flying object have snatched Frederick out of the air Well, as the saying goes, the sky's the limit on possible theories pun very much intended.

For now, the only thing we know is that Frederick's plane disappeared over the Indian Ocean, and it was, as they say, a photo finish. Where do we come from? How did we get here? These are questions that have been asked by scientists for generations. The more we dig into our past, sometimes literally, the more we discover how we evolve to where we are today, from Australopithecus to

Homo sapiens. We have a good idea of how human beings changed over the millennia, but there has always been a gap in the evolutionary chain, a missing link, as it's often called, and one man in nineteen twelve claimed to have found it. Charles Dawson was a lawyer by trade, but on the side he was part of the Geological Society of London, made up of professional and amateur geologists. The organization provided a venue for scientists to showcase their

latest findings. Dawson came to them on December eighteenth with one of his own. He found it while digging around on the pilt Down gravel pits in southeastern England. A man working in the pit had uncovered a skull fragments and brought it to Dawson. This kicked off a series of visits to the site, some just Dawson by himself, and later with Arthur Smith Woodward, the head of the

geological department at the British Museum. Together the two men worked all summer digging through rocks and dirt looking for more fragments. What they found and where they'd found it surprised them. Very few of the remaining pieces were located in the ground. Almost everything that remained the skull had been dug out and discarded into large piles along with other pit debris. Dawson and Woodward found more pieces of the skull, as well as half of the lower jawbone.

After they had completed their hunt for the other fragments, they pieced together what they had collected. The skull was incomplete. The story get told, though, would fill in the largest gap in human history. Much of the skull was the same or similar to the skull of a modern human. The portion is with the greatest difference were in the brain, cavity, the jawbone, and the base of the skull, all of

which resembled that of a chimpanzee. The British Museum also took a stab at reconstructing the skull, which all but proved where the creature fit on the evolutionary scale, right between Homo neanderthalis and Homo sapiens, otherwise known as the missing Link, but both models were heavily challenged by other scientific groups. Depending on how the fragments were arranged, cranium sizes could vary, and they could even be reconstructed into

the skull of a full sized modern human being. The key was in the canine teeth, which they didn't have. Dawson and Woodward returned to the pilt down pit to search for the missing teeth that would confirm their hypothesis, and this time they brought with them French paleontologist and geologist Pierre Tajard de Chardin. The three men dug around the same piles as before. It was Pierre who found a canine that fit inside their jaw fragments. Unfortunately, it

wasn't the proof they were hoping for. Professor and anthropologist Arthur Keith of the Royal College of Surgeons of England claimed the canine could never have allowed the jaw to move the way Woodward and Dawson had suggested to almost everyone who saw the skull, there was no way this was the missing link. Then, in nineteen fifteen, Dawson presented three new fragments from a different location, two miles away from the original pit. They fit perfectly into the original fragments,

once again giving credibility to his previous fines. The Piltdown Man, as the skull had come to be known, was officially a scientific wonder, and as long as its status among the scientific elite went unchallenged, other discoveries of bones and fossils related to Homo erectus were ignored, and Dawson kept

adding fuel to the fire. In the years following Piltdown Man's acceptance, he managed to provide tools and artifacts to bolster its authenticity, and it worked for almost forty years until a group of scientists in the early nineteen fifties got together and ransom tests on the skull fragments. As it turned out, there had never been a pilt Down Man. The skull that Dawson and Woodward had presented had been

comprised of pieces from three different creatures. One portion had come from a medieval era human skull, the lower jaw had belonged to a five year old orangutan, and the teeth had been fossils from an ancient chimpanzee. The bones themselves had been aged using iron sulfate and chromic acid. There were also tool marks on the teeth meant to wear them down in a way that would fit the

diet of the ape or person they belonged to. Whether it was Dawson or Woodward who had come up with the forgery remains unclear to this day, but much of the evidence points to Dawson, especially since examination of his private collection revealed that dozens of specimens he owned, including the teeth of a mammal reptile hybrid, were actually fake.

Dawson only got as far as he did because technology at the time prevented his scheme from being discovered, and perhaps because his peers didn't want to know the truth. After all, he'd given them exactly what they'd always wanted, what we've always wanted for as long as modern man has existed. Closure. It's just a shame that he had to do it by lying through his teeth. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,