Sky Fall

song with a keen ear and a little imagination. A stonemason from Keswick, England, possessed such an ear, and it took him quite far. In eighteen forty, Joseph Richardson had been wandering around near a mountain five miles from his home when he struck one of the rocks along the mountain side. Surprisingly, it rang out with a clear, crisp tone, and it gave Joseph an idea. He took the rock home and stored it away. It had been the first step in a journey that would take him thirteen years

to complete. He returned to the mountain over the course of those thirteen years, over and over again. In search of more rocks, known as horn fells. Just like the first, he hit each one to hear its tone, and he did this until he had amassed over sixty of them. His goal was to compile them into a musical instrument known as a lithophone. Now, the lithophone wasn't too different from a xylophone. It consisted of carefully assembled tiers of

rocks arranged like piano keys. When struck, each rock elicited a specific tone on the musical scale. His first lithophone had too small, arranged to play most songs of the time, but a second version was so large it could reach eight octaves, and Joseph was obsessed with building the instrument, spending most of his time and money on its construction. The effort nearly bankrupted his family, but don't worry, he

had a plan to earn it all back. With a special set of mallets and his children by his side, Joseph took his lithophone on a European tour. He and his sons toured Germany, France, Italy and other European countries, playing for all kinds of crowds. Audiences were in awe of the unique sound of his lithophone. The concerts proved so successful, in fact, that the Richardson's didn't return home for three years. He even performed for the Queen at

Buckingham Palace. The papers reported that his Stones sounded like the warble of a lark at its upper register, and like the bellowing toll of a funeral bell at the lower end. Others described the music as haunting. It sounded like a relic from an ancient era, not a modern musical instrument. As Joseph traveled and put war into are on his creation, he modified it with steel bars for reinforcements. He also added bells and other pieces to produce additional

sounds during performances. However, all that travel had exacted a heavy toll on his children too. They'd grown tired, and his youngest son had caught pneumonia. On the night before a plan trip to America. The boy passed away. Grief was too much for Joseph and his two other children, and so they ended the tour, and that was the end of the Richardson family band. It's not known whether Joseph ever performed with the Stones again after that, but

we do know that they stayed in the family. In nineteen seventeen, more than sixty years after Joseph's death, his great grandson donated the lithophone to the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in his hometown, where it still resides today. Its sound has been recorded and converted digitally too, so today's musicians can incorporate its ethereal notes into their modern compositions. Joseph Richardson can tributed to the world of music in

a powerful way over the course of thirteen years. He built his influence one stone at a time, with blood, sweat and a lot of tears, and even though the record books might not agree, one might say he also had a pretty big claim to fame. After all, he did create the world's first rock band. Plane crash survivors have told incredible stories of the fear they overcame when

facing what they thought was certain death. A man who had been on a US Airways flight that crashed in two thousand nine discussed reading the emergency instructions while his plane was nose diving over water. A woman on a small chartered flight in found herself lost in the congo when the pilot lost control over a mountain range. She made it out of the wreckage, but eventually lost her legs to frostbite. We have their stories to help us understand what it's like to be part of an experience

that most people do not survive. But what happens when those stories can't be told. I'm not talking about a lack of survivors. I'm talking about a lack of any evidence at all. What do you do when you know there's been a crash but there's no proof. It's hard to imagine such a thing happening. A large metal aircraft falling from the sky, the sound of the impact, an explosion, the smell of burning fuel. There would be pieces of the plane left over, or a crater, or down trees.

And yet despite eyewitness reports of airplanes disappearing into wooded areas or over the ocean, there's no proof they ever happened. And the planes often seen are vintage models from the nineteen thirties and forties, usually aircraft used for bombings or

personnel transport. For example, in the spring of nineteen Tony Ingle from Derbyshire, England, watched as a large airplane with enormous propellers silently fell into an open field where sheep had been grazing Tony hurried to the site, expecting death and destruction, hoping someone had radioed for help that would soon be on its way, but no help came. It wasn't needed. The sheep were still there, safely eating, without any trace of a crash. No smoke, no fire, and

no plane. And that wasn't the only phantom crash seen over Derbyshire. One year earlier, the local police received hundreds of frantic calls about a World War Two bomber gliding at a dangerously low altitude. Many observers thought that it was moments away from crashing, so the authorities dispatched a full search team to hunt for the wreck, only to find nothing. The plane had just disappeared. Even as recently as two thousand eighteen, Derbyshire citizens took the social media

with claims of another ghost plane cruising low overhead. Some had peg the vessel as a Douglas Dakota, a transport model that had crashed in the area during the war. It moved without making a sound, an impossible feat for something so large being powered by four giant propellers. It should come as no surprise that Derbyshire, England was an unfortunate victim of the Second World War. Having been subjected to countless bombings and attacks, much of the area was

reduced to rubble. In fact, an old oak tree in the northeast Derbyshire town of Duckmanton is honored every year for taking a direct hit from a German parachute bomb in The bomb had been meant for the local railway station, but instead hit the tree, sparing not only the station but also hundreds of lives and a nearby school. That doesn't explain why phantom airplanes continue to plague the townspeople there, though, and Derbyshire isn't the only place where they've been seen.

A loud roar startled the people of Berkshire, just west of London on the evening of October two thousand eleven. They ran to their win knows and into the street to check on the commotion. When they looked up, there was a commercial airliner streaking past them, headed for a nearby wooded area. The Civil Aviation Authority reported no distress calls that night from any passenger aircraft. The woods were also a dead end if the plane was real and hadn't made a hard landing or resulted in a crash,

it's simply vanished in the end. Perhaps we shouldn't be asking where these planes come from or where they go when they vanish. Instead, maybe we should be asking ourselves a better question. If a plane falls in the woods and it doesn't leave a trace, was it ever really there at all? Either way, I'd call that curious. 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 asked dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey 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.