The Book of the Damned (37 page)
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Authors: Charles Fort
26
“Notes and Queries,
5-3-306:
About eight lights that were seen in Wales, over an area of about eight miles, all keeping their own ground, whether moving together perpendicularly, horizontally, or over a zigzag course. They looked like electric lights—disappearing, reappearing dimly, then shining as bright as ever. “We have seen them three or four at a time afterward, on four or five occasions.”
London
Times,
Oct. 5, 1877:
“From time to time the west coast of Wales seems to have been the scene of mysterious lights . . . And now we have a statement from Towyn that within the last few weeks, lights of various colors have been seen moving over the estuary of the Dysynni River, and out to sea. They are generally in a northerly direction, but sometimes they hug the shore, and move at high velocity for miles toward Aberdovey, and suddenly disappear.
L’Année Scientifique,
1877-45:
Lights that appeared in the sky, above Vence, France, March 23, 1877; described as balls of fire of dazzling brightness; appeared from a cloud about a degree in diameter; moved relatively slowly. They were visible more than an hour, moving northward. It is said that eight or ten years before similar lights or objects had been seen in the sky, at Vence.
London
Times,
Sept. 19, 1848:
That, at Inverness, Scotland, two large, bright lights that looked like stars had been seen in the sky: sometimes stationary, but occasionally moving at high velocity.
L’Année Scientifique,
1888-66:
Observed near St. Petersburg, July 30, 1880, in the evening: a large spherical light and two smaller ones, moving along a ravine: visible three minutes; disappearing without noise.
Nature,
35-173:
That, at Yloilo, Sept. 30, 1886, was seen a luminous object the size of the full moon. It “floated” slowly “northward,” followed by smaller ones close to it.
“The False Lights of Durham.”
Every now and then in the English newspapers, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there is something about lights that were seen against the sky, but as if not far above land, oftenest upon the coast of Durham. They were mistaken for beacons by sailors. Wreck after wreck occurred. The fishermen were accused of displaying false lights and profiting by wreckage. The fishermen answered that mostly only old vessels, worthless except for insurance, were so wrecked.
In 1866 (London
Times,
Jan. 9, 1866) popular excitement became intense. There was an investigation. Before a commission, headed by Admiral Collinson, testimony was taken. One witness described the light that had deceived him as “considerably elevated aboveground.” No conclusion was reached: the lights were called “the mysterious lights.” But whatever the “false lights of Durham” may have been, they were unaffected by the investigation. In 1867, the Tyne Pilotage Board took the matter up. Opinion of the Mayor of Tyne—“a mysterious affair.”
In the
Report of the British Association,
1877-152, there is a description of a group of “meteors” that traveled with “remarkable slowness.” They were in sight about three minutes. “Remarkable,” it seems, is scarcely strong enough: one reads of “remarkable” as applied to a duration of three seconds. These “meteors” had another peculiarity; they left no train. They are described as “seemingly huddled together like a flock of wild geese, and moving with the same velocity and grace of regularity.”
Jour. Roy. Astro. Soc. of Canada,
November and December, 1913:
That, according to many observations collected by Prof. Chant, of Toronto, there appeared, upon the night of Feb. 9, 1913, a spectacle that was seen in Canada, the United States, and at sea, and in Bermuda. A luminous body was seen. To it there was a long tail. The body grew rapidly larger. “Observers differ as to whether the body was single, or was composed of three or four parts, with a tail to each part.” The group, or complex structure, moved with “a peculiar, majestic deliberation.” “It disappeared in the distance, and another group emerged from its place of origin. Onward they moved, at the same deliberate pace, in twos or threes or fours.” They disappeared. A third group, or a third structure, followed.
Some observers compared the spectacle to a fleet of airships: others to battleships attended by cruisers and destroyers.
According to one writer:
“There were probably thirty or 32 bodies, and the peculiar thing about them was their moving in fours and threes and twos, abreast of one another; and so perfect was the lining up that you would have thought it was an aerial fleet maneuvering after rigid drilling.
Nature,
May 25, 1893:
A letter from Capt. Charles J. Norcock, of H.M.S.
Caroline:
That, upon the 24th of February, 1893, at 10 p.m., between Shanghai and Japan, the officer of the watch had reported “some unusual lights.”
They were between the ship and a mountain. The mountain was about 6,000 feet high. The lights seemed to be globular. They moved sometimes massed, but sometimes strung out in an irregular line. They bore “northward,” until lost to sight. Duration two hours.
The next night the lights were seen again.
They were, for a time, eclipsed by a small island. They bore north at about the same speed and in about the same direction as speed and direction of the
Caroline.
But they were lights that cast a reflection: there was a glare upon the horizon under them. A telescope brought out but few details: that they were reddish, and seemed to emit a faint smoke. This time the duration was seven and a half hours.
Then Capt. Norcock says that, in the same general locality, and at about the same time, Capt. Castle, of H.M.S.
Leander,
had seen lights. He had altered his course and had made toward them. The lights had fled from him. At least, they had moved higher in the sky.
Monthly Weather Review,
March, 1904-115:
Report from the observations of three members of his crew by Lieut. Frank H. Schofield, U.S.N, of the U.S.S.
Supply:
Feb. 24, 1904. Three luminous objects, of different sizes, the largest having an apparent area of about six suns. When first sighted, they were not very high. They were below clouds of an estimated height of about one mile.
They fled, or they evaded, or they turned.
They went up into the clouds below which they had, at first, been sighted.
Their unison of movement.
But they were of different sizes, and of different susceptibilities to all forces of this earth and of the air.
Monthly Weather Review,
August, 1898-358:
Two letters from C.N. Crotsenburg, Crow Agency, Montana:
That, in the summer of 1896, when this writer was a railroad postal clerk—or one who was experienced in train-phenomena—while his train was going “northward,” from Trenton, Mo., he and another clerk saw, in the darkness of a heavy rain, a light that appeared to be round, and of a dull-rose color, and seemed to be about a foot in diameter. It seemed to float within a hundred feet of the earth, but soon rose high, or “midway between horizon and zenith.” The wind was quite strong from the east, but the light held a course almost due north.
Its speed varied. Sometimes it seemed to outrun the train “considerably.” At other times it seemed to fall behind. The mail clerks watched until the town of Linville, Iowa, was reached. Behind the depot of this town, the light disappeared, and was not seen again. All this time there had been rain, but very little lightning, but Mr. Crotsenburg offers the explanation that it was “ball lightning.”
The Editor of the
Review
disagrees. He thinks that the light may have been a reflection from the rain, or fog, or from leaves of trees, glistening with rain, or the train’s light—not lights.
In the December number of the
Review
is a letter from Edward M. Boggs—that the light was a reflection, perhaps, from the glare—one light, this time—from the locomotive’s fire box, upon wet telegraph wires—an appearance that might not be striated by the wires, but consolidated into one rotundity—that it had seemed to oscillate with the undulations of the wires, and had seemed to change horizontal distance with the varying angles of reflection, and had seemed to advance or fall behind, when the train had rounded curves.
All of which is typical of the best of quasi-reasoning. It includes and assimilates diverse data: but it excludes that which will destroy it:
That, acceptably, the telegraph wires were alongside the track beyond, as well as leading to Linville.
Mr. Crotsenburg thinks of “ball lightning,” which, though a sore bewilderment to most speculation, is usually supposed to be a correlate with the old system of thought: but his awareness of “something else” is expressed in other parts of his letters, when he says that he has something to tell that is “so strange that I should never have mentioned it, even to my friends, had it not been corroborated . . . so unreal that I hesitated to speak of it, fearing that it was some freak of the imagination.”
27
Vast and black. The thing that was poised, like a crow over the moon.
Round and smooth. Cannon balls. Things that have fallen from the sky to this earth.
Our slippery brains.
Things like cannon balls have fallen, in storms, upon this earth. Like cannon balls are things that, in storms, have fallen to this earth.
Showers of blood.
Showers of blood.
Showers of blood.
Whatever it may have been, something like red-brick dust, or a red substance in a dried state, fell at Piedmont, Italy, Oct. 27, 1814
(Electric Magazine,
68-437). A red powder fell, in Switzerland, winter of 1867
(Pop. Sci. Rev.,
10-112)—
That something, far from this earth, had bled—super-dragon that had rammed a comet—
Or that there are oceans of blood somewhere in the sky—substance that dries, and falls in a powder—wafts for ages in powdered form—that there is a vast area that will someday be known to aviators as the Desert of Blood. We attempt little of super-topography, at present, but Ocean of Blood, or Desert of Blood—or both—Italy is nearest to it—or to them.
I suspect that there were corpuscles in the substance that fell in Switzerland, but all that could be published in 1867 was that in this substance there was a high proportion of “variously shaped organic matter.”
At Giessen, Germany, in 1821, according to the
Report of the British Association,
5-2, fell a rain of a peach-red color. In this rain were flakes of a hyacinthine tint. It is said that this substance was organic: we are told that it was pyrrhine.
But distinctly enough, we are told of one red rain that it was of corpuscular composition—red snow, rather. It fell, March 12, 1876, near the Crystal Palace, London
(Year Book of Facts,
1876-89;
Nature,
13-414). As to the “red snow” of polar and mountainous regions, we have no opposition, because that “snow” has never been seen to fall from the sky: it is a growth of micro-organisms, or of a “protococcus,” that spreads over snow that is on the ground. This time nothing is said of “sand from the Sahara.” It is said of the red matter that fell in London, March 12, 1876, that it was composed of corpuscles—
Of course:
That they looked like “vegetable cells.”
A note:
That nine days before had fallen the red substance—flesh—whatever it may have been—of Bath County, Kentucky.
I think that a super-egotist, vast, but not so vast as it had supposed, had refused to move to one side for a comet.
We summarize our general super-geographical expressions:
Gelatinous regions, sulphurous regions, frigid and tropical regions: a region that has been Source of Life relatively to this earth: regions wherein there is density so great that things from them, entering this earth’s thin atmosphere, explode.
We have had a datum of explosive hailstones. We now have support to the acceptance that they had been formed in a medium far denser than air of this earth at sea-level. In the
Popular Science News,
22-38, is an account of ice that had been formed, under great pressure, in the laboratory of the University of Virginia. When released and brought into contact with ordinary air, this ice exploded.
And again the flesh-like substance that fell in Kentucky: its flake-like formation. Here is a phenomenon that is familiar to us: it suggests flattening, under pressure. But the extraordinary inference is—pressure not equal on all sides. In the
Annual Record of Science,
1873-350, it is said that, in 1873, after a heavy thunderstorm in Louisiana, a tremendous number of fish scales were found, for a distance of forty miles, along the banks of the Mississippi River: bushels of them picked up in single places: large scales that were said to be of the gar fish, a fish that weighs from five to fifty pounds. It seems impossible to accept this identification: one thinks of a substance that had been pressed into flakes or scales. And round hailstones with wide thin margins of ice irregularly around them—still, such hailstones seem to me more like things that had been stationary: had been held in a field of thin ice. In the
Illustrated London News,
34-546, are drawings of hailstones so margined, as if they had been held in a sheet of ice.
Some day we shall have an expression which will be, to our advanced primitiveness, a great joy:
That devils have visited this earth: foreign devils: human-like beings, with pointed beards: good singers; one shoe ill-fitting—but with sulphurous exhalations, at any rate. I have been impressed with the frequent occurrence of sulphurousness with things that come from the sky. A fall of jagged pieces of ice, Orkney, July 24, 1818
(Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin.,
9-187). They had a strong sulphurous odor. And the coke—or the substance that looked like coke—that fell at Mortree, France, April 24, 1887: with it fell a sulphurous substance. The enormous round things that rose from the ocean, near the
Victoria.
Whether we still accept that they were, super-constructions that had come from a denser atmosphere and, in danger of disruption, had plunged into the ocean for relief, then rising and continuing on their way to Jupiter or Uranus—it was reported that they spread a “stench of sulphur.” At any rate, this datum of proximity is against the conventional explanation that these things did not rise from the ocean, but rose far away above the horizon, with illusion of nearness.
And the things that were seen in the sky July, 1898: I have another note. In
Nature,
58-224, a correspondent writes that, upon July 1, 1898, at Sedberg, he had seen in the sky—a red object—or, in his own wording, something that looked like the red part of a rainbow, about ten degrees long. But the sky was dark at the time. The sun had set. A heavy rain was falling.
Throughout this book, the datum that we are most impressed with:
Successive falls.
Or that, if upon one small area, things fall from the sky, and then, later, fall again upon the same small area, they are not products of a whirlwind, which though sometimes axially stationary, discharges tangentially—
So the frogs that fell at Wigan. I have looked that matter up again. Later more frogs fell.
As to our data of gelatinous substance said to have fallen to this earth with meteorites, it is our expression that meteorites, tearing through the shaky, protoplasmic seas of Genesistrine—against which we warn aviators, or they may find themselves suffocating in a reservoir of life, or stuck like currants in a blanc mange—that meteorites detach gelatinous, or protoplasmic, lumps that fall with them.
Now the element of positiveness in our composition yearns for the appearance of completeness. Super-geographical lakes with fishes in them. Meteorites that plunge through these lakes, on their way
v
to this earth. The positiveness in our make-up must have expression in at least one record of a meteorite that has brought down a lot of fishes with it—
Nature,
3-512:
That, near the bank of a river, in Peru, Feb. 4, 1871, a meteorite fell. “On the spot, it is reported, several dead fishes were found, of different species.” The attempt to correlate is—that the fishes “are supposed to have been lifted out of the river and dashed against the stones.”
Whether this be imaginable or not depends upon each one’s own hypnoses.
Nature,
4-169:
That the fishes had fallen among the fragments of the meteorite.
Popular Science Review,
4-126:
That one day, Mr. Le Gould, an Australian scientist, was traveling in Queensland. He saw a tree that had been broken off close to the ground. Where the tree had been broken was a great bruise. Nearby was an object that “resembled a ten-inch shot.”
A good many pages back there was an instance of overshadowing, I think. The little carved stone that fell at Tarbes is my own choice as the most impressive of our new correlates. It was coated with ice, remember. Suppose we should sift and sift and discard half the data in this book—suppose only that one datum should survive. To call attention to the stone of Tarbes would, in my opinion, be doing well enough, for whatever the spirit of this book is trying to do. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a datum that preceded it was slightingly treated.
The disk of quartz, said to have fallen from the sky, after a meteoric explosion:
Said to have fallen at the plantation Bleijendal, Dutch Guiana: sent to the Museum of Leyden by M. van Sypesteyn, adjutant to the Governor of Dutch Guiana
(Notes and Queries,
2-8-92).
And the fragments that fall from super-geographic ice fields: flat pieces of ice with icicles on them. I think that we did not emphasize enough that, if these structures were not icicles, but crystalline protuberances, such crystalline formations indicate long suspension quite as notably as would icicles. In the
Popular Science News,
24-34, it is said that in 1869, near Tiflis, fell large hailstones with long protuberances. “The most remarkable point in connection with the hailstones is the fact that, judging from our present knowledge, a very long time must have been occupied in their formation.” According to the
Geological Magazine,
7-27, this fall occurred May 27, 869. The writer in the
Geological Magazine
says that of all theories that he had ever heard of, not one could give him light as to this occurrence—“these growing crystalline forms must have been suspended a long time”—
Again and again this phenomenon:
Fourteen days later, at about the same place, more of these hailstones fell.
Rivers of blood that vein albuminous seas, or an egg-like composition in the incubation of which this earth is a local center of development—that there are super-arteries of blood in Genesistrine: that sunsets are consciousness of them: that they flush the skies with northern lights sometimes: super-embryonic reservoirs from which life-forms emanate—
Or that our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages—
Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans—
Or someone especial thing: an especial time: an especial place. A thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s alive in outer space—something the size of Central Park kills it—
It drips.
We think of the ice fields above this earth: which do not, themselves, fall to this earth, but from which water does fall—
Popular Science News,
35-104:
That, according to Prof. Luigi Palazzo, head of the Italian Meteorological Bureau, upon May 15, 1890, at Messignadi, Calabria, something the color of fresh blood fell from the sky.
This substance was examined in the public-health laboratories of Rome.
It was found to be blood.
“The most probable explanation of this terrifying phenomenon is that migratory birds (quails or swallows) were caught and torn in a violent wind.”
So the substance was identified as birds’ blood—
What matters it what the microscopists of Rome said—or had to say—and what matters is that we point out that there is no assertion that there was a violent wind at the time—and that such a substance would be almost infinitely dispersed in a violent wind—that no bird was said to have fallen from the sky—or said to have been seen in the sky—that not a feather of a bird is said to have been seen—
This one datum:
The fall of blood from the sky—
But later, in the same place, blood again fell from the sky.