A Gem From Jim Marrs: Dallas Morning News, April 19, 1897

[Cogburn]

I'll be going through this one for a while. Absolutely fascinating.

If you've never seen this information before, you're in for a treat.

[attachment=0:12aj9q7w]newspp.jpg[/attachment:12aj9q7w]

[century]

The first self-powered aircraft was created by an Englishman by the name of John Stringfellow of Chard in Somerset, who created a self-powered model aircraft that had its first successful flight in 1848.

[Cogburn]

The first self-powered aircraft was created by an Englishman by the name of John Stringfellow of Chard in Somerset, who created a self-powered model aircraft that had its first successful flight in 1848.
Sure... except nobody was on it.

[lala]

The hot air ballon was carrying people from 1783 . . . :wink: . . . . good fing cog. :D

[hp]

Something doesn't seem right with this whole thing.

[GhostOfCaptSpaulding]

[offsite:s6h4csj0]"I Like my Wife"[/offsite:s6h4csj0]

Pure fiction...



[offsite:s6h4csj0]"Lost - Physician's Obstetrical case with instruments. Reward if delivered to Dr. M'Coy"[/offsite:s6h4csj0]


Doctor - fuckin' - M'Coy!!?

Holy shit!

Proof of inter dimensional time-travel!

0]bVhcB9ucmdg0]

[hp]

This is all over the web. Since the Morning News has been out of business for many years, I wonder where the archives are and if anyone has verified the article.

If true then the UFOs are no longer UFOs and case solved. This should break the hearts of those die hard fans that think ever sighting ever was aliens.

[Cogburn]

I learned of it after watching a video of a UFO conference from 2003. Marrs announced that he had "just received a copy not two weeks ago".

You hit my interest in this right on the head, HP.

Marrs is convinced that the "aliens" are able to morph their technology to match the technology of the time in which they are operating.

Bullshit. Marrs can't admit that maybe, just maybe, it's us.... and it's always been us.

[hp]

It seems a bit odd that some one wrote up all those sightings back in one issue. Guess it slow times.

Does tend to help the position that many of the sightings are just confusion of what is actually being witnessed. At least these old timers looked to man not people from space.

[skunk]

Jim Mars, the old sohai conspiracy master? Is this the article about the spaceship that crashed in the old west and there was a body found/buried in a cemetery?

[Cogburn]

Uhhh... Dallas Morning News is still in print. It's one of the oldest continuously printing newspapers in the country.

http://www.dallasnews.com/

Yup, same Jim Marrs. It's a 2-hour DVD and I can't post it to YouTube due to the 10min limit. It was a part of his lecture tour when he was humping "Rule by Secrecy". There are vast portions of his information which are just wrong or based on the worst of all sources (Sitchin!!!!11one). If you've been paying attention to conspiracy theory and it's patterns you can cut through the bullshit in his stuff pretty easily. Let's face it, all Marrs really did was ripoff Bill Cooper. Since Bill Cooper was in the ground for 2 years prior to publication I guess he didn't have much to say on being stolen from.

This is a mass sighting over Texas with multiple reported interactions with the occupants. It was sighted from the OK border to the Dallas area. The reason the whole front page is covered in eye-witness accounts is because there were just that many. Honestly, given the number of reports (there were some on Ft. Worth papers, too, which I'm trying to find) it almost sounds like the most witnessed mass sighting until the Phoenix Lights.

[hp]

I confused it with the other Dallas paper that bit the dust, much like the Houston Post.

Thinking about, an airship back then would be big news. that date was a monday.

[lala]

From wiki . . . . .


1887
There were a number of mystery airship reports from the U.S. east coast in 1887[3]


[edit] 1896-1897 wave
The best-known of the Mystery Airship waves began in California in 1896. Afterwards, reports and accounts of similar airships came from others areas, generally moving east.

Some accounts during this wave of airship reports claim that occupants were visible on some airships, and encounters with the pilots were reported as well. These occupants were said to be human, though their behaviour, mannerisms and clothing were sometimes reported to be unusual. One witness from Arkansas-- allegedly a former state senator Harris -- was supposedly told by an airship pilot (during the tensions leading up the Spanish American War) that the craft was bound for Cuba, to use its "Hotchkiss gun" to "kill Spaniards". (Jacobs, 10)

In one account from Texas, three men reported an encounter with an airship and with "five peculiarly dressed men" who reported that they were descendant from the lost tribes of Israel; they had learned English from the 1553 north pole expedition led by Hugh Willoughby.


[edit] Specific cases
At least two airship tales were taken as at least possibly genuine by generations of later ufologists:

An account by Alexander Hamilton of Leroy, Kansas supposedly occurred about April 19, 1897, and was published in the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate of April 23. Hamilton, his son, and a tenant witnessed an airship hovering over his cattle pen. Upon closer examination, the witnesses realized that a red “cable” from the airship had lassoed a heifer, but had also become entangled in the pen’s fence. After trying unsuccessfully to free the heifer, Hamilton cut loose a portion of the fence, then "stood in amazement to see the ship, cow and all rise slowly and sail off." (Jacobs, 15) Some have suggested this was the earliest report of cattle mutilation (In 1982, however, UFO researcher Jerome Clark debunked this story, and confirmed via interviews and Hamilton's own affidavit that the story was a successful attempt to win a Liar's Club competition to create the most outlandish tall tale).
An account from Aurora, Texas [1] (as related in the Dallas Morning News) reported that an airship had smashed into a windmill-- later determined to be a sump pump -- belonging to a Judge Proctor, then crashed. The occupant was dead and mangled, but the story reported that presumed pilot was clearly "not an inhabitant of this world." (Jacobs, 17) Strange "hieroglyphic" figures were seen on the wreckage, which resembled "a mixture of aluminum and silver ... it must have weighed several tons.”"(ibid.) (In the 20th Century, unusual metallic material recovered from the presumed crash site was shown to contain a percentage of aluminum and iron admixed.) The story ended by noting that the pilot was given a "Christian burial" in the town cemetery. In 1973, MUFON investigators discovered the alleged stone marker used in this burial. Their metal detectors indicated a quantity of foreign material might remain buried there. However, they were not permitted to exhume, and when they returned several years later, the headstone -- and whatever metallic material had lay beneath it -- was gone.[citation needed]

[edit] 1909-1912
There was a series of mystery airship sightings in 1909. Some came from various European locations[4], some from New England[5] and from New Zealand. (Clark 2000, 123)

Later reports came from the UK in 1912 and 1913[6]


[edit] Later research
Jerome Clark writes that "One curious feature of the post-1887 airship waves was the failure of each to stick in historical memory. Although 1909, for example, brought a flood of sightings worldwide and attendant discussion and speculation, contemporary accounts do not allude to the hugely publicized events of little more than a decade earlier." (Clark 2000, 123)

Clark writes that attempts to "uncover the truth about the late-nineteenth-century airship scare comes up against some unhappy realities: newspaper coverage was unreliable; no independent investigators ('airshipologists') spoke directly with alleged witnesses or attempted to verify or debunk their testimony; and, with a single unsatisfactory exception, no eyewitness was ever interviewed even in the 1950’s, when some were presumably still living."(Clark 1998, 37)

The "single unsatisfactory example" Clark cites is a former San Francisco Chronicle employee interviewed via telephone by Edward J. Ruppelt in 1952. Ruppelt wrote that the man "had been a copy boy ... and remembered the incident, but time had cancelled out the details. He did tell me that he, the editor of the paper, and the news staff had seen 'the ship', as he referred to the UFO. His story, even though it was fifty-six years old, smacked of others I’d heard when he said that no one at the newspaper ever told anyone what they had seen; they didn’t want people to think they were 'crazy.'"

Jacobs notes that "Most arguments against the airship idea came from individuals who assumed that the witnesses did not see what they claimed to see. This is the crucial link between the 1896-97 phenomenon and the modern unidentified flying object phenomenon beginning in 1947. It also was central to the debate over whether unidentified flying objects constituted a unique phenomenon." (Jacobs, 33-34)


[edit] Explanations

[edit] Hoaxes or misidentification
During the 1896-1897 wave, there were many attempts to explain the airship sightings, including suggestion of hoaxes, pranks, publicity stunts and hallucinations. One man suggested the airships were swarms of lightning beetles misidentified by observers (Jacobs, 30).

Jacobs notes that many airship tales were due to “Enterprising reporters perpetrating journalistic hoaxes.” (Jacobs, 16) However, Jacobs notes that many of these accounts “are easy to identify because of their tongue-in-cheek tone, and accent on the sensational.” (ibid.) Furthermore, the supposed authors of many such newspaper hoaxes make their hoax obvious "by saying--in the last line--that he was writing from an insane asylum (or something to that effect)." (Jacobs, 17-18)


[edit] Human airships
Some argued that the airship reports were genuine accounts. Steerable airships had been publicly flown in the US since the Aereon in 1863, and numerous inventors were working on airship and aircraft designs (the idea that a secretive inventor might have developed a viable craft with advanced capabilities was the focus of Jules Verne's 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror).

Several individuals, including Lyman Gilmore and Charles Dellschau, were later identified as possible candidates for being involved in the design and construction of the airships, although little evidence was found in support of these ideas.


[edit] Extraterrestrial origin
Early citations of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, all from 1897, include the Washington Times, which speculated that the airships were "a reconnoitering party from Mars"; and the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, which suggested of the airships, "these may be visitors from Mars, fearful, at the last, of invading the planet they have been seeking." (Jacobs, 29) In 1909, a letter printed in the Otago Daily Times (New Zealand) suggested that the mystery airship sightings then being reported in that country were due to Martian "atomic-powered spaceships." (Clark 2000, 123)

[Cogburn]

In 1973, MUFON investigators discovered the alleged stone marker used in this burial. Their metal detectors indicated a quantity of foreign material might remain buried there. However, they were not permitted to exhume, and when they returned several years later, the headstone -- and whatever metallic material had lay beneath it -- was gone.[citation needed]
Go back in the middle of the night and dig the shit up anyway, you gutless bastards. If this is the cover-up of the century, you're telling me you're going to let some podunk town mayor get in your way?

MUFON... failed again.

The only thing those fuckers seem to do is destroy serious research by never taking risks and ruining evidence.

Nice find, lala.