Still no laptop, nor internet connection, to truly call my own and whilst I do have time(ish) to write posts I don't have the urge for some reason because it eats into what is now valuable internet time for me to chat with mates and blog on my other two blogs. Posts on here take a lot of reading to get up, and a fair bit of writing, and so things here are closed until I can afford a new laptop.
But... I will be back here, and things will be updated as soon as I get a new laptop... thanks to everyone for keeping me in their readers and following lists. It really is appreciated. This blog gives me an excuse to look into areas that interest me, that I've neglected for a long time, so it is very much forefront in my future plans.
I just love this article on "shadow life" here on Earth. A very interesting area of study. I've always been fascinated by the "vent life" of the seas but this takes things a whole step further...
This blogger works for nothing but the joy of writing but always appreciates things bought from his wishlist
I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.
Wednesday 24th November 1971 was just another day for Florence Schaffner, an air hostess on Flight 305 from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. It was the day before Thanksgiving and perhaps her thoughts were turning to the festivities that were soon to come as she sat in her jump seat. She probably didn't realise that the passenger in seat 18c wasn't coming on to her as she pocketed the note he gave her. Just another chancer passing her his phone number. Her level of shock must of been pretty high when the guy turned round to her and said:
"Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb."
As well as telling her the plane was being hijacked the note also carried demands that when the plane landed in Seattle he was to be brought 2 sets of parachutes, $200 000 in $20 dollar notes (unmarked of course) and threatened to blow up the plane if these demands were not met exactly.
The pilot William Scott was told by the FBI after a quick response by the emergency services to cooperate with the hijacker and he asked Schaffner to confirm whether this guy had a bomb. She returned to the cockpit with confirmation having seen inside the briefcase and brought the request from the hijacker that they were not to land until the parachutes and money was ready on the ground.
The FBI gathered the money, making microfilm copies so they could track them down should they be used, and managed to find some parachutes at a local skydiving school. The plane landed and whilst the negotiations commenced, our hijacker generously requested food be brought for the crew. After the goods were delivered to the plane he quickly released all the passengers and stewardess Schaffner but kept all 3 of the flight crew and one other stewardess on the plane.
Once he was satisfied with all the arrangements he ordered the pilot to fly to Mexico City at an unusually low altitude and speed. He ordered the last stewardess to go to the cockpit and stay there and as she left she saw him putting on a harness. Moments later the cockpit instruments recorded the door being open and when they attempted to ask if he need any assistance the crew were rebuffed with a loud "No!!"
Somewhere over the southern part of the state of Washington he lowered the aft stairs and jumped... never to be seen again.
He'd used the name Dan Cooper when booking the seats, but thanks to a misprint in a press article he will always be known as D.B. Cooper to most people. And the fact that his was the first ever unsolved airplane hijacking and that no one had ever seen him since has caused this case to be one of great interest.
The FBI and US Army made one of the largest ground searches in history across Washington state and the FBI began a sweep of the country looking for the banknotes they had given Cooper. They found nothing. Nada. Zip.
In 1978 a hunter in the area found the placard from the plane giving instructions on how to open the aft stairs.
In 1980 a boy on a picnic with his family found $5880 on a riverbank which belonged to Cooper's haul and after careful study it was found they'd probably washed up there sometime after 1974 from one of the rivers in Cooper's landing zone.
Given that the notes have never been found in circulation and that part of his stash washed up in a river it seems unlikely that Dan Cooper survived his jump. But until his remains are found, speculation over his ultimate fate will continue.
... since my laptop died and to be honest I don't want to fix the problem until at least the new year. I realised just how much free time the internet was eating up and have rediscovered the joy of reading!
But I thought I'd just post to say I will be back in the new year and hopefully you'll stick around. In the meantime I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Eat, drink and be merry!
And in an act of shameless self promotion that has become a festive tradition on my other blog I submit for you my Christmas Wishlist.
My laptop is dead. So until I can afford a new one (think years rather than months here people!) I'm afraid there shall be few/no new posts. Sorry guys!!
Throughout the early 20th century reports came in of mysterious airships from places as far afield as California, London and New Zealand. What could they have been?
Charles Dellschau and the Sonora Aero Club
Behind every great unexplained event is a conspiracy theory waiting to see the light of day and the phantom airships are no different.
Dellschau was born in Prussia in 1830 but emigrated to America in his early adulthood. At that time (and for many years after) Germany was at the forefront of aeronautical innovation and perhaps that is what influenced Dellschau's later works.
He wasn't famous during his lifetime, in fact he was considered a recluse and his grouchy nature made him few friends. But after his death several personal journals and artworks were discovered which perhaps might shed some light on the phantom airships.
Dellschau began this work in 1899 and his works tell a story. If his work (written in badly spelt English, German and his very own code language) is to be believed some 50 years previously he had been a member of a secretive organisation named the Sonora Aero Club which was established by eccentric men dedicated to furthering the cause of powered flight in California.It was supposedly part of a larger secret society called NYMZA. Some see these claims as a possible explanation for at least some of the reports of mystery airships over the USA. Many encounters with the airship crews record the crews stating various ambitions to fly on to another destination as part of some great adventure.
But it must be remembered that Dellschau was an artist, his artistic airships not in anyway resembling those reported (or those that could ever fly!) and his ramblings could either simply be part of his art or part of some sort of mental health issue. There's a bit more on this here.
Contemporary Zany Inventors?
The rather interesting thing about the sightings is that they occurred at a time when it is very possible there were people inventing such ships such as:
Henri Giffard flew a steamed powered airship 27km in 1852 near Paris.
Solomon Andrews flew Aereon in 1863 over New Jersey which consisted of three 80-foot cigar-shaped balloons, with a rudder and gondola.
Henri DupuydeLôme flew an airship in the last days of the Franco-Prussian War
By the late 1890s rigid, metal hulled airships were beginning to be flown thanks to inventors such as David Schwarz.
And there were rumours of other inventors at work, some stories are on this site including this one, which I particularly like:
In 1848 gold fever seized America. On January 24 a workman discovered the precious metal in Sutter's millrace in California's Sacramento Valley. Within weeks the entire Pacific coast knew about it and a few months later "gold" was on the tongue of every easterner who ever dreamed of easy fortune. Getting to those goldfields, however, was a problem, for the inland parts of the young nation were largely unsettled. A unique solution -- air travel -- came from "R. Porter & Company," a firm which listed its address as Room 40 of the Sun Building in New York City. In the latter part of 1848 the company distributed an advertising flyer in the eastern United States which promised more than it ever delivered. Touting "THE BEST ROUTE TO THE CALIFORNIA GOLD!" the flyer read in part that the company was "making active progress in the construction of an 'Aerial Transport' for the express purpose of carrying passengers between New York and California. "It is expected to put this machine in operation about the first of April, 1849, and the transport is expected to make a trip to the gold region and back in seven days..." On the flyer the "aerial locomotive" is illustrated -- a huge cigar-shaped device, identified as a "gasbag," with a tail. Under it, attached with "sturdy material arrows can't puncture," is a similarly-shaped car with windows in its midsection. "Snug gondola with benches for 50 or more passengers," the caption reads. From the top of the gondola stretches a long pipe which is identified as "a steam engine for controlled propulsion through sunny skies at 60 miles the hour." Except for this pipe, entrepreneur Porter's vessel is almost a dead ringer for the type of "UFO" widely reported in the late 1800's and early 1900's which came to be called "the airship," although obviously there had to be more than one of them and they did not all look alike. But in the advertisement of an obscure company lie the first hints of a bizarre mystery which is staggering in its implications.
So yes those ships described by the witnesses would be futuristic and advanced but not completely impossible. For all we know they were simply the product of over enthusiastic inventors. But why would they not have reported such marvels? Well my other half is always making and creating new things, a jukebox from scratch was my favourite, and he does it simply for the joy of doing so. Soon after he's made them he tears them down to move on to his next project. Could these guys have not been like that? Sure it's far fetched but anything is possible!
Aliens?
On April 19 the Dallas Morning News reported that the airship had crashed into a windmill in Aurora and exploded. The body of the pilot was recovered, and was identified as a native of the planet Mars. Despite this, the remains were buried in the local Masonic cemetery. The Amazing Airships of 1896
Of course with these reports of crafts in the sky so greatly resemble later UFO and extraterrestrial encounters it is not difficult to go one step further and claim these sightings are also extraterrestrial in origin. Sure some of the lights in the sky type sightings might well be alien space craft but more likely are simply natural phenomenon.
The more detailed encounters suggest that these airships could not be alien in origin. The technology described was not that advanced (certainly not advanced enough for intergalactic travel) and most reported humans in the vehicles, or at least heard human voices and laughter from them. I find it highly unreasonable to connect the airship flaps with aliens, as the evidence is very much against that idea and more in favour of a more earthly origin.
A Hoax?
History shows us that hoaxes are more likely an explanation for the sightings than any other possible cause. If you think news reporting is unreliable and biased now, then you have obviously not seen anything about news reporting in Victorian times. Given to exaggeration, and sometimes downright lying, just to sell papers many reporters would happily seize upon a light in the sky story and turn it into several pieces on strange craft generating more reports by people who think they've seen something which ends up generating more stories and so on.
If you look at the flaps, starting off slowly and become more feverish and outlandish as time passes before petering out, the chronology bears out this sort of scenario perfectly. I'm not suggesting anyone person intentionally set out to hoax others, but I am suggesting a combination of factors may have exaggerated the stories from mere misunderstandings into crazy airship stories.
One article even goes on to cite the possibility, that newspapers at the time suggested, that some of these hoaxes may even have been an elaborate advertising scam!
Foreign Powers?
The scareships show us that paranoia about the abilities of an adversary can lead to exaggerated reports. There is no way airships could have reached parts of the country they were reported in from anywhere else in Europe. The very idea is absurd. Perhaps the Sheerness sighting reported last time was a German airship but in Wales? Or in the north? Absolutely not.
Perhaps there were airships in the sky during some of those encounters, but sadly the general media situation at the time of the sightings and people's enthusiasm for the subject leave me unable to believe the majority of reports which can be put down to hoaxes, exaggeration and mistaken identity.
"Alien big cats" are reported throughout the country (and throughout the world). But all such reports should be treated critically as human perception can be flawed. So what other evidence is there that large big cats wander our woods, fields and sometimes towns? Let's take a look.
There's plenty of video "evidence" on Youtube and the following video is certainly intriguing but only if that fence is 12 foot high. If it's not then this would be the smallest big cat in history.
In 1991 an European Lynx was shot near Great Witchingham, Norfolk. See the picture below.
Many think this animal was an escapee from a zoo or private collection who preyed upon local livestock until it was killed. It does at least show big cats have survived in the wild in the UK before. Another lynx was captured in 2001 and earned the nickname "the Beast of Crinklewood". She's now called Lara and lives at London Zoo.
Across the country in Shropshire, Devon and even on the Isle of Wight Jungle cats and Leopard cats have been shot or run over (on more than a few occasions!) over the last couple of decades. Now these cats aren't "big cats" but they are large ecologically alien cats and it is very interesting to see that they can be found living wild in this country.
The Times carried a story headlined "Puma Cub Caught Near Hospital" on the 28th of October 1976. That same year the Dangerous Wild Animals Act went through Parliament. This act is often cited as a cause for the release of captive animals into the wild in an effort to avoid breaking the law (it wasn't illegal to release them until the eighties). Although my article on the Surrey Puma shows big cat sightings do predate this event, perhaps this is when a larger more widespread population was introduced. In 1980 Ted Noble caught a puma, later named Felicity at Cannich, Inverness-shire, Scotland. This however didn't stop sightings of a large cat that had preceded her capture and they carried on as she lived out her days as a tourist attraction at the Highland Wildlife Park, Kinguisse. Another incident happened in Greenwich Park (just a few minutes walk from where I sit typing this) in 1987 when police shot a puma near the famous Greenwich Observatory.
Worrying footage can be found about 7 minutes into this video. Part one of this documentary can be found here. I'm not big on conspiracy theories (as you, Dear Constant Reader, know) but I'm at a loss to explain away that footage of firemen and men with guns turning up at this man's property after a big cat sighting. Either there is an established extermination programme or the authorities have reason to take such reports extremely seriously. Now if they were simply taking things seriously surely it would be uniformed firearms officers who attended? Not a ramshackle group of guys who look more like guns for hire than officers of the law? Really rather interesting footage which I will take with a big dose of "reality" but will still ponder for quite some time. The big dose of reality is simply that the "big cat" looks to be a large domestic cat in this instance. Can they really grow that big? YES! I myself am desperate to own a Maine Coon which is a very large (and beautiful!) breed of felis catus. So I'm wary of the rest of the story as the premise (as featured in the video beforehand) is faulty. Another similar sort of report of police involvement can be read here. Again I make no claims of belief in such a cover up but simply put it out there for consideration.
Neil Arnold has an interesting article (among many) on what sort of big cats could survive and remain relatively hidden in the wilds of Kent (and hence most of Great Britain).
Check out the Monster Quest episode The Black Beast Of Exmoor for some more supposed footage of big cats in Britain.
Don't get me wrong, I believe most reports of such cats are simply mistaken identity as most pictures are very clearly domestic cats or some just dogs (I really despair when I see a picture supposedly of a big cat and see instantly it's a dog). But there is too much evidence to dismiss the fact that somewhere out there, right now, a large cat is lurking. Whether it's a rogue or a member of a thriving breeding population... that is what we need to establish.
Sometimes I truly am amazed at the guff the news media print in this country. I can almost forgive the Sun, but the fact the Telegraph also went with this story proves that it has gone to the dogs.
Nigel and Christine Strange (cue five million jokes) from Bristol think their leather sofa is haunted because... it makes squeaking noises when they sit on it. The noises appear to be getting louder over time and their "fearless Yorkshire Terrier" is scared by the noises.
1. Anyone ever had a leather sofa? I hate the things, the squeaky noises can be totally irritating.
2. Sofas often BREAK and if something is broken inside it will often make a noise, especially when sat on, and over time the noise might get worse as the problem gets worse.
3. Yorkshire Terriers will bark at anything.
How can anyone take this seriously? It's obviously a set up story to enable the Sun to push it's parent companies latest release "The X-Files: I Want To Believe" (I did too but I was very much off put by the terrible plot). Only an idiot would assume something was haunted just because it squeaked when you sat on it!
Less well known than the 1896-97 spat of sightings, the 1909 wave is still worthy of mention. This wave occurred at the true dawn of air travel and appropriately enough had a much more international flavour.
The "scareships" appeared across Britain that year causing panic and fear. We must remember that the early years of the 20th Century spelt the end of Britain's splendid isolation thanks to the invention of controlled, powered flight. The British truly were scared of what that could mean, and sadly we all know we Brits were quite right to fear what lay ahead. So "scareships" was the phrase the papers coined for that year's mystery airships.
The first ascent of the Zeppelin LZ1 in 1900
The Airship Wave Of 1909 - Dr David Clarke is a rather brilliant article about the scareships and their immediate historical setting. I'll give you a few examples of the sights Dr Clarke mentions:
In May 1909, the skipper of the Suffolk-based fishing smack Superb, J.H. Stockman, reported how in October the previous year, when fishing in the North Sea 35 miles out of Lowestoft he had seen what at first appeared to be "a large star rising out of the water" and approaching his ship. After calling one of his crew, Stockman decided to signal to the "airship" with a red flare, and to his surprise he was immediately answered by a red flare from above his ship. He then showed a white flare, and received a blue flare in response! The "airship" appeared to be sausage shaped, and carried a single light; it eventually disappeared out to sea in the direction of the Continent
No German Zeppelin would have been able to make such a crossing and the report is remarkably similar to many latter day UFO sightings.
From the point of view of the London newspapers, however, the scare can safely be said to have begun with the sighting made by Police Constable Kettle in the Cathedral city of Peterborough, early on the morning of 23 March 1909. It was this sighting which was the first to appear in a London evening newspaper, the Daily Mail, and was subsequently noted by Charles Fort in his account of the airship scare.
In his original statement, published in the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser, Kettle said: "I was on duty in Cromwell-road at 5.15 am when I heard what I took to be a motorcar some 400 yards distant. It was quite dark at the time, and I looked along Cromwell-road expecting to see the lights of an approaching car. Nothing appeared, but I could still hear the steady buzz of a high-powered engine. Suddenly it struck me that the sound was coming from above, and I looked up. My eye was at once attracted by a powerful light, which I should judge to have been some 1,200 feet above the ground. I also saw a dark body, oblong and narrow in shape, outlined against the stars. When I first sighted the machine it was not straight overhead but appeared to be over the railway in the direction of Taverners-road. It was travelling at a tremendous pace, and as I watched, the rattle of the engines gradually grew fainter and fainter, until it disappeared in the northwest."
The Daily Mail's account mentions that a second policeman in another part of Peterborough had corroborated Kettle's account, but no further reference has been located referring to this fact in the local Press. Newspaper reporters, however, were quick to locate other witnesses in the town who claimed to have seen a similar object in the sky over Peterborough at around the same time. One of these was a Miss Gill, daughter of the city electrical engineer, who upon returning from the theatre with friends that same night saw "a brilliant flashing light in the sky...apparently attached to some dark object moving slowly in the direction of Cromwell Road.
This was to be the first in a series of sightings in East Anglia and soon enough fevered reporters and onlookers descended on the counties thereabouts in search of the lights in the sky. Soon the craze moved further afield...
"a report was made by a police constable Day, of the Lincolnshire force, to the effect that he had seen an airship hovering over Immingham Dock at night. PC Day claimed he was patrolling on the banks of the Humber at 2am when his attention was attracted to a bright light hanging over the river nearby.
"Having been in the navy for several years, the officer states emphatically that it was not a searchlight," maintained the Sheffield Telegraph. "He also states that he distinctly saw the outline of a car, which was swaying gently in mid-air. For an hour the mysterious body and light remained visible until, in fact, the officer went off duty."
As usual there may well have been a less sensational explanation for this sighting, for the account went on to say: "It so happens that there was a remarkable display of the Northern Lights early [on the morning of 22 May] and it is quite possible that this may afford an explanation."
I just imagine him staring at this strange sight, amazed and bewildered than seeing his watch and thinking "Wooooo... what am I doing standing around here, it's time for a beer!" Typical Brit... ;)
At Herne Bay in Kent, five independent witnesses in different parts of the town observed the passage of an airship shaped like "a big cigar" or a sausage, carrying a brilliant light, which travelled inland from the sea between 9 and 9.30 pm on 13 May.
On the same night hundreds of miles to the north in Hull, on the East Coast of Yorkshire, Mr A. Walker was walking home when he observed a flash of light in the sky above the Humber at 11pm. "It was working to the west and seemed to be tracking a little as if going against the wind which was forcing it back," he told the Hull Daily Mail. "It was a luminous body seen through a cloud, and appeared arc-shaped, and I also heard a peculiar whirring noise. The light was high up, about a mile up, I should think. It was dark and cloudy at the time and I had the light under observation for about two minutes. I immediately called my father and mother who were in the house, and they also both saw the light as it travelled westwards."
Several other Hull residents also came forward and claimed they had seen an airship hovering over the Humber the following night, and that "for a brief space, a piercing searchlight was directed on the river."
Did you think Kent would escape a mention? Never!
That is just a few of many sightings in Britain that spring and I've left out some actual encounters with "Germans" and even a few Men In Black stories too mentioned in the article which I really urge you to read. Given the huge amount of publicity and the sheer quantity of witness statements it's quite astonishing that so few people have even heard of the scareship wave, whether it was aliens, pre-WWI delusions or German recon flights it's still a fascinating phenomenon. The reports continued right up until the outbreak of the First World War and the first waves of real "scareships" which brought misery to our isles. In fact one incident in 1912 when the sounds of an airship were heard flying over Sheerness in Kent (trust me, if you are of right mind you'd want to ensure you flew above Sheerness and not ever touch down there...) lead to questions being asked in Parliament.
Another place that was home to a wave of sightings of strange craft was quite a long way away from any possible threatening Zeppelins; New Zealand.
New Zealand, Dunedin: On July 28, an airship apparently came down over the city of Dunedin. A resident in the North Eastern Valley reported that he was awakened by a horrible noise at about two o'clock this morning,' he told a reporter. “The noise was like a ship dragging her anchor up or a windlass of a steamer with dry-gear wheels working. I got up and went round to the front and I saw something floating up past Knox College. It was a great black thing with a searchlight attached.'"
• New Zealand, Fairfax: The afternoon of July 31, 1909, a resident reported seeing an airship while he was at Akatore. At 4:55 p.m., he saw a dark object shoot over the brow of the hills in the east and rapidly climb towards the west. He got a side view of the object which he described as cigar-shaped but bulkier, with a box-like structure underneath in the centre.
• New Zealand, Gore: Early the morning of August 1, a resident of Grosvenor Street in Dunedin reported seeing an airship. At one stage, he saw a bright yellow light shoot up what looked like a mast and stay at the top.
• New Zealand, Greenvale: On July 31, there was a UFO incident during the early morning hours at Greenvale, near Gore, South Island. While feeding the horses, a Greenvale farmhand heard a strange whirring sound, which frightened the animals. On looking out, he saw an airship overhead about 150 feet long. It had head and taillights and was moving so fast that, when he woke up his mates, the lights were faint in the distance.
• New Zealand, Kaka Point: New Zealand was repeatedly visited by UFOs, then known as "airships". On July 24, 1909, some half dozen boys were playing on the beach at Kaka Point saw a huge illuminated object moving about in the air. It appeared as if it was going to alight at Kaka Point. The light from it was distinctly reflected on the roof of Mr. Fitzgerald's cottage. The boys thought it was being attracted by their lantern and left it on the beach. The airship then glided around the rocks at the old pilot station and nearly came in contact with them. It shortly afterwards disappeared. The boys said it was as big as a house.
• New Zealand, Kaitangata: On Sunday night July 25, the mysterious object again made its appearance at the beach and was seen by Mr. George Smith and Mr. Poulter about 8:30. Mr. Smith viewed it through a very powerful night glass. It was apparently over Mr. Aitkenhead's house when he first saw it, but it glided high in the air and sailed north in the direction of Kaitangata, swooping west and east and finally disappearing over the horizon. About 10:30 Mr. Smith was called out by Mr. Poulter to see the airship, which again had made its appearance. This time it headed out to sea and eventually disappeared. As seen through the glass, Mr. Smith said it appeared to be a fair size, dark superstructure with a powerful headlight and two smaller lights at the side.
• New Zealand, Kelso: On July 23, a small group of schoolchildren and some residents reported that an airship came down and bobbed around in the sky over the school for a few minutes.
• New Zealand, Lambourne: On July 27, about 10 a.m., Mr. Allan Mitchell and Mr. Alex Riach, while working at Lambourne near the mouth of the Pomehaka River, saw high in the air a large boat-shaped structure floating in the air.
• New Zealand, Oamaru: On July 19, three residents of Oamaru, reported "a flickering light" moving about in the sky.
And just to prove it wasn't just the British Empire losing it's marbles, New England too was host to a fresh wave of American airships.
With sightings also reported in the Middle East and Vietnam the final few years before the First World War truly were the last great mystery airship wave. So what could be behind these reports? Are they lies, or misidentification of other phenomena? Are they steampunk aliens? The work of crazy inventors? A Government conspiracy? Or war machines sent by foreign powers? Next time we'll look at the evidence... Mystery Airships: The Steampunk UFOs Part Three.
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