Part 73

That, at Kattenau, Germany, about half an hour before sunrise, March 22, 1880, "an enormous number of luminous bodies rose from the horizon, and passed in a horizontal direction from east to west." They are described as having appeared in a zone or belt. "They shone with a remarkably brilliant light."

So they've thrown lassos over our data to bring them back to earth. But they're lassos that cannot tighten. We can't pull out of them: we may step out of them, or lift them off. Some of us used to have an impression of Science sitting in calm, just judgment: some of us now feel that a good many of our data have been lynched. If a Crusade, perhaps from Mars to Jupiter, occur in the autumn--"seeds." If a Crusade or outpouring of celestial vandals is seen from this earth in the spring--"ice crystals." If we have record of a race of aerial beings, perhaps with no substantial habitat, seen by someone in India--"locusts."

This will be disregarded:

If locusts fly high, they freeze and fall in thousands.

Nature, 47-581:

Locusts that were seen in the mountains of India, at a height of 12,750 feet--"in swarms and dying by thousands."

But no matter whether they fly high or fly low, no one ever wonders what's in the air when locusts are passing overhead, because of the falling of stragglers. I have especially looked this matter up--no mystery when locusts are flying overhead--constant falling of stragglers.

Monthly Notices, 30-135:

"An unusual phenomenon noticed by Lieut. Herschel, Oct. 17 and 18, 1870, while observing the sun, at Bangalore, India."

Lieut. Herschel had noticed dark shadows crossing the sun--but away from the sun there were luminous, moving images. For two days bodies passed in a continuous stream, varying in size and velocity.

The Lieutenant tries to explain, as we shall see, but he says:

"As it was, the continuous flight, for two whole days, in such numbers, in the upper regions of the air, of beasts that left no stragglers, is a wonder of natural history, if not of astronomy."

He tried different focusing--he saw wings--perhaps he saw planes. He says that he saw upon the objects either wings or phantom-like appendages.

Then he saw something that was so bizarre that, in the fullness of his nineteenth-centuriness, he writes:

"There was no longer doubt: they were locusts or flies of some sort."

One of them had paused.

It had hovered.

Then it had whisked off.

The Editor says that at that time "countless locusts had descended upon certain parts of India."

We now have an instance that is extraordinary in several respects--super-voyagers or super-ravagers; angels, ragamuffins, crusaders, emigrants, aeronauts, or aerial elephants, or bison or dinosaurs--except that I think the thing had planes or wings--one of them has been photographed. It may be that in the history of photography no more extraordinary picture than this has ever been taken.

L'Astronomie, 1885-347:

That, at the Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico, Aug. 12, 1883, about 2,500 meters above sea level, were seen a large number of small luminous bodies, entering upon the disk of the sun. M. Bonilla telegraphed to the Observatories of the City of Mexico and of Puebla. Word came back that the bodies were not visible there. Because of this parallax, M. Bonilla placed the bodies "relatively near the earth." But when we find out what he called "relatively near the earth"--birds or bugs or hosts of a Super-Tamerlane or army of a celestial Richard Coeur de Lion--our heresies rejoice anyway. His estimate is "less distance than the moon."

One of them was photographed. See L'Astronomie, 1885-349. The photograph shows a long body surrounded by indefinite structures, or by the haze of wings or planes in motion.

L'Astronomie, 1887-66;

Signer Ricco, of the Observatory of Palermo, writes that, Nov. 30, 1880, at 8:30 o'clock in the morning, he was watching the sun, when he saw, slowly traversing its disk, bodies in two long, parallel lines, and a shorter, parallel line. The bodies looked winged to him. But so large were they that he had to think of large birds. He thought of cranes.

He consulted ornithologists, and learned that the configuration of parallel lines agrees with the flight-formation of cranes. This was in 1880: anybody now living in New York City, for instance, would tell him that also it is a familiar formation of aeroplanes. But, because of data of focus and subtended angles, these beings or objects must have been high.

Sig. Ricco argues that condors have been known to fly three or four miles high, and that heights reached by other birds have been estimated at two or three miles. He says that cranes have been known to fly so high that they have been lost to view.

Our own acceptance, in conventional terms, is that there is not a bird of this earth that would not freeze to death at a height of more than four miles: that if condors fly three or four miles high, they are birds that are especially adapted to such altitudes.