Since the seventeenth century, many strange shapes and substances have tumbled from the sky and distressed local sensibilities. They have been identified as gelatinous and bloodlike, fungus, coke, clinker, anthracite, slag, ash, yellow oil, high-grade steel, furnace products, also receptacles. Sometimes these have descended in neatly-contained, well-turned metal vessel;-., despite which they have usually smelt abominably.
From 1800 onwards, whence dawned the rosy ‘Age of Experts’, appropriate savants have been called in to examine, prod, probe and identify. When two or more experts were called in, each pronounced unhesitatingly, and with equal sureness. totally opposite findings; and when in doubt fell back upon his old friend and stock-in-trade ‘fungi’, for which no one was going to contradict him.
At Maury Island, a saucer appeared to be in trouble. It dropped something near the shore, preceded by a loud booming report. Pieces recovered later were variously identified as volcanic matter, slag, basalt, furnace residue, unknown metal, etc. Pre-1900 showers of the same stuff were likewise usually heralded by loud explosions, booming reports or thunder-claps of ‘unusual nature’. In falling from a great height this explosion could have been caused by matter breaking through what is now called the ‘Sound Barrier’.
Maury Island is the first case in the twentieth century where the source of falling matter was low enough to be seen. Are there any other cases in which matter, jelly, waste-products, and engine-room bilge have actually been observed to leave a flying saucer and fall to the ground ?
Yes, in Autumn 1952, a scoutmaster from West Palm Beach, Florida, was out with two scouts when they saw flashes of light in a wooded area. Going to investigate, they found themselves standing beneath a heel-shaped saucer, about 30 feet in diameter. The machine was hissing and hovering about 10 feet off the ground. It was solid, semi-circular and surrounded by a corona, or outer rim, of glowing phosphorescent light. The next minute the machine projected, or allowed to fall, a ball of fire, which narrowly missed the scoutmaster who either fainted, or was overcome by the stench. He said the ball of substance gave out a misty flare and floated straight towards him causing minor burns. The two scouts who were with him confirmed his testimony and the incident was widely reported by the American Press.
But something very similar happened back on 26 October, 1846, when a flying object shot over Lowell, Massachussetts, coughed, puffed, and ejected a large lump of evil-smelling jelly, 4 feet in diameter, and weighing 442 lb. It was examined, prodded and inspected, none too enthusiastically, for it was ‘extremely odiferous’. Various accounts appeared in local papers, and the inevitable experts finally identified it as ‘odorous jelly’.
The Annals of Philosophy report that near Rome in May 1652 a sticky mass of jelly fell at the time of the appearance of a large luminous body. And in March 1796 another great clot of jelly fell at Lusatia from an aerial ‘fireball’. A huge lump of sticky stuff fell just after some enormous flying object had exploded (or caused an atmospheric explosion) near Heidelberg in July 1811. And the American Scientific Journal reports that in 1718 another lump of ‘gelatinous substance’ fell on the Island of Lethy, India, from a ‘globe of fire‘ in the sky.
It is a pity that none of these reports tell what happened to the jelly; whether it melted, evaporated, was analysed, or just left to stink, for had notes been made, we would now have something to compare with an extraordinary occurrence that took place over Gaillac, in south-west France, on 29 October 1952, where matter falling from a squadron of sixteen saucers escorting a huge ‘flying cigar‘ was picked up by people underneath, which unfortunately ‘disintegrated’ before they could get it to a laboratory for analysis. The reasons for its disappearance will be discussed later in this chapter. But slag, ash, bloodlike rain, lumps of jelly, congealed ‘blood‘ and incendiarised metal objects (not meteors) and blocks of ice—sometimes blue ice—have, and do, frequently precipitate themselves from out of the dazzling blue. In 1951 there was a great descent of ice, and several cars had holes torn in their roofs from lumps the size of beer bottles. Experts blamed freak conditions in the upper atmosphere (they did not say what freak conditions), while aviation people said with equal certainty that they were lumps that had fallen off the wings of high-flying aircraft. Even blue ice fell !
Thousands of improper objects have fallen upon our Earth, improper not from any lewdity or suggestiveness, but improper because they have been improperly explained away as meteors or ball lightning, when it was also affirmed they were not of meteoric material; and because no one has ever hazarded a sensible guess at the nature of ‘ball lightning’. Smelted iron fell at Braintree in 1903. ‘Soft carbonaceous substance‘ fell at the Cape of Good Hope and exploded so violently on touching the ground the report was heard for 70 miles.
‘Meteorites’ have arrived, which turned out to resemble various furnace products, cankers, and smelted alloys. Unaccountable ‘showers of ashes’ have fallen and darkened whole districts for days when nowhere in the world was any known volcano active. Even peculiar, polished ‘marble cylinders‘ have swished down and embedded themselves in startled suburban gardens at times when the Weather Offices knew nothing of approaching storms of marble cylinders. No weather forecast has ever announced that tomorrow would be ‘mainly fair; rainy in parts with occasional marble cylinders towards nightfall, and a further outlook—ashy, slaggy and possibly metallic’.
Nor are they likely to co-relate improper objects seen in the sky with improper precipitations raining to the ground until someone finds out and issues a comprehensive list of the byproducts of waste from etheric, magnetic and sonic engines for inclusion in ‘Jane’s Book of Flying Saucers‘ to be published by out great-grandchildren.
On 29 October 1952, according to the London Evening News, about 100 people of Gaillac in south-west France saw a formation of 16 saucers (circular with the familiar raised central position) escorting a ‘saucer‘ of the torpedo, or flying cigar, variety, such as the one that shot up Captain Chile’s airliner (see p. 12). They gave out a bluish glow from their edges, as did the vimanas; and the flying ‘cigars‘ in the middle proceeded to jettison or discharge ‘bright, whitish filaments like glass wool‘ This is the first time a saucer of the torpedo variety has been seen in company with circular disks. So, two more bits fit into the jigsaw. If a torpedo flies in company with disks, then the makers of both types of craft (hitherto only seen separately) must be on friendly terms. Going further, one can propose that the makers of disks and the makers of torpedoes are the same. Therefore, disks and flying cigars come from the same place.
The Gaillac sighting is even more important in that ‘pieces of this bright glass fibrous substance floated down to treetops and telegraph wires and that many eye witnesses gathered whole tufts of it’.
‘Unfortunately it disintegrated and disappeared before it could be taken to a laboratory for analysis.’ 59
59/ Evening News (London), 29 October 1952.
I have heard this said about a similar mysterious substance— a bright, fibrous filament, rather like glass wool—that can be produced out of the body of a medium in a trance in the seance room. No, there is nothing spooky about ‘ectoplasm’, as this peculiar stuff is called. It has been procured, touched, photographed, looked at under microscopes, and subjected to the whole gamut of analytical tests. It appears to be physical for as long as it lasts. Unfortunately it, too, disintegrates and disappears, ‘leaving not a wrack behind’, within a period of seven days—more usually within minutes. Ectoplasm is held to be etheric in nature. It becomes physical temporarily, owing to certain biomagnetic processes not yet understood.
But, whatever the purpose was of this strange procession passing through the autumn skies of France, the fact remains that something very akin to ectoplasm floated down, got tangled in the telegraph wires, and did not survive its trip to the analysts’ benches; which was a great pity. Had it reached the microscope, somebody could have pontificated to the satisfaction of all that it was fungus/cellular/vegetable/animal/slag/resin and the rest, and everyone would have been much happier. As it is, we are left with a substance answering to all the characteristics of ectoplasm.
But intellects capable of producing flying saucers would have little use for the negative aspects of this phenomenon; rather would they have solved and explored its positive and creative possibilities, and harnessed it to produce scientific marvels, which the natives of Gaillac may have glimpsed unwittingly when that bright fibrous substance drifted into the phone wires, only to disintegrate before it could be correctly inspected, catalogued and identified.
Before leaving this odd subject, I would like to mention a very curious occurrence which was reported in the Sunday Express of 1 October 1951. Two Philadelphia policemen, John Collins and Joseph Keenan, saw a large spherical shiny object float down to land in a field. They called another patrolman, James Caspar, and a sergeant, Joseph Cook. Warily they approached the fallen, silent monster which sat where it had landed, gleaming in the light of their flashlamps. Eventually, after regarding it for some moments, Patrolman Collins plucked up courage and prodded it. His experience was unpleasant.
‘I touched it,’ he said, ‘and it just dissolved, leaving my fingers sticky. There was no smell, no anything, just stickiness.’ During the next twenty minutes the thing became less real. Like the Gaillac fibres it was slowly disappearing before their eyes— not melting, not evaporating, just disappearing—ceasing to exist. After half an hour it had gone completely—not a dent in the ground, not even damp grass. It just wasn’t there any more. Like ectoplasm it appeared, and it disappeared, as if it was made of ‘temporary matter’.
Returning to solids and things we know more about, there is a crash, a thud, and a block of ice weighing nearly a ton lands in Hungary, sending the rabbits and peasants scuttling to safety. For ice, in assorted hues and sizes, has clattered down from heaven long before there were petrol-driven aircraft with leading edges from whence to drop. The London Times of 4 August 1847 reported that a block of pure ice weighing 25 lb. fell in a meadow in Cricklewood.
A lump 3 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 2 feet deep—almost a cubic metre—fell in Hungary on 8 May 1802; and in Salina, Kansas, 1882, a block weighing 80 lb. arrived and was packed proudly in sawdust by a local merchant. Ice in cubic yards struck India in 1828. But here is the climax—In August 1849, at Ord in Scotland, there was an explosion in the air or ‘extraordinary peal of thunder,’ and an icy asteroid 20 feet in circumference hurtled down to earth.
Somewhere in the upper air were vessels so vast that their leading edges could accumulate single chunks weighing over a ton; or just more things the weather experts cannot explain ? Yet if, according to the officials, the small lumps of ice that smote Croydon and South London in 1951 fell from the leading edges of high-flying aircraft, why not the metric block that tumbled a century before—from leading edges a hundred times or even a thousand times larger ?
The Godman Field monster was reported as 500-1,000 feet in diameter. Can anyone volunteer information of cubic yards of ice arriving anywhere on the world around that date; or have they been mentioned in some local paper without anyone seeing a connection ?
If 1,000 feet, why should not super vessels exist of 10,000 feet ? The Asura Maya vimana in the Samar was 12,000 cubits in circumference. Why not ten miles ? If we, the terrestrial pygmies, think we can soon make an artificial satellite, why limit its size, once the Earth’s magnetic field has been overcome ? So why not ten miles ?
Phobos is about ten miles in diameter.
Phobos and Deimos are the two tiny ‘satellites’ of Mars estimated (though it is hard to be accurate with things that appear as tiny bright dots under the most powerful telescope) as ten and five miles in diameter. Strange things have been said of them. Intuitional things that should not—must not—be said, according to the laws. Dean Swift said that Mars had two tiny moons, over 100 years before they were discovered. Guess ? Fluke ? Intuition ? Where did Swift obtain his information ?
Denis Wheatley suggested in Star of Ill Omen that one of these tiny ‘moons’ was an artificial construction similar to the ‘space station’ now being contemplated by the American Government, and Gerald Heard made the same suggestions earlier in The Riddle of the Flying Saucers. But at the time of their ‘official‘ discovery, the Mahatma Kuthuami Lal Singh wrote to A. P. Sinnett in 1882: ‘The inner satellite, Phobos, is no satellite at all. It keeps too short a periodic time.’ 60
60/ Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett.
If our world were approaching obscuration, with water scarce as gold, and with drastic conservation required, what would a highly scientific humanity do ? It would try to control the weather. It would be much easier to do this from a few thousand miles out in space where the meteorological conditions of the whole planet could be observed at once, than from stations on the ground. First of all, what is weather ? We don’t know many of the answers, but assuming that eventually we take the trouble to study polar and terrestrial magnetism properly, as well as the mysterious magnetic layers of the upper atmosphere, we shall get far nearer the answer than we do now with our insistence on attributing cyclones, anti-cyclones, depressions and the rest to changes in the amount of solar heat reaching the Earth.
Old, despised and primitive sayings say that the Earth has its moods just as we do. When agitated, there are storms; when peaceful, it is fine. When the proper relationship between weather and the Earth’s magnetism is established, this old myth will not sound so absurd, as it would today if suggested to the people who write the Air Ministry weather reports with such consistent lack of success.
So if, in millennia hence, we have learned to look for and to control the causes of our weather in the higher air, would we not build an enormous satellite weather station out in space to circle the planet and influence its ‘moods’. That is just what a disappearing Mars’s humanity may have done. An artificial satellite can have many uses besides a mere convenient platform from whence the other half of humanity can be briskly and economically annihilated—controlling weather, mapping the heavens free from atmospheric distortion, a half-way house for inter-planetary vehicles, for example. Also, building a tiny artificial planet may be very good practice for something much more involved which the Gods have in mind for Man to do when he has finished his earthly schooling.
A brilliant, shining city flying in space. A round thing, a beautiful thing, the summit of achievement for the drifting mindless thing that once oozed out of primal matter, and grew in consciousness and wisdom until it also became able to con struct a radiant, miniature world of its own.
