The Silpho Moor UFO cipher mystery…

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Today, I have a curious story of a 1957 cipher mystery from Scarborough in Yorkshire, with a flying saucer spin. And – best of all – its secret history has (as far as I know) never been fully revealed.

The first press write-up dates to the 9th December 1957, when the Yorkshire Post ran an article (which I haven’t seen) “Mystery object found on Scarborough moors”, “Has ‘Unusual Hieroglyphics’”.

However, most of the contemporary accounts appeared in that august publication Flying Saucer Review…

Three Men in a Car

According to the Flying Saucer Review 1958 Mar-Apr (Vol 4 No 2) p.4:

“[…] three men, Messrs. Frank Hutton [a property dealer], Charles Thomas [a butcher] and Fred Taylor [a tailor], were driving up a steep hill on Silpho Moor at night when the engine of the car cut out. They then saw a glowing object in the sky above some trees and it seemed to go right down into the ground.

“Mr Hutton went alone with a torch and found the object in some bracken and then went back to tell the others. On the way he passed a man and a woman on a little used path. When he got back with his friends to the spot where he had found the object in the bracken it was no longer there. After apparently making enquiries they got in touch with the man […]. There was quite a little bargaining and eventually the object was passed over to them for £10. […]

The story continues in Flying Saucer Review 1958 Jul-Aug (Vol 4 No 4) p.19, which helpfully included images of the object (top left, top right) as well as the mysterious hieroglyphics on the outside (bottom left) and some of the 17 sheets of strange imprinted writing (bottom right) that were found inside. These photos were “reproduce[d] through the courtesy of both Dr. James B. Williamson, of Middleton, Manchester, and of the Manchester Flying Saucer Research Society“, and were presumably taken by its President, John Dale:

Though the reproduction isn’t, ummm, out of this world, the first two pieces look like this:

Philip Longbottom and “Ullo”

This object quickly found its way into the hands of an “Anthony Avenel[l]” (actually Anthony Parker, Mr Hutton’s solicitor), who examined the object in the company of a reporter from the local newspaper and Scarborough cafe owner (and ex-electrical and mechanical engineer) Philip Longbottom. Before they drilled into the saucer object to open it up, Avenell had already looked at the imprinted markings on the outside enough to think that it formed some kind of message.

Once it had been pried open, inside they found 17 small copper sheets “joined at one edge”, containing roughly 2000 words of hieroglyphics, in some kind of a cuneiform language. Each letter was formed from two stamped lines, so gave a superficial impression of T, L and V.

Despite knowing nothing about ciphers, Longbottom spent 100 hours decrypting the mystery message: his decryption appeared in the Flying Saucer Review 1958, Nov-Dec (pp.15-17). He wrote:

I took a copy, symbol by symbol, of the key on the outside of the object, and also of the first few lines of the first page of the book, worked through most of the night on this, and finally ended up with a reasonable translation and also, which was more important, was able to evolve a sort of code card, or more elaborate key, to the whole of the heiroglyphics.

[…] It was soon found that each symbol had several alternative meanings and sounds, depending upon its position under, over or across the line or, in some cases, its proximity to the line. Some of the symbols are abbreviations, and several of them are phonetic spellings of familiar words. The whole thing is not just a simple substitution code, but is a very complicated effort. [pp.15-16]

Longbottom added that “the scrolls are now in the hands of a cypher expert, so that we may expect a more accurate translation in the near future, although I expect the gist of the message to remain unchanged“.

He also noted that he had been shown “a paper with heiroglyphics on” by a man called George King (a psychic), “and asked if they resembled those on the scrolls. I replied that one or two were something like them and that is all.” King’s article on this appeared in the April 1957 issue of Cosmic Voice (which I haven’t really summoned the enthusiasm to search for, I must confess).

Longbottom’s “Text of the Scrolls”

My name is ULO and I write this message to you my Friends on the Planet of the sun you call Earth. Where I live I will not say. You are a fierce race and prepare travel. No one from any other planet ever has landed on earth, and your reports to the contrary are faulty. Men cannot travel far in space vehicles owing to sudden changes in speed direction and many other reasons. They are machines, part at out “control”, part “auto-control to avoid objects in way. It is impossible to receive radio over far distances owing to natural waves in space unless key of several frequencies is used, but we can receive single frequencies from near transmitter recorder in space vehicles.

From here to end of message is written by me, Tarngee. I am since three earth years secretary for Ulo who has injured his arm while repairing space vehicle. He lost swimming race with me and I made him tell me reason. Now I write for Ulo. It is friendly if I write about our women. I am of average height. We can’t tell quite your size to compare but I am of height four times across.”

I could transcribe more but personally that’s as much as I can handle before it starts getting really quite silly – but don’t take my word for that, feel free to read Flying Saucer Review for the remainder.

As to whether this decryption was correct, an article by Dr David Clarke (a Sheffield Hallam University lecturer) reports that “Dr [John] Dale also got a language expert at the University to translate the symbols. It was very easy as the code was simple.  Based only on a simple L shape in various clock face orientations. Not exactly the product of an extra-terrestrial Einstein.“

Well… OK. But I’d prefer to see the ciphertext and form my own opinion.

The prehistory of the Silpho Moor saucer

When I was researching this a couple of months ago, I found a webpage by someone who claimed that they had seen the same lettering on a fake alien artifact a few months before the Silpho Moor flying saucer incident. Moreover, that preceding artifact had been produced not on Betelgeuse but in Birmingham.

Unfortunately, when preparing to write this page, I haven’t been able to find my way back to that website. If anyone happens to find out where that claim came from, please leave a comment below, thanks!

An epilogue from Paul Grantham?

According to Paul Grantham’s entertaining (and more than a tad skeptical) online account of the above (sadly now only available via the Wayback Machine), an allegedly reliable source told him:

The saucer was in fact one of a batch of secret surveillance objects code named PF228. Three of those launched went astray, two falling into the Atlantic, the other being lost somewhere over northern Britain. He recognised my description of the object as he was working at the base at the time of their launch. They were (he claimed) deliberately disguised as UFOs for the very reason that we discovered. If one were to be found, no-one would believe anyone about it.

It was secretly purchased back from the finders for an undisclosed amount of ‘hush-money’.

Well… I’m not exactly convinced by this, but I couldn’t leave it out, now, could I?

Silpho Moor Bibliography

Isaac Koi’s web page on Silpho Moor helpfully includes a list of book references that discuss the incident.

Moor Questions Than Answers

  • If the saucer was in a restaurant for years, where was that?
  • Where is the saucer now? (A few fragments turned up in the Science Museum)
  • Has anyone got photographs of the message?
  • Has anyone got a transcription of the message?
  • Who was the languages expert that John Dale passed it to?

In search of “Isaac”…

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Who was the mysterious “Isaac“, who claimed to have been working on an alien language in a Palo Alto research institute (“CARET”) in 1984-1987? In 2007, this Isaac posted a page on the free hosting website Fortune City (which has now been archived) with a load of scanned ‘alien’ documents; then answered various follow-up questions (I found what seems to be a complete archive of these on the “Metallicman” website); and then completely disappeared. Everything online since then relating to Isaac’s actual identity appears to be 50% speculation, 50% noise, and 0% fact.

Might a white hat hacker be able to find more details about Isaac, e.g. his IP address, email address etc? I think probably not, because I believe that Fortune City’s account details or server logs were never leaked or exploited (though please tell me if I’m wrong). After a heavily-oversubscribed IPO at the peak of dotcom mania, Fortune City crashed in 2012, and became Dotster (had you ever heard of Dotster? No, me neither). Now, not unlike Ozymandias, “nothing beside remains” of this “king of kings”, and only “the lone and level sands stretch far away”.

All the same, my question today is this: might digital forensics be able to identify “Isaac”?

Under A Digital Microscope

I started by examining Isaac’s JPEGs: these had no metadata or even comments, and their raw data (using HxD) revealed nothing of interest. JPEGSnoop, however, revealed that all the images appeared (according to its database of JPEG header signatures) to have been saved out from Adobe Photoshop. The range of different quality options used suggest to me that the user was (at least) a fairly experienced Photoshop user.

The JPEGs divided into two obvious groups:

Document scans:

  • 2550 x 3274 quality 82 – p119- Adobe Photoshop – Save as 07
  • 2550 x 3199 quality 90 – p120 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3234 quality 90 – p121 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3203 quality 90 – p122 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 09
  • 2550 x 3247 quality 90 – p123 – Adobe Photoshop – Save For Web 015
  • 2550 x 3298 quality 53 – cover – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 08
  • 2550 x 3313 quality 87 – p2 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 08
  • 2550 x 3266 quality 87 – p3 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 03
  • 2550 x 3290 quality 76 – p4 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05
  • 2550 x 3294 quality 82 – p5 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 06
  • 2550 x 3255 quality 86 – p6 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05
  • 2550 x 3274 quality 82 – p7 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 04
  • 2550 x 3278 quality 76 – p8 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 03
  • 2550 x 3255 quality 82 – p9 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 05

The dimensions suggest to me that the scanner’s native resolution was 2550×3300 (or an integer multiple of that, e.g. 1200dpi rather than 300dpi). So I would expect that Isaac used something like an HP Scanjet 3570c, which was a popular choice of scanner at the time (and has a 1200dpi native resolution).

Photographs:

  • 1768 x 1203 quality 95 – photo 1 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1768 x 1147 quality 95 – photo 2 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1768 x 1147 quality 95 – photo 3 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11
  • 1762 x 1151 quality 95 – photo 4 – Adobe Photoshop – Save as 11

Superficially, you might think that the dimensions of these images suggest that they were taken with a digital camera whose native sensor width was 1768 (roughly 2.2MP). However, a web search yielded no obvious technical matches.

Hence it’s far more likely that these were in fact scanned in from 35mm negatives and digitally inverted. What we call “35mm film” is actually made up of a 36mm x 24mm rectangle per individual frame (with a 2mm gap between frames). Hence 36mm = 1.41732 inches, and 1.41732 inches x 1200dpi would yield 1700 pixels, which is tolerably close to 1768 pixels. Note further that 37mm would yield 1748 pixels, so we seem to be very much in the right neighbourhood here.

Finally: I should perhaps also mention that Amped Authenticate offers a set of commercial JPEG analysis tools that seems to be even more turbo-charged than JPEGSnoop, but you (alas) pay handsomely for that privilege.

A Scanner Darkly

What can we tell from the images themselves?

For fun, the first thing I tried was to contrast enhance the areas of the scans that had been redacted, just in case the redaction had been inexpertly done (and the text beneath was still recoverable).

As expected, this produced nothing of interest: but while doing this, I did notice something a little unusual. Even though the source material being scanned was monochrome, a faint streaky blue vertical line artifact appeared about 30% of the way in from the left edge in the scans.

After a little thought, I then realised that this artifact was most likely caused by a flaw in the scanner head itself (which might possibly have been damaged during its manufacture). And I also realised that this could essentially be used as a digital fingerprint for Isaac’s scanner.

Here’s what a raw image looks like in Gimp (at 18.2% of original size):

In Gimp (though you could also use ImageMagick etc), to make Isaac’s scanner’s blue-flaw column visible (it’s between x = 752 and x = 760 in the original 2550-wide images) use the menu option Colors –> Value Invert :

Because of the way JPEG down-samples blocks of colours, the blue column isn’t easily visible in normal images: but once the values have been (numerically) inverted, it becomes clear to see. The redacted text blocks make it particularly easy to see (i.e. it’s visible on black text, but not on white background).

JPEGSnoop helpfully offers the ability to look at individual JPEG planes (the other forensic toolboxes I tried didn’t), so here’s a JPEGSnoop screengrab of the Cb plane for part of the same image, with a patchy vertical white streak where the scanner’s blue artifact is:

This is where the digital forensics chase starts to become interesting…

Once again, “the game is afoot!”

The idea now is simple: even though there may be no direct trace of “Isaac” anywhere on the Internet, might we be able to find any other scans made with his same subtly damaged scanner head and posted online? That is, might we be able to find other scans made with Isaac’s scanner?

Given that Isaac posted his alien writing scans on Fortune City, it seems a reasonable guess that he may well have posted other scans to other free Fortune City accounts.

Furthermore, Isaac’s way of working seems to have been be to leave the width of each scan intact (at 2550 pixels) and to trim its length. So I would initially only be interested in images where the width is exactly 2550 pixels.

Finally, the whole point of Fortune City was that it was a place to host stuff that was completely free (it made its money from banner ads). So we would probably only be interested in 2550-pixel-wide images with this specific blue colour flaw that were also hosted by Fortune City.

Step 1 could be to webcrawl the fortunecity.ws archive (there must surely be a list of accounts?) and compile a list of 2550-pixel-wide JPEGs/JPGs. Step 2 would be to grab them (into an AWS bucket?) and run an image filter on them. Step 3 would be visual inspection, or an automated sort based on a metric.

So… who wants to help give this a go? Will this reveal Isaac’s identity?

In search of Mauritian shipwrecks 1740-1750…

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If the Last Will and Testament written by Andre Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang is genuine (or, at least, perhaps only modestly embellished in the copying) and – as part of that – was indeed written by him, it can only have been written prior to his death in 1750.

I previously also wrote about the intrigue and politicking around La Bourdonnais’ fleet that he hustled together in 1745-1746 in Mauritius, and speculated that Bernardin – himself a lifelong sailor in the Compagnie des Indes – might well have got caught up with that whole operation. But all the same, that was just my guess: the fact that Bernardin died in Port Louis in 1750 provides a solid terminus ante quem regardless.

It further seems likely (to me) that even five years would be an eternity to wait before returning to cached treasure, so the decade 1740-1750 seems a good basic search period to start with. So we might ask: can we find a historical source for Mauritian shipwrecks during the period 1740 to 1750? And if so, can we use that to steer us any closer to a likely source for Bernardin’s treasure?

“Maurice : Une Ile et Son Passé” (1989), by Antoine Chelin

I found a digitised copy of this book online: this runs from 1500 to 1750, and chronologically lists many (though of course not all) events in Mauritius’ history.

The author (who wrote in Mauritian newspapers for many years under the anagrammatic byline “HELNIC”) first published this book in 1973, then released a chunky supplement to it in 1982, before finally merging the two into a single larger book in 1989.

Here, we’re specifically interested in shipwrecks (“naufrages“) and hurricanes (“ouragans“) in the period 1740-1750 on Mauritius. In the following, I’ve used Chelin’s numbering system to make it easy to look up individual events in the original book.

298: 11 Jan 1740: hurricane which caused considerable damage in the bay of Port Louis

325a: 13 Dec 1743: violent hurricane which caused considerable damage to the whole island

337: 17-18 Aug 1744: the shipwreck of the Saint-Géran off the Ile d’Ambre, close to Poudre d’Or, subsequently made famous by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre by his fictionalised version of the event in his novel Paul et Virginie. The ship had a cargo of 54000 Spanish piastres plus machinery for a sugar factory that was being built.

354: 10 Dec 1746: return of Mahé de La Bourdonnais from Madras.

361: 21 Jan 1748: hurricane which caused great damage to boats in the harbour of Port Louis – the Brillant, the Renommée, and the Mars were all beached, and three other boats were lost. “The kilns of Isle aux Tonneliers were destroyed, houses in Port Louis were thrown down; Pamplemousses Hospital
was flattened, the wings of the Monplaisir building in Les Pamplemousses lost their roofs, bridges were washed away, shops in Port Sud-Est were knocked down, the newly-built battery at Trou-aux-Biches was flattened by the waves.“

377: 7 Nov 1748: “departure for India of part of the squadron under the orders of Capitaine de Kersaint. It is composed of the Arc-en-Ciel, Capitaine de Belle Isle, 54 cannons, crew of 400; the Duc de Cumberland, enseigne Mézidern, 20 cannons, crew of 179; and L’Auguste, enseigne de Saint-Médard, 26 cannons, crew of 130.”

378: 9 Nov 1748: “Departure of the rest of de Kersaint’s squadron, consisting of Alcide, captained by de Kersaint, 64 cannons, crew of 500; Lys, frigate captain Lozier Bouvet, 64 cannons, crew of 476; the Apollon, enseigne de La Porte Barrée, 54 guns, crew of 383; and of the Centaure, ensign de La Butte, 72 guns, crew of 522.”

379a: 26 Nov 1748: arrival of the frigate Cybèle from Pondicherry, announcing the news that the siege of that place by the British had been lifted.

389: 10 Jul 1750: shipwreck of the Sumatra at l’Ile Plate, which had left Port Sud-Est carrying a cargo of wood headed for Pondicherry (14 crew drowned).

A new Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang timeline?

Previously, I had speculated that Andre Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang might have been part of La Bourdonnais’ cobbled-together fleet that sailed to Madras in May 1745. It was certainly true that many Mauritians, rattled by the loss of the Saint-Géran in January 1744, didn’t want to take part: though as a former sailor in the Compagnie des Indes, I suspect Bernardin was unlikely to have been in that group.

In March 1748, (British) Admiral Boscawen arrived at the island with 28 boats en route to Pondicherry, angling for a fight: however, the only French ship he encountered was Capitaine de Kersaint’s Alcide at Port Louis. When Boscawen subsequently arrived off the Coromandel coast in August 1748 in his flagship the Monteran (after a detour to Bourbon in July 1748), his fleet was (according to H. C. M. Austen, p. 21) “the greatest European fleet ever seen in the East“.

Later in 1748, a small French/Mauritian fleet assembled itself under Capitaine de Kersaint. Maybe Bernardin could not say no to joining that small squadron that left Mauritius in November 1848 to try to relieve the siege of Pondicherry. However, they were not to know that the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had already been signed on 30th April 1748, making their journey pointless.

And so I can’t help but wonder: might the “treasures saved from the Indus” hidden by Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang have been from a ship wrecked by the huge cyclone that hit Mauritius on 21 January 1748? And might the enlistment Bernardin talks about in his Last Will and Testament have been the (actually unnecessary) squadron under Capitaine de Kersaint that left Mauritius on 7-9 November 1748?

“I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a half-lot in La Chaux River district of Grand-Port, île de France, plus my treasures saved from the Indus.”

Note: full letter here

It’s an interesting possible timeline, that (if true) would answer some of the questions I’ve had about timing that have long seemed very slightly off. Even so, the account does remain fairly hypothetical: though on the positive side, it does perhaps suggest some ideas about where to look next.

So… where next for this?

The first thing I’d like to see are contemporary accounts of the hurricane that hit Mauritius on 21 January 1748. The information Chelin reports must (surely) have come from somewhere, but from where? Mauritian newspapers only go back (very incompletely) to 1777 – Le Cernéen and Le Mauricien only started in 1832 and 1833 respectively.

I should perhaps add that the Wikipedia page on tropical storms in the Mascarenes only mentions two from the period 1740-1750 (though note that Grant’s book includes a long section on hurricanes on Bourbon compiled by the Abbé de Caille?):

  • March 8, 1743 – A strong cyclone passed near Mauritius.
  • February 1748 – A strong storm

Note that a letter discussing the 1743 cyclone is quoted in Garnier and Desarthe (2013):

Letter of the governor of the Ile-de-France (Mauritius) of March 8th, 1743:

We had a hurricane on March 8th. The big rashness of the wind lasted only from ten o’clock in the evening till two o’clock at night. Several vessels ran aground in the port because of very high waves which reached the store of the port. The harvest was almost completely destroyed, in particular the corn, the potatoes and the sugar canes. On the other hand, the rice and the manioc were protected. As soon as our port (Port Louis) will be repaired, I shall send to you by boat of the peas of the Cape (South Africa) and the beans which you can distribute in the poorest and to the blacks.

As far as the Jan/Feb 1748 Mauritian hurricane goes, I did find a (fairly miserable) letter from Baron Charles Grant de Vaux dated 10 March 1748 (pp. 293-294):

We have been informed that fifteen ships have been dispatched from the East, laden with provisions for our islands ; but unfortunately the English fell in with them, and, being superior in point of force, have taken them all, except a small vessel, which escaped to make us acquainted with our misfortunes. We live at present in a most wretched state of incertitude, in want of every thing ; and, to complete our misery, afflicted with a continued drought, which has known no interval throughout the year, but from an hurricane that visited us during the last month. It ravaged every thing, and occasioned many fatal accidents. Several persons were killed and wounded during its continuance ; and, to complete our distresses, it was succeeded by a cloud of locusts, which devoured whatever the hurricane had not laid waste. Such is our present situation, &c. &c.

For other sources, I haven’t yet found any journaux de bord covering 1748 (the Achilles’ only goes up to 1747), nor any prize papers, and the Log of Logs starts from 1788, alas. I’ve also asked Professeur Garnier if his researchers found any sources on the 1748 hurricane. Myself, I haven’t yet found anything relevant in gallica.fr, though the chances that something useful is there are surely quite high. The French maritime archives are similarly daunting and huge.

But at least I’m looking for something now. 🙂

Isaac, CARET, Starfire Tor, Alienware…

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Since posting up some images way back in 2009, I haven’t really covered the (allegedly) ‘alien’ language claimed to have been stolen from a (fictitious) “CARET” research institute in Palo Alto by a mysterious Fortune City poster called “Isaac”. The whole lot was – in my opinion – nothing more than a Ufologist-trolling hoax (albeit one of the better-looking ones).

Starfire Tor

However, I recently found out that Isaac’s alien alphabet had (supposedly) been debunked by an online poster called Starfire Tor. She had noticed that the same font had been used by Alienware for a viral-style marketing campaign, based around a competition where breaking a ciphertext could have won you a trip to New York City worth $2800. Here’s what the ciphertext looked like (image from Starfire Tor’s website):

Alienware (which by then had been Borg-ed up by Dell Computers) also used the font to stamp “ALIENWARE” onto their promotional desktops (image also from Starfire Tor’s website):

For Starfire Tor, this was a slamdunk: a huge corporation like Dell would never (she reasons) just steal someone else’s font, ergo Dell/Alienware must have commissioned the font design in the first place, ergo they must have been (somehow) behind the whole Isaac/CARET thing. End of story.

However… take a closer look at all three versions of the alien alphabet, and you’ll notice they’re all slightly different. The competition alphabet contains four extra glyphs (plus a dash and a full stop) not in the Isaac alphabet: while the ALIENWARE stamped-out alphabet has one of the new competition glyphs (for the “A” in “ALIENWARE”) plus a unique reflected version of a glyph in the Isaac alphabet (the “E” in “ALIENWARE”). Additionally, the three alphabets all render the alien vertical bar glyph in different ways.

Hence it seems as though what actually happened was that Dell/Alienware just got their in-house artists to rip off the bloody aliens. (Presumably hoping that they came in peace, rather than with trademark attorneys?) So, even though I’m sure Alienware founder Nelson Gonzalez (who was famously a fan of all things ufological, hence his company’s name) would have loved to have been part of an alien conspiracy, I don’t believe that this was what happened (or else Dell would have just reused the existing font, right?)

Anatomy of an Alien (Alphabet)

In my 2009 post, I noted that it looked as though the alien text was made up of some letters, some numbers, and a few pieces of what seemed to be punctuation. I also complained that nobody had actually bothered to transcribe the alien text (presumably because going round in circles is a pain in the neck).

All the available Isaac CARET scans are online here, taken from pages 119 to 123 of a fictitious CARET book. Note that pages 120 to 123 are just zoomed-in versions of parts of the (larger) diagram on page 119, so there’s actually only a single diagram to work with.

Looking more closely, the alphabet contains a large number of apparent groupings, which suggest that a kind of “pigpen”-style glyph generation process might have been in play here. With that in mind, here’s my work-in-progress transcription key for Isaac’s alien alphabet:

It’s entirely possible that I’ve missed one or two really rare glyphs (the lettering is large in some places and tiny in others), but I believe that this covers just about everything that appears. (I’m reading all the strings clockwise.)

Alien Alphabet Transcription

Inevitably, I tried to use this to transcribe some of the text (in the middle of the “octal junction”, p.120):

FKRYRSAKML SBUN M HY

X2L R -JM EW1D DT-ED (345-521) BV-KA P6FKL (])

SHJD C-XEGYRI (DEB)

JMRI LAI-FELK GUHFVX (KLN) [

However, I have to point out that CryptoCrack wasn’t hugely impressed. But maybe someone else will have more perseverance and luck than me.

“NB Gas” decoded (in plain sight)…?

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Charles Dellschau’s curious notebooks talk elliptically about a mysterious lifting gas called “NB Gas”: this was discovered (or, perhaps more accurately, harnessed) by miner Peter Mennis. It was created by dripping a green liquid (which Dellschau nicknamed “suppe”, for “pea soup”) onto an electrode, releasing the “NB Gas”, thus giving – so the theory goes – an airship buoyancy, and defying gravity. Unlike hydrogen, “NB Gas” was thought to be far less explosive, and thus more suitable for safe airshippery.

Going through the list of possible lifting gases, the best candidate by far would seem to be ammonia (NH3): though because its lifting power is far less than that of hydrogen, ammonia balloon envelopes would need to be significantly larger than hydrogen balloon envelopes (and let’s put all the other practical issues to one side too).

In his notes, Dellschau seemed not to know either what NB Gas was or why it was called that. But perhaps – I wonder – it was supposed to have been written “N-B” Gas instead? Because if so, the reason for the name would have surely been hidden in plain sight:

Now you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it, can you?

Charles Dellschau, Columbia, The Special AKA, and Scooby Doo…

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At the time of his death in Houston, Texas in 1923, Charles Dellschau was nothing more than an unknown (and indeed unremarkable) retired butcher. Yet a century later, his drawings of brightly-coloured (if somewhat implausible-looking) airships are feted as Art Brut and exhibited widely: while researchers continue to rummage through his books of recollections to try to work out how true (or, conversely, how imaginary / fantastical) his accounts of what happened actually are.

Some people even believe not only that Dellschau’s group of (alleged) Californian inventors flew dirigibles (steerable airships) before 1860, but also that this (somehow) proves that a steampunk super-science cadre was living in our midst; and from there spinning off into all manner of alt.history craziness.

To be fair, it does seem entirely plausible that Dellschau was living in / near Sonora or Columbia in California in 1857-1859, and perhaps at the start of 1860 too. For instance, he’s clearly familiar with nearby places (e.g. Knights Ferry), and later parts of his story do line up satisfactorily with actual evidence.

But for all that, 1857-1859 remains a yawning gap in his CV/résumé. And the fact that there is no evidence linking him to Columbia or Sonora in those years is certainly annoying. So… what’s going on here, then?

Columbia, California

Prior to the Gold Rush, Columbia was barely on the Californian map: but with the rapid hyper-scaling that followed the discovery of gold in 1848, the town quickly had its own shops, bars and hookers, and even its own printing press. It grew so fast that the town was even seriously proposed as a new California state capital to replace Sacramento.

But if you fast forward to 1860, Columbia was a bust: it all panned out, you might say. The last hurrah was a rumour that there were copper deposits beneath the town itself, which triggered frantic digging, rendering many of the buildings unsafe. And then, finally, the few remaining miners there decamped to other nearby towns, such as Copperopolis (though the astute ones had gone long before).

And so we already have a direct answer as to why the archives have no concerted trace of Dellschau and his airship-designing drinking buddies. This was because the 1850 and 1860 dates of the US Census stood rigidly either side of Columbia’s all too brief flourishing – its success was a proverbial flash in the pan. By 1860, pretty much everyone had moved on (including Dellschau himself), leaving the town a (literally) hollowed-out shell of its former thriving self.

Once again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The Special AKA

In my head, the soundtrack to all this is – perhaps inevitably? – the major chord middle 8 in The Specials’ “Ghost Town”.

“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang, and the music played inna da boomtown“

For me, this brief snatch of the lyrics captures Dellschau’s drawings best: specifically, his burning, shining nostalgia for whatever happened in those three brief years in California, “inna da boomtown“. To my eyes, his bright, almost DayGlo images speak of a past full of possibilities, of a shared peak experience, of everyone at their best, but all reconstructed and captured in far greyer days half a century later.

And then, as the old joke goes, “Tea break’s over, back on your heads“. 😮

Scooby Doo

As you may possibly remember, the theme of abandoned gold rush mining towns appeared in the “Miner 49er” Scooby Doo episode “Mine Your Own Business” [S01 E4] (spoiler: the Monster of the Week was Hank the caretaker, on stilts):

Strictly speaking, Columbia never became a Californian ghost town (unlike, say, Agua Fria in Mariposa County): it stumbled along until 1934, when New Deal archaeologists went in to make sense of the mess: in 1945, the town was restored and turned into the core of Columbia State Historic Park.

The questions everyone ends up asking about Dellschau’s notebooks are very often to do with what his motivation was for writing them. Was it all an act of scientific journalism (of real airships), or an act of pure personal creative expression?

All the same, maybe Dellschau saw himself as a kind of caretaker, trying to keep the memories of his boomtown days alive, even if everyone else involved was now far away or long dead: and where it is highly doubtful whether the airships he was documenting were ever constructed, let alone flown.

For me, I can’t help but wonder whether the 1896-1897 Airship Flap was the thing that first triggered Dellschau into writing down his recollections and reconstructing the designs proposed by his drinking club friends back in 1857-1859. Might his actual motivation have been to instead prove that they (rather than these gosh-darn Airship Flap pretenders) were the real inventors of the idea of the airship?

Ultimately, I guess that makes me Fred Jones removing the monster’s mask to reveal Dellschau as an obsessed caretaker not of a lost history of built airships, but of a lost history of conceptual airship inventors. That is to say, I suspect the ‘gold’ Dellschau was trying to attain was a place in airship history for his inventive friends, from his younger boomtown days when everything – briefly – seemed possible.

“And I’d have got away with it too, if it weren’t (etc)“.

On NB gas, suppe, and NYMZA…

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Anyone trying to make sense of Charles Dellschau’s partly-enciphered airship drawings will quickly run into three roadblocks: (1) what was the mysterious “NB gas” that allegedly made the airships buoyant? (2) What was the curious green “soup” that was allegedly used to release additional NB gas whilst in flight? (3) What was the mysterious group “NYMZA”, whose enciphered initials appear on so many pages of Dellschau’s notebooks?

Here’s what “NYMZA” looks like in Dellschau’s cipher:

NB Gas

In terms of chemistry, there are very few substances that are less dense than air at normal air pressures and temperatures (and that can hence be used to lift an airship).

Of these, hydrogen is the best known, but it is prone to explosion; methane too is similarly prone to going bang; while helium was only properly isolated in 1895 (and so was not in play in 1856, the year when – according to Dellschau – Peter Mennis discovered “NB gas”), broadly similar to neon, krypton, argon etc.

However, there is one other “lifting gas” that was within reach of inventors circa 1850: ammonia. Even though ammonia is only half as dense as air (by way of comparison, hydrogen has 8% of the density of air, so an ammonia-filled balloon would need to be a fair bit bigger to get the same lift), and is stinky and noxious, it has many secondary benefits.

Interestingly, there’s a 2016 article by Brett Cohen (Karl Kluge kindly pointed this out to me, thanks Karl!), published in “Shadows of Your Mind” Vol. 1 #10, pp.78-81), that proposes that Peter Mennis’ NB gas was indeed ammonia.

It’s a good theory, certainly better than Jerry Decker’s somewhat forlorn theorification that Mennis may have found one of 26 elements supposedly missing from the periodic table before hydrogen. (*sigh*)

Even if we proceed by Holmesian elimination, ammonia seems a strong pick. And yet… it has to be pointed out that ammonia’s relatively meagre advantage over air as a lifting gas would probably have meant bigger balloon envelopes than the ones depicted by Dellschau. This is a tricky issue that everyone panning Dellschau’s notebooks for historical gold dust has to face up to.

All the same, I think it’s fair to say that ammonia is a very strong candidate for NB gas, with no obvious alternative contender (Dellschau repeats many times the idea that other gases were too explosive to be used in airships – and though ammonia is, ummm, slightly explosive, it’s still less troublesome than the others).

Suppe

The second problem is the “suppe” (which Dellschau always paints green): this is a liquid substance that get somehow poured onto a spiked ‘turner’ device, releasing the NB gas. At one point, Dellschau calls it “pys suppe” (which I believe means “pea soup”, though you will have to form your own opinion).

Want your airship to go up? Pour “suppe” onto your spike turner to release NB gas into your balloon envelope. Want your airship to go down? Release some NB gas from your balloon envelope. Whereas the most technically aware balloonists of the day were using ballonets (inflatable air bags inside the hydrogen gas bag), an ammonia-based airship need – theoretically – not use any such additional mechanism.

Cohen thinks that the two substances that were added together to release ammonia were were ammonium chloride (NH4Cl, A.K.A. sal ammoniac) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH, A.K.A lye, or caustic soda, first properly isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1807). The equation he points to is:

NH4Cl + NaOH –> NH3 (ammonia gas) + NaCl (sodium chloride) + H20

In Cohen’s concluding paragraph, he proposes “that ammonia gas (NH3) could be produced from a simple mixture of two solids, ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) dissolved completely in water and allowed to react.”

Incidentally, ammonium chloride is used as a food additive under the title “E510”. If you’ve had “salty liquorice” in Northern Europe, you’ve probably eaten ammonium chloride.

Overall, Cohen’s account is sensible and rational: and yet it has to be said that neither ammonium choride nor sodium hydroxide has a green appearance. In Crenshaw’s book (p.89), Peter Mennis’ discovery of NB gas is phrased in terms of “searching for a better way to extract gold from quartz”, and an experiment that went wrong (in a good way), though Crenshaw doesn’t connect this explicitly with references to Dellschau’s notebooks.

Cohen may be right, or he may be wrong – it’s hard to tell. Even if Mennis’ NB gas is indeed ammonia, I think it’s hard to feel confident the “suppe” secret sauce has yet been figured out properly.

NYMZA

In many places, Dellschau alludes to what seems to be a shadowy group of investors who were at least partially bankrolling the inventors in the Sonora Aero Club: he calls the group “NYMZA” (but only ever writes its initials in cipher, as far as I can tell).

If NYMZA is an acronym, it’s certainly a curious one: though it’s hard not to read the first two letters as “New York” (arguably the investment capital of the world back then), the “MZA” part feels much more like a German acronym.

If the “M” is the first letter of a German word, I wondered if it might be (for example) “mechanisch or mechaniker”. Similarly, I wondered whether the “Z” might stand for “zunft” (guild), “zirkel” (circle), or “zeichner” (draftsman / designer). Finally, I wondered if the “A” might stand for “Assoziation”. However, my cunning websearches for all of these yielded plenty of false positives, but nothing actually helpful.

Yet Dellschau himself was born in Prussia in 1830, and his written language is a mishmash of English, German, French and sometimes apparently phonetic renderings. For example, I personally find it hard not to read all Dellschau’s transcriptions of “Moyk Gorée” and not to wonder whether the person’s name was simply “Mike Grey” (possibly from Britain or Ireland?).

In that context, it’s also quite hard for me to look at “NYMZA” and not wonder whether this was an imaginary Anglo-German group of investors that Dellschau had himself made up. In which case, the question is whether Dellschau had made it up in 1857 in California, or whether he made it up back in Houston many years later.

Your thoughts, Nick?

Though it would be nice to believe that NYMZA and Sonora Aero Club existed just as Dellschau’s notebooks imply, there currently seem to be more historical and technical impediments than supporting evidence.

To be fair, I can imagine that Californian miner Peter Mennis existed, and even that he indeed discovered a lifting “NB gas”; I can even imagine that Mennis may have been able to build a small test balloon using his NB gas, and excite other people’s imaginations.

Yet startup ventures throughout history have faced immense difficulties re-engineering a demonstrator into something that works at scale: and, so far, I don’t really see any way that the rest of the Sonora Aero Club (itself a name that wasn’t really possible until 1900 or so) was anything apart from a local Liar’s Club / drinking club formed to fantasize about manned flight amidst the brutal day-to-day madness of a Gold Rush.

But hopefully I’ll be proved wrong. 😉

Two Hunters on Bolinas Ridge…

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Prompted by Karl Kluge, I’ve been reading Dennis Crenshaw’s “The Secrets of Dellschau” to try to work out my own angle on the mysterious Sonora Aero Club and its alleged airships. However, when Crenshaw mentions Mount Tamalpais (in connection with the 1896 Airship Flap in California), he refers to two articles from The San Francisco Call that I hadn’t previously quoted here. I’ve been relying on newspapers.com, and annoyingly it doesn’t always find the articles you want: the magic keyphrase that happened to unlock the door here was “Bolinas Ridge“.

Bolinas Ridge

Bolinas Ridge starts close to Mount Tamalpais, and has a picturesque trail that runs along it for several miles. For example, here’s an Oct 1896 story about “four ladies from the Hotel Rafael” riding along Bolinas Ridge being caught out by a sudden fog dropping, and having to spend the night in a makeshift campsite under the redwoods sitting on saddles. Other newspaper stories of Bolinas Ridge tell tales of encounters with “an enraged deer” or panther, or of forest fires, etc

More importantly (for airship historians), here’s the Call article from 19 Nov 1896 (p.1) mentioned by Crenshaw, and which was the final one of Daniel Cohen’s four early airship-flap mentions that I wasn’t previously able to dig up:

SEEN THREE WEEKS AGO.

Story Told by a Hunter Living on Bolinas Ridge

On Sunday, the first day of this month, a representative of THE CALL met on Bolinas Ridge, just to the west of Mount Tamalpais, an old hunter living there, named Brown. The old man was very nervous and started a conversation immediately by asking:

“Do I look like a crazy man?”

“Why certainly not, Mr. Brown. Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he replied, “I don’t expect anybody to believe me. To tell the truth I can hardly believe myself. But it’s an honest fact that yesterday morning, when the fog began to lift, I saw an airship right up there a couple of hundred feet over them pines.

“No, I can’t tell you much what she looked like. She didn’t show very plainly through the mist, but it was a large, dark shape with something moving on it. Don’t know whether I saw any people or not. It came on me so sudden I was almost stunned, and by the time I collected my senses she was out of sight.

“I have been kind of dazed ever since, and to have you tell me that I don’t look crazy is a great relief. But I know that what I saw was an airship.”

As the “superior” type of mirage is not uncommon to people living on the Marin hills it was thought that this was what the old man had seen, so no attention was paid to his story. The mirage effect of a large ocean vessel passing through the sky might appear to him like some new-fangled machine for navigating the air.

Perhaps the mirage is what he really saw, but in the face of the stories circulated in regard to the airship there is a probability that is what Mr. Brown really saw. Certainly he would have no object in telling such a story.

Thomas/William Jordan of San Rafael

The other Call article (23 Nov 1896, p.1) referred to a previous article I quoted here:

One of the most interesting of the corroborative stories comes from Thomas Jordan of San Rafael, who states that he found a machine-shop in a mountain fastness some months ago: that six men were working on an airship and that it would soon be completed.

In the first day’s story of the airship, as printed in THE CALL, it was stated that an old hunter named Brown of Bolinas Ridge had seen an airship floating a few hundred feet above the pine trees one morning just as the fogs were lifting from the ridge.

It seems that The Call’s journalist misremembered “William Jordan” as “Thomas Jordan” (as per the original article I quoted here).

“Strange Lights At Sea”

Incidentally, I did find one curious story in the San Francisco Examiner of 19 Jun 1894 (p.8) that might possibly have been related to the 1896 Airship Flap:

STRANGE LIGHTS AT SEA

Will-o’-the-Wisps That Deceive the Life-Saving Crews.

Flare Lights and Rockets Seen at Night Near Bolinas by the Watchers at the Point Lobos Observatory Station.

What are those strange lights at sea, those blue rockets and flare lights and flashes of yellow fire that are thrown at night from the water’s surface against the inky background of the hills that seem to crowd Bolinas into the sea?

Twice within a fortnight that have been seen by the lonely watchers at Point Lobos, and as many times they have been mistaken for signals of distress, whereupon tug boats have been sent out from the city, and these have towed one or more of the life-saving crews out to sea to search for mariners in distress.

Each time these errands have been fruitless, and not a trace could be found of the origin of the mysterious signals.

Two weeks ago last Sunday night the lights were first seen by the Golden Gate Life-Saving crew’s lookout on Point Lobos.

“I began to see the lights flashing about 9 o’clock in the evening,” he says, “and they continued for over two hours.” […]

“They were flare lights mostly, but I am certain there were some blue rockets fired from the same point during the evening. The lights were intermittent and a good deal like those that would be flashed from a ship in distress.

“Last night I saw the same lights again, almost in the same place, over there near Bolinas. Those hills are so black over there at night that I could see the flashes very plainly, though it was a cloudless and moonlight evening. About 9 o’clock they commenced. At times a great streak of yellow would be flashed up straight against the black hills, and I was sure they must be signals of distress from some craft or small boat in Bolinas Bay.”

[…] Some are inclined to think that the lights were signals to or from small crafts engaged in smuggling, but the most prevalent theory now is that picnickers at Willow Camp have been having bonfires and fireworks among their other sports.

Willow Camp Hotel

I’ve been trying to work out who the mysterious “Mr Brown” was. Though by 1896 Mount Tamalpais had started to become a popular summer destination for visitors, October/November would have been out of season. The report (in Cohen p.9) characterised Brown as a recluse, but was that the whole story?

One possibility is that could have been the John W. “Bill” Brown (born May 2, 1863) who owned the nearby Willow Camp Hotel on Stinson Beach in Bolinas Bay, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. Despite its impressive-sounding name, this was simply a set of tents in the shade of the willow trees. Previously, Brown had shared the ownership with a Mr Jukes, but in 1894 he bought out the other man’s share to run the enterprise with his sister Dolly Brown and mother Lucinda. (He sold it to William Neumann in 1903-1904: Brown died in 1946 in Mill Valley.)

In this 1894 article, we can see more than a hundred people (including Miss Dolly Brown) staying at Willow Camp, and there’s a nice scenic description here (though don’t eat the mussels). From there it would have been a three-mile hike to Bolinas Ridge:

On the other hand, I have to point out that despite his proximity to the ridge, Bill Brown doesn’t sound at all like an “old hunter”: but I haven’t yet got an alternative candidate. I’ll keep looking.

Did the 1896-7 Airship Flap have any cipher mysteries?

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You know, I’m so glad you asked me that question, it’s almost as if I was waiting to be asked.

It turns out that there were in fact two airship ciphers. Well… one. Well… none. Well… maybe a half.

Bear with me, I’ll try to explain.

The 1897 Aurora Alien Incident

Daniel Cohen has a lot of fun with this incident, to the point that it fills an entire chapter (Chapter 8, “The Texas Spaceship Crash“) of his “The Great Airship Mystery” book. This is because he gets a chance to tell a story that involves a whole load of UFO groups doing what they do best (or perhaps worst) – ripping into each other’s methodological, historical and evidential shortcomings, while displaying almost exactly the same ideological blindness and ineptitude themselves. It’s a story with Jacques Vallee, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and a 1973 incident where the “spaceman’s grave” was robbed out. What’s there not to like?

The first airship cipher story originally appeared in the newspapers as follows:

A Windmill Demolishes It.

Aurora, Wise Co., Tex. April 17. – (To The News.) About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing through the country.

It was travelling due north, and much nearer the earth than ever before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.

The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.

Mr. T.J. Weems, the United States signal service officer at this place and an authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he was a native of the planet Mars.

Papers found on his person – evidently the records of his travels – are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered.

The ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminium and silver, and it must have weighed several tons.

The town is full of people to-day who are viewing the wreck and gathering specimens of the strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place at noon tomorrow.

For a cut-down re-telling of the whole sorry saga, you could high-tail it to the Wikipedia page: but Cohen leaves his readers in little doubt that it was a local hoax. So the “Papers found on [the alien pilot’s] person [… that] are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered” would seem to fall into the ‘outright hoax‘ category, along with the rest of the whole (non-existent windmill-height) tall tale.

The Astoria Cipher

The earliest newspaper appearance of the second airship cipher story I have found is from the Miners Journal of April 20 1897, which runs as follows:

FROM THE “AIR-SHIP”

A Letter Addressed to Edison Found in an Illinois Village.

Astoria, Ill., April 18. A great sensation was caused here to-day when it was learned that a message had been received from the alleged air ship.

“Bert” Swearingin found it on a farm one-half mile north of the town in a piece of reed about three feet long, sticking in the ground, with a red, white and blue streamer attached to the top.

An egg-shaped stone was tied by rags to the lower end, weighing about three pounds.

About half way to the top of the reed was attached a packet, enclosed in a large and dirty envelope, on which was written:

“From air ship. – Notice to the finder: Please mail letter inside. Passed over here about half-past 2 p. m., April 16, 1897, about 2,300 feet high, going east and north. Excuse dirt, as just got done oiling. “HARRIS”

The letter was addressed and ready for mailing to Thomas A. Edison, New York city. It was opened and found to be written in cipher, dated April 16, and signed “C. L. Harris, Electrician Air Ship No. 3.” It will be mailed. Captain James McNeill, Mrs Walters and other here declare they saw the ship last night.

This story fell on ears well-primed by the media. The Chicago Tribune of 16 Apr 1897 (p.4) had just printed a sighting from a fisherman of someone on the airship nearly catching a swordfish on a lake near Cleveland OH (errrm… the one that got away); by “more than a hundred persons” at Mount Vernon, IL; at Carlyle, IL travelling northwest in the evening; and at South Haven, MI, travelling westward. Having said that, I should add that the Tribune printed an Ananias-themed (Liars’ club) airship cartoon on the 18th, and an editorial comparing the airship to mythical sea serpents on the 20th, so was no big airship fan.

Anyhow, the newspapermen of the day immediately whooshed Harris’ enciphered letter to the great man himself in his West Orange Laboratory, who was… somewhat less than impressed, let us say. According to the Bucyrus Evening Telegraph of 5 May 1897 (p.3):

Mr. Edison paused from a luncheon of sandwiches, pumpkin pie and tea to observe: “You can take it from me that that is a pure fake. I have had several men in my employ called Harris, but I know nothing of C. L. Harris.

“I have no doubt that airships will be successfully constructed in the near future, but there has been too much talk about this supposed airship out west. I have always found that there is much talk before these ships are tried and very little afterward.

“It is absolutely absurd to imagine that a man would construct a successful airship and keep the matter secret. When I was young we used to construct big colored paper balloons, inflate them with gas, and they would float about for days. I guess some one has been up to that same game out west. […]”

Yes, yes, that’s all well and good, but… what about the bloomin’ cipher, then? In many ways, it now doesn’t matter if it’s really from an airship or not, it may well have genuinely been enciphered. Without seeing it, who’s to say what it said?

To that end, I tried searching the digital edition of the Thomas A. Edison papers at Rutgers, but found only a pair of newspaper clippings of the story (initially from the New York Herald of April 19 1897) and no cipher, alas; so it seems to be lost. If anyone has a better idea as to where to look for it, please say!

Summary

At the top, I promised you two, or one, or none, or “maybe a half” airship cipher, which is where I think this story is at. Perhaps one day the second cipher will turn up: I’ll be here waiting. Fingers crossed!

When did the 1896 California Airship Flap begin?

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In the last post, I brought together all the sightings of the October 22 1896 Meteor I could find, and was able to conclude that they were all indeed sightings of an unusual meteor (rather than of a mystery airship). So… what remains? What was the first actual sighting of the 1896 California Airship Flap?

Daniel Cohen’s extra sightings

Cohen adds some early extra sightings that weren’t in Loren E. Gross’ book, that I thought need checking out. For example, Cohen reports (p.9) that “in the last week of October [1896], C. T. Musson, a fruit rancher from Placer County, California, also reported three lights in the sky. He estimated that they were moving at about 100 miles an hour, and were the “prettiest sight” he had ever seen.“

After a few searches, I found the original story in the San Francisco Call of 25 November 1896 p.2:

Sighted Triple Lights

A Rapid Aerial Traveler Observed in Placer County

BOWMAN, Placer County, Cal., Nov. 24 – The articles published in THE CALL and other papers in reference to the observed mystical aerial traveler have aroused great interest here. Several persons in this locality have been favored with a view of the strange visitor.

C. T. Musso, a fruit rancher, and several members of his family affirm that about four weeks ago and shortly after dark they saw a singular sight, which they are now convinced could have been nothing else than the much-discussed airship. Mr. Musso says he saw the “prettiest sight that his eyes ever viewed.” It appeared to be three very bright lights moving horizontally and easterly at a rate of perhaps 100 miles an hour.

A. H. Thompson, a painter, states that about the same time he saw a similar sight, which he describes as being three very bright and large lights appearing about eight feet apart, and the forward one as being larger and brighter then the rest, and moving horizontally eastward rapidly and gracefully.

Professor S. D. Musso states that about two weeks ago he and his wife saw a similar sight moving in the same direction and with about the same velocity. He feels quite confident that it was not a meteor, as there were three lights appearing about seven feet from each other in a direct line, the forward one being larger than the other two. The light, he states, was different from meteoric light, the velocity was too slow for a meteor, and it was traveling horizontally as long as was seen, which was for several minutes.

Cohen also briefly mentions (p.9) a sighting from around this earlier time by “a young San Francisco woman named Hegstrom”. Again, I eventually found the original report in the Record-Union of 23 November 1896, p.4:

Miss Hagstrom, who resides on Telegraph avenue, saw the same object about six weeks ago. The feature that impressed her most was the bright light which she distinctly saw. On returning home she told her brother of what she had seen, but nothing more was thought of it until she read recently that a similar object had been seen in another part of the state.

So, replacing Musson/Hegstrom with Musso/Hagstrom, I feel reasonably confident that both were in fact sightings of the October 22 meteor, rather than first sightings of the mystery airship. I’m also reasonably sure that Cohen was relying on a type-written (and probably somewhat faded) list of sightings.

“A Hunter named Jordan”

Our final pre-Sacramento sighting appears in Cohen (p.9): “One of the most astonishing tales was attributed to a hunter named Jordan, who said that he and some friends had tracked a wounded deer to a remote part of Tamalp[a]is Mountain northwest of San Francisco. There in a clearing he came upon a hidden workshop, and in it were six men working over a strange-looking vehicle.“

Gross’ book on Charles Fort tells this same story (but without giving a source) (p.7): “For example, a hunter claimed he had come across the airship and its inventors while walking through the woods in Marin County. The inventors were quite ordinary people he asserted.“

Once again, diligent searching revealed the full story as recounted in a letter published in The San Francisco Call, 23 Nov 1896, p.2, right at the zenith of Californian mystery airship mania:

OTHERS WHO SAW IT

Stories that Corroborate the Fact of the Invention

The following letter from San Rafael explains a phase of the story that has not yet come to light:

SAN RAFAEL, Nov. 22, 1896

Editor Call: The mysterious light mentioned in your valuable paper this morning as seen by several citizens in different parts of the State, and which seems to mystify yourself as well as your readers, is nothing more than an airship, and of this fact I am perfectly cognizant. I think now that I am released of my obligation of secrecy, which I have kept for nearly three months, as the experiment in aerial navigation is a fixed fact and the public or a few of the public at least have seen its workings in the air.

In the latter part of last August I was hunting in the Tamalpais range of mountains, between the high peak and Bolinas Bay. I wounded a deer, and in chasing it I ran onto a circular brushpile about ten feet in height in a part of the mountain seldom visited even by hunters.

I was somewhat astonished, and my curiosity prompted me to approach it, when I encountered a man who sang out: “What are you doing here and what do you want?” I replied that “I had wounded a deer and was chasing it.” He said “that they had been camping here for a month or so and had not seen a deer, but if you think your deer is in the neighborhood I will assist you in finding it as we need a little meat in camp.” This man went with me and in less than 500 yards found my deer. We carried it into the brush corral. And what a sight – a perfect machine shop and an almost completed ship. I was sworn to secrecy and have kept it till this moment. Six men were at work on the “aerial ship.” It is this ship that a few people have seen at night on its trial trip. It returns to its home before daylight and will continue to do so until perfected. Yours, WILLIAM JORDON.”

Once again, even though Cohen’s account has a coupling of niggling typos (Jordan/Tamalpis for Jordon/Tamalpais), it does basically seem to have been well-sourced.

As an aside: according to Familysearch and MyHeritage, there are plenty of “William Jordon”s in California, but my guess is that the right one would prove to be closely related to William Charles Jordon (born 1817), who was registered to vote in San Rafael in 1872 [myheritage], and (I guess) who Familysearch thinks married Mary J. Devine in Sonoma on 15 July 1865.

Mountain Man named Brown

Our final sighting appears in Cohen (p.9), and mercifully doesn’t involve three bright lights in the sky. He writes: “A reclusive mountain man named Brown said he actually observed some sort of vehicle rising from the trees on a mountain ridge near San Francisco. He could not see the thing clearly because of the mountain mist, but he was sure it was quite unlike anything he had ever seen before.“

Well… I’ve searched newspapers.com (and elsewhere) for this without any luck at all (and it doesn’t seem to appear in any of Loren E. Gross’ books). I think there’s a high chance this story did appear in a newspaper around that time, but perhaps a spelling mistake crept in. All the same, this certainly seems to at least be consistent with William Jordon’s story.

Still, three out of four’s not a bad hit rate, and perhaps I’ll find the fourth at some point in the future.