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  WONDERS IN THE SKY

  UNEXPLAINED AERIAL OBJECTS FROM ANTIQUITY TO MODERN TIMES

  and Their Impact on Human Culture, History, and Beliefs

  JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by Chris Aubeck and Documatica Research, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vallee, Jacques.

  Wonders in the sky: unexplained aerial objects from antiquity to modern times and their impact on human culture, history, and beliefs / Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck.—

  1st Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-44472-6

  1. Unidentified flying objects—Sightings and encounters—History.

  2. Unidentified flying objects—Psychological aspects.

  3. Unidentified flying objects—Religious aspects. I. Title.

  TL789.3.V354 2010 201024720

  001.942—dc22

  While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assume any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  In memoriam:

  Janine Vallee

  I will show wonders in the sky above, and signs on the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and billows of smoke.

  —Acts 2:19

  There shall be Signs in the Sun, and in the Moon, and in the Stars.

  —Luke 21:25

  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

  —Albert Einstein, “What I Believe,” Forum, October 1930

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword by Professor David Hufford

  Introduction

  PART I: A Chronology of Wonders

  A: Chronology to 1000 AD

  B: Chronology: 1000 to 1500 AD

  C: Sixteenth-Century Chronology

  D: Seventeenth-Century Chronology

  E: Eighteenth-Century Chronology

  F: Nineteenth-Century Chronology

  PART II: Myths, Legends, and Chariots of the Gods

  PART III: Sources and Methods

  Classical sources

  Screening

  Rules for inclusion

  Hoaxes

  Explanations

  The special problem of crashed saucers

  The special problem of “dragons”

  Entities

  Biblical accounts

  Aerial phenomena in classical art

  For further research…

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  Bibliography

  WONDERS IN THE SKY

  UNEXPLAINED AERIAL OBJECTS FROM ANTIQUITY TO MODERN TIMES

  and Their Impact on Human Culture, History, and Beliefs

  FOREWORD

  by David J. Hufford, Ph.D.

  Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry

  Penn State College of Medicine

  Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies

  University of Pennsylvania

  Author, The Terror That Comes in the Night

  In 1969 I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of Folklore. My primary interest was in what was called “folk belief.” This term was, and still is, generally reserved for beliefs that are at odds in some way with the official modern worldview. I was taught that such beliefs were both non-empirical and non-rational, that they were cultural fictions that reflected local concerns and functioned to support community values and psychological needs. The experiences on which they claimed to be based were, to use the term popularized by Thomas Kuhn’s landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), “anomalies.”

  From seeing a ghost to the alleged cures of folk medicine, the events described in folklore seemed to contradict the paradigm of science, the gold standard of modern rationality. For this reason they were, as Charles Fort had said, “damned” (1919), forbidden entry to the corpus of valid knowledge. However, I was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations, and that if they did they might point to important new knowledge.

  I was already frustrated by the way that widely held folk beliefs, beliefs common to many distinct cultures, were dismissed without investigation or argument. I had, in fact, already seen that investigation of the possible validity of folk belief claims was subject to an intimidating array of sanctions. I was thrilled, therefore, to find Jacques Vallee’s book, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969).

  I considered UFOs to be a part of contemporary folk belief and, given my questions about valid anomalous observations, I had been reading the UFO literature. I had read Vallee’s Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) and knew him to be both scientific and open-minded. More than most of the popular UFO literature, Vallee’s Anatomy… provided a convincing case for the objective reality of anomalous aerial phenomena. In Passport to Magonia he continued to strengthen the case for there being real phenomena behind UFO reports, but linked these reports to older reports of fairies, ghosts, angels, demons, and so forth in a compelling and fascinating way. He recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

  This is a sophisticated distinction that I had rarely found among scholars of folk belief, and in Magonia Vallee laid out the conceptual basis for using this distinction in the cross-cultural analysis of reports of strange aerial phenomena and the events often associated with them. Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” he said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly. But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the appearances of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment…” (1969: 149).

  In 1971 I traveled to Newfoundland, Canada, where I spent four years teaching and doing fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation on folk belief. Vallee’s ideas went with me and were repeatedly confirmed by the folklore that I studied there. Ghost ships, Jackie-the-Lanterns, and weather lights comprised a very old set of fo
lk traditions and were constantly reported around the island, often in very UFO-like terms. In one small village a series of strange aerial sightings was described and interpreted in old fashioned terms by older residents, while the young people in the community simply called the lights UFOs. In Newfoundland I also found the tradition that they call “the Old Hag,” a terrifying nocturnal paralysis accompanied by a frightening entity that Newfoundlanders associated with witches or ghosts.

  Using Vallee’s approach I was able to immediately recognize in the Old Hag the “bedroom invader” experience that I had encountered in popular UFO literature (Keel 1970). This phenomenon, known to sleep researchers as “sleep paralysis,” has “stable, invariant features” that in reports are surrounded by culturally shaped language and interpretations. Among the stable core features of sleep paralysis is the anomalous presence of a frightening entity. This experience, like the experience of strange lights and aerial objects, has wandered through a great variety of traditions around the world: witchcraft, ghosts, vampires, and UFOs. In the 1992 booklet Unusual Personal Experiences (Hopkins et al.) UFO abduction investigators Hopkins, Mack and Jacobs report a large national survey intended to determine how many humans have been abducted by aliens—their number one index question asks whether the respondent recalls “Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange…presence…in the room” (p. 26): sleep paralysis.

  Anomalies are a threat to the intellectual status quo. They are powerfully resisted, and that resistance often seems to co-opt the efforts of those bravely investigating the anomalous just as much as it recruits the efforts of intransigent skeptics. As Thomas Kuhn’s ground-breaking work showed, this cultural dynamic is inseparable from more obvious data in the effort to make—and to understand—scientific progress. The initial response of a paradigm to anomalies is to ignore or, when reports become too numerous, to assimilate. Both of these strategies are facilitated by the distribution of anomalous reports across a large number of apparently disparate conceptual categories. This process is facilitated by investigators who rush to theories, such as the extraterrestrial spaceship explanation of UFOs, that divide large sets of anomalous reports into smaller and more numerous subdivisions.

  UFOs do not seem like Newfoundland weather lights or Will-o’-the-Wisp or the burning ship of Ocracoke Island—until you strip away the culturally elaborated language and secondary interpretations, leaving “anomalous aerial phenomena.” Just as “sleep paralysis,” “the Old Hag” and UFO abductions don’t appear similar—until you strip away the cultural layers and find “Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange…presence…in the room.” This is the beauty of the approach pioneered by Vallee in Magonia. Wonders in the Sky extends this with the huge corpus of additional early reports assembled by Chris Aubeck and his colleagues through The Magoniax Project. The willingness of these authors to cast a very wide net, and not to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

  Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more. Enthusiastic advocates of various anomalous phenomena tend to oppose, even to be offended by, the kind of rigorous methodology found in Wonders in the Sky. Not only does this method refuse to accept particular theories as a starting point; it also has much in common with the method of debunkers. When Dr. Hynek invented the “marsh gas” explanation for UFOs (which he later recanted) he implied that he was stripping away layers of cultural elaboration to find the “stable core” of the phenomenon, just as skeptics have used “just sleep paralysis” to debunk UFO abduction reports (and a variety of other anomalous events). The work of Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck is especially steadfast and courageous in two respects. While seeking a core phenomenology that requires the stripping away of layers of cultural elaboration, they nonetheless systematically attend to the data. After they have removed “spaceship” as a core feature of an observation, they do not proceed to remove all anomalous features. The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpretation rather than an observation. This is true open-mindedness, and it suggests that we are seeking to understand aspects of the world that are deeply strange.

  Their rigorously scientific insistence allows Vallee and Aubeck to retain the most challenging and interesting aspects of these events without the distraction of premature commitment to any particular interpretation. That, I believe, is true science: to follow the data wherever they lead, and to move away from established theory when it fails to deal adequately with the data. As philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend pointed out (1975), what he called the “consistency principle”—judging a theory or hypothesis on the basis of its fit with well established prior theory—ensures the survival of the oldest theory, not the best theory.

  The other beautiful innovation in Vallee and Aubeck’s work is the combination of science and scholarship. A willingness to combine documentary research, the heart of humanities scholarship, with physical and astrophysical knowledge is rare. To do this in an open-ended search for elusive truth without needing to offer a theory of their own is rarest of all. To do this in a way that harnesses the possibilities of international scholarly collaboration through the Internet offers a view of truly 21st century inquiry. When I met Jacques Vallee for the first time at Esalen, almost 40 years after I read Passport to Magonia, it was truly a peak experience. To have learned that with Chris Aubeck he was preparing the successor to Magonia just added to my delight. When Jacques asked me to write a foreword to the new book I felt the sense of completion when an aspect of life comes full circle.

  INTRODUCTION

  Imagine that we have been transported back in time to Hamburg, Germany, on the 15th day of December in the year of the Lord 1547. Historian Simon Goulart, in his Trésors Admirables et Mémorables de notre Temps (1600) writes that on that day the sailors who were aboard ships in the harbor of Hamburg saw in the air, at midnight, a glistening globe as fiery as the Sun. It rolled towards the north, emitting so much heat that people could not remain inside the ships, but were forced to take cover, thinking the vessels were about to burn up.

  A meteor? The behavior of this aerial phenomenon is not typical of meteors, which are too high in the atmosphere for their heat to be felt on the ground. In any case a meteor would have passed overhead in seconds, never giving people aboard the ships time to run away from the heat. Globular lightning? Unlikely in the absence of thunder or stormy conditions. Lacking more information, we have to classify the incident as an unidentified flying object.

  Thousands of such incidents have been recorded in the last 60 years or so, giving rise to much speculation about flying saucers, visitors from other planets, and alien abductions. Influenced by books and movies, most people have jumped to hasty conclusions: they believe that unidentified flying objects are spaceships from another planetary civilization that became aware of us when we exploded the first atom bombs at the end of World War Two. Understandably concerned about the irresponsible antics of our young species, the theory goes, these aliens decided to come over and take a closer look. According to this interpretation, some of the spaceships even crashed on the earth and their technology has been hidden away and secretly studied by concerned governments.

  As the above incident in Hamburg shows, however, the extraterrestrial theory is not quite complete: The phenomenon did not begin in the 1940s, or even in the nineteenth century. It is much older than that. Further, it has some definite physical features – such as the heat felt and reported by witnesses – that have not changed much over the centuries.

  The evening of September 3, 1965, two law enforcement officers, Sheriff McCoy and Robert Goode, were patrolling the highways around Angleton, Texas, when they observed a huge object, estimated at 70 meters long and 15 meters high wit
h a bright violet light at one end and a pale blue light at the other. It flew within 30 meters of them, and cast a large shadow when it intercepted the moonlight. They felt a heat wave that scared them, prompting them to hastily drive away. Just like the sailors of Hamburg in 1547.

  A robust phenomenon

  Such similarities between ancient sightings and modern reports are the rule rather than the exception. In this book we will examine 500 selected reports of sightings from antiquity to the year 1879, when the industrial revolution deeply changed the nature of human society.

  We selected the cutoff date of 1880 for our study because it marked a turning point in the technical and social history of the advanced nations. We wanted to analyze aerial phenomena during a period that was entirely free of those modern complications represented by airplanes, dirigibles, rockets and the often-mentioned opportunities for misinterpretation represented by military prototypes. There may have been a few balloons in the sky towards the end of our period, but the first dirigible able to return to its starting point was not demonstrated until the celebrated flight of French Captains Renard and Krebs on August 9, 1884, and the first airplane (equipped with a steam engine) would not fly until Clément Ader’s feat at Satory on October 14, 1897.

  Even more important than technical achievement were the social changes that marked the end point of our study. It is in 1879 that the world’s first telephone exchange is established in London and the first electric tram exhibited by Siemens in Berlin. The following year, both Edison and Swan devise the first practical electric lights, Carnegie develops the first large steel furnace, and New York streets are first lit by electricity. Any study of unidentified flying objects after that date has to adopt the standards of a world where communications, social interaction, travel patterns, and the attitudes of people in everyday life have been deeply altered by the impact of technical progress.