Episode 220: Uplifting

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Sometimes the thing you're looking for is right there in front of you.

You just need to look harder.

That was the case about a decade ago when Peter Williams, a historian at the University of Cambridge, asked his students to take images of a medieval document home to study over the summer of 2012.

The manuscript in question dates back to the 6th century, so it's pretty old and significant on its own.

But it turns out, it was hiding something even more amazing.

You see, it was actually a palimpsest manuscript, a fancy term for a recycled book.

At some point 1400 years ago, some economical scribe took an older document and washed and scraped it until it was blank again so that they could use it in their own project.

But it was never a perfect process, and 10 years ago, student Jamie Clare spotted those earlier shadows.

After putting it through a series of x-rays and photographic tests that can see the microscopic metal from the original pigment, the older script actually came to life, and with it, a historical document that was long thought to be gone forever.

It was a passage by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus.

Well, it was more than that, actually.

It was a list of coordinates for stars that Hipparchus himself tracked and studied more than 2,000 years ago.

In fact, they were able to prove that Hipparchus himself wrote it by finding the correct date for those stars' positions using known data about the Earth's precession, which pinned the date right in the middle of his writing career.

And the discovery proves something else.

That for a very long time, humans all over the world have been looking up at the sky for answers to their questions.

Not that they've always found them, though.

In fact, sometimes those gazing eyes have spotted something else wholly unexpected.

And the results have been terrifying.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

If you live near a major city or even in the suburbs, then you know what you typically see when you look up at night.

Almost nothing.

Sure, the odd planet shines through and of course the moon, but most of the view is polluted by our electric lights.

But head out into the wilderness, away from civilization, and you'll get a better idea of what our ancestors saw every single night.

A sky filled with an uncountable number of stars.

In fact, they were so intimate with that view that they started to draw them as collections known as constellations.

The first constellations drawn by humans that we can put a definitive date on come from ancient Mesopotamia, way back in 1300 BC.

But there is also a cave in France that has dotted markings that some archaeologists believe represent stars, and it dates to over 17,000 years ago.

Basically, humans have been looking up and sketching what they see there for a very long time.

Now, if I asked you to name a few constellations, you would probably mention the Big Dipper or Orion's belt.

But when the Greek astronomer Ptolemy published his star charts about 1800 years ago, it included over a thousand stars grouped into 48 distinct constellations.

Then in the 17th and 18th century, astronomers all over the place started making up their own constellations and the list grew into the hundreds.

The 88 official constellations that we know today were selected back in 1922 by the International Astronomical Union, cutting all the rest out.

Constellations like Aranea the long-legged spider, Hippocampus the seahorse, the leech Herudo, and one that was supposed to look like the heart of Charles I of England, who was beheaded in 1649.

Yeah.

Of course, over the centuries, there were other things that humans decided that they could do with what they saw in the sky.

There was aromancy, the practice of divination using the shape of clouds, the patterns of bird migrations, and other atmospheric conditions to predict the future.

Sort of a supernatural meteorology, I guess.

The ancient Sumerians thought that by tracking the movement of certain stars, they were literally keeping an eye on the gods, watching them move across the night sky.

And in ancient China, it was commonly believed that things like visible sunspots or full or partial eclipses were a sign of how things were going to go for the emperor, good or bad.

And then there were other things, objects in the sky that people have been unable to identify.

And of course, when I mention that sort of phenomena, your mind probably drags up images of the 1940s and 50s.

But UFOs aren't just a modern concept, and sightings date back further than Roswell and Rendlesham and Area 51.

One early sighting that was recorded in the diary of a public official tells us a most unusual story.

The writer, John, tells us that a man named James Everell had been in a rowboat with two other friends on a river just outside of Boston when they spotted a bright light in the sky.

John tells us that, when it stood still, it flamed up and was about three yards square.

When it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine.

John, by the way, wasn't a random guy who was just writing things down for fun.

He was John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

And that diary entry was dated March 1st of 1639, almost four centuries ago.

And according to the rest of the text, other well-respected citizens came forward to report the exact same sighting.

Same night, same place, same unexplainable object that moved quickly and then stopped on a dime.

Oh, and Mr.

James Everell reported something else that sounds very UFO-ish today.

When the mysterious light finally vanished, he and his friends discovered that they had traveled a full mile against the current of the river without remembering that it happened.

Winthrop would go on to record many more sightings, but so did a lot of other people over the years.

In May of 1900, one woman reported seeing what appeared to be a massive illuminated shape of a cross floating a thousand feet above her town.

Sparks seemed to drip off of it as the object zipped around the sky.

But when push comes to shove, No one witnessed more dramatic, mysterious visions in the sky than the folks who lived across America in the late 1890s.

It was both a national craze and a local experience.

And to those who lived through it, it was also the fright of their life.

We have to begin with the overall mood of the world at the time.

For context, in 1852, a French engineer named Henri Giffard had the bright idea to attach a steam-powered engine to a balloon filled with hydrogen gas, and it propelled the craft 17 miles.

Not too bad for a first go at it.

In 1895, a German guy named Ferdinand filed a patent for a fully designed airship.

It had a rigid frame covered by a tough skin, which was filled with hydrogen gas.

Beneath the long, thin balloon was something like a cable car, which housed two engines, passenger compartments, and a place for the crew.

And it could zip around at 25 miles per hour.

Ferdinand's last name, by the way, was Zeppelin, which is where the airship's name comes from.

These were first steps, rare machines that were pioneering something new.

Powered dirigible flight.

They weren't the jetliners of their day yet, so most people only read about them in papers and books, which is what makes the events of 1896 and 1897 so unusual, I suppose.

It started on November 17th of 1896, out in Sacramento, California.

That evening, between 6 and 7 p.m., hundreds of people looked up and spotted something strange in the sky.

As the front page article described it the following morning, they saw coming through the sky, over the housetops, what appeared to them to be merely an electric arc lamp propelled by some mysterious force.

It came out of the east and sailed unevenly toward the southwest, dropping now nearer to Earth and now suddenly rising into the air again, as if the force that was whirling it through space was sensible of the dangers of collision with objects upon the earth.

More unusual though was that many of the witnesses claimed to have heard men shouting from the craft.

Things like, lift her up quick, you are making for that steeple and we ought to get to San Francisco by tomorrow.

If that was the end of it, we could write it off as a random dirigible enthusiast who wanted to go for a joyride in a state-of-the-art European technology on the western edge of the United States.

But it didn't.

In fact, it was just the first of many similar sightings.

Each came with a description, and while there are a lot of details that varied from place to place, many were eerily similar.

People frequently described a white central headlamp with colored lights beside it, often in red and green.

But the strangest similarities centered around the body of the craft.

Most described it as nearly 200 feet long, much larger than any dirigible at the time.

Weirder still, a good number of witnesses claimed that the aircraft had wings, described as almost as long across as the ship's own length.

Some of the ship's surfaces were apparently metallic, and there was a sort of basket hanging from its underside, which many said contained a pilot.

And I mentioned that there were a lot of witnesses, but I'm not sure that fully represents what I mean.

Over the span of just five months, reports came in from over 150 different witnesses.

The craft was spotted across 20 different states in the US, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, on the same day.

I could spend hours telling you all about them, but here are a small handful of examples.

On April 6th of 1897, hundreds of people in Wilmington, North Carolina stood on the wharf and watched as a craft covered in green and red lights passed overhead.

Some people even saw rope hanging down from the basket.

Eight days later, on April 14th, a farmer in Wolf Creek, Arizona named Richard Butler spotted an airship while he was out in his horse-drawn wagon.

When they spotted the thing in the air, his horses bolted and capsized the wagon.

And on the exact same day, all the way over in Rochester, New York, local man Cyrus Wheatley was helping a neighbor with a sick cow when he spotted red and green lights in the sky, flanking a brighter white headlight.

And reading through them, it's easy to assume that all of these encounters were benign and safe and from a distance.

But in at least one report, things became much more dangerous.

On March 9th out in Utah, people all over town looked up at about 9.30 in the morning and spotted a strange craft in the sky.

They claimed that smoke billowed out of three distinct smokestacks and that it was moving quickly.

And then, the craft exploded.

Witnesses say that the sound of the blast was heard as far away as 20 miles, but it had been so low in the sky that the explosion was also felt like the concussion of some sort of bomb.

Windows and houses for mild were shattered by the force of it, and lights were knocked out.

After it was all over, one man, David Leefer, went out to his barn to check on the horses.

He found one of them unresponsive to sound as if the explosion had caused it to go deaf, and the other, according to the report, had been decapitated by some of the debris.

And that right there would be enough for anyone to be afraid of.

And yet, just a decade later, one woman experienced something that would change not only her own life, but that of her entire family.

It was 1911, and the whispers of the airship sightings from 14 years earlier had sailed off over the horizon.

Folks all across America had settled back into the more mundane aspects of life, although I'd have to assume they sometimes glanced up at the sky.

People probably never will stop doing that.

Idella was 36 at the time, living in central Ohio.

In mid-May of that year, she decided she wanted to go visit her grandmother who lived about 40 miles to the east.

So she bought a ticket and boarded a train for the town of Broadway, heading out with a smile on her face and the anticipation that comes with seeing loved ones that you miss.

When she arrived at her grandmother's home later that day though, something was wrong.

Idella had left that good mood behind and seemed to be a shell of her former self.

She was in emotional distress, barely spoke, and was sullen and dark.

And that was just on the inside.

Her body also showed signs of some sort of immense physical trauma, as if she had been in an accident.

There were burn marks on her face, her tongue was badly swollen, and there was a strange indentation across the back of her lower leg, as if some enormous rope had bound her tightly, leaving a mark in the skin.

Understandably, her family was concerned.

Upon seeing the state Idella was in, her grandmother called for Idella's mother to come help.

Her mother then called Idella's two brothers and one sister, and the family sort of converged on the house in Broadway to surround and support her.

When it became clear that Idella wasn't going to recover anytime soon, one of her brothers caught a train home to make sure someone was there to take care of Idella's kids.

The rest just sort of moved in, becoming full-time caretakers to a woman they had known and loved for years.

But they weren't hopeful.

Idella could barely manage life anymore, and while she would attempt small talk from time to time, whenever anyone asked her what had happened, she would immediately become so terrified that she was unable to speak.

There were darker days ahead.

Idella attempted to take her own life a number of times, once even throwing herself into a nearby river until her mother jumped in to save her.

But the truth came out one night in the kitchen.

as she stood over the sink with her mother and sister Elsie in the room.

She told them how, on her journey to the house in May, they had come out of the sky and told her that they were going to destroy everything.

Her kids, her family, and the rest of the world.

She even sat up at night and wrote her experiences down.

But according to Elsie, their mother burned the pages every time, out of shame for the fantastical lies that they assumed she was telling.

By February of 1912, Idella had been sent to a mental health facility in Columbus, Ohio.

And a few months after that, she managed to sneak away from the caretakers there and end her own life.

A very dark chapter had ended for her family and on a tragic note and from that day forward no one spoke of it again.

It was a mystery that the family would lock away and never tell another soul.

But no secret can stay hidden forever.

It took six decades but eventually Elsie had to speak out and the reason for that was because of something she read.

You see, in 1972, a man named J.

Allen Hynek had started an organization that published articles and research of a very particular kind.

He had worked for years as a consultant to the U.S.

Air Force, but he left after they made it clear that they weren't interested in his unusual ideas.

And it was those ideas that Elsie read about in 1973, 61 years after her sister's mysterious encounter and tragic death.

Reports of other events that sounded eerily similar to Idella's, reports of lost time, unexplainable injuries, and talk of someone or something coming out of the sky.

It helped Elsie finally put a name to the events that happened to her sister and helped her better understand the physical and emotional damage she and her family were all witnessed to.

It happened decades before the events at Roswell, New Mexico, but the comparisons were clear.

J.

Alan Hynek, the man who coined the term close encounter, had inadvertently helped her discover the truth.

Idella hadn't suffered through an accident.

She had been the victim of something darker.

A UFO encounter.

Today, the skies above us are busy.

If you're like me and live in the vicinity of a major airport, it can often seem like there's always some giant metal bird to look at whenever we glance upward.

We still can't help ourselves, after all.

The sky is a playground, as the Foo Fighters sang.

There's always something going on above us.

But that doesn't explain the mysterious sightings across America in 1896 and 97.

Yes, it was the sort of vessel that a few people in Europe had heard about, but it was far from common and nothing that anyone would expect to find popping up all over the United States.

Even if those sightings were truly just some giant airship in the sky, they were wildly out of place on the timeline of powered balloon flight.

Sadly, it seems to be a mystery that will never be solved.

At the time, a number of people came forward with claims to be the mastermind behind one or more of the ships.

In fact, right after that first sighting in Sacramento in November of 1896, an attorney announced that he had been hired to represent the anonymous scientist who built the airship.

A second attorney disputed that story, though, claiming that he was the true representative.

A month later, Henry H.

Hearn learned about the the airship and claimed the invention was his own, but the designs had been stolen.

His outburst of anger turned violent, and he was placed in an institution to make sure that he could no longer harm himself or others.

In April the following year, a woman in Ohio named Eleanor Woodruff started to violently attack friends and family members because they refused to give her the money necessary to build an airship of her own.

She too was placed in an asylum.

People were so desperate for answers that they sent countless letters to Thomas Edison, assuming that he was either behind it or knew who was.

Edison eventually had to respond publicly, making it clear that he had nothing to do with the mysterious airships.

One last thing.

Remember how I told you of the hundreds of constellations that were killed off in 1922 by the International Astronomical Union?

One good bit of news is that all of Ptolemy's 48 original constellations were kept, even if that meant that we lost so many curious and wonderful alternatives in the process.

Honestly, this world is a little less cheerful without Skurus Volens, the flying squirrel, looking down on us from the night sky.

Oh, and one other constellation that was once common, only to be cast aside a century ago.

Its name, Argonavi, the ship of the Argonauts.

A gigantic ship hovering in the air.

It's honestly astounding the sorts of stories you can track down in newspapers across the country.

In a day and age when most people were looking at the ground beneath their feet, it's illuminating to see a moment in the past when all eyes pointed upward, and the stories of what they spotted are beyond entertaining.

But there's one more story I need to tell you about, and it's a lot more prominent than those isolated airship sightings we've already explored.

Stick around through this brief brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a groundbreaker.

There's no doubt about that.

But a century before he filed this patent, another man was making his own mark on the world of balloons.

Actually, we need to go back even further in time first to the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne.

They were the ones who gave us the hot air balloon that we think of today, the large globe-like structure with a longer bottom, like an upside-down teardrop.

And it was their experience with the family business, paper manufacturing, that helped them find the right materials.

In 1793, that design set a record for manned free flight by soaring 3,000 feet above Paris and traveling nearly six miles.

It sounds pretty weak by today's standards, but back then it drew a massive crowd.

Historians think that upwards of 100,000 people gathered to watch it happen, including King Louis XVI and a guy most of us have heard of, named Benjamin Franklin.

But hydrogen entered the picture a couple of decades earlier and balloon enthusiasts were looking for ways to use it.

In 1785, a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Blanchard, along with an American doctor, became the first to fly over the English Channel in a hydrogen balloon.

It took them two and a half hours.

And Blanchard became an overnight celebrity in his home country.

He went on to be the first to fly a balloon in America, Germany, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands.

And as his fame grew, he started to travel around putting on balloon shows that, judging by the stories, were the monster truck madness events of the 1780s.

Seriously, this man would strap dogs into parachutes and toss them out of his balloon.

His shows included pyrotechnics, too, literally shooting fireworks from his hydrogen-filled balloon.

It was like a rock show, just without the loud music.

Thanks to Blanchard, Europe was swept up in balloon mania.

Everywhere you looked, there were balloons for sale, ceramic ones, ones printed on fabric, and even reproduced in fashion through round, puffy sleeves and voluminous skirts.

Some folks even copied the man's haircut.

Honestly, people loved him.

In 1804, he married Sophie Armand, a woman half his age, and started taking her along on his tour.

Through on-the-job training, she became a star right alongside him.

In fact, just a year later, she became the first woman to fly solo.

And then, tragedy struck.

While giving a balloon demonstration, Blanchard had a heart attack and plummeted out of his balloon.

It's unknown if the fall ended his life or if he was already dead when he hit the ground.

But it seemed as if his balloon tour was over.

And yet, Sophie wasn't ready to walk away.

Instead, she kept the show going and just sort of took over.

And despite the fact that she was a shy, nervous woman on the ground, once she climbed into that basket and lifted off, she became an absolutely fearless performer.

And she did it all, too.

She launched fireworks from the balloon at her shows, dropped explosives, and flew enormous distances.

And sadly, yes, she also tossed dogs wearing parachutes out into the open sky.

I suppose no one is perfect, right?

For 10 years, Sophie was the queen of balloons.

Heck Napoleon named her chief air minister of ballooning and tasked her with planning an air invasion of England, which never came about.

Four years later, King Louis XVIII named her the official aeronaut of the restoration.

It seems that everyone loved Sophie Blanchard.

In July of 1819, she arrived in Paris for one of her regular performances, but she and her team noticed that there were a lot more fireworks than normal.

Again, her balloon was filled with hydrogen gas, not hot air, so it's a detail worth mentioning.

And she discussed the dangers with her team and almost, almost canceled the show.

But at the last minute, she caved in to to the chants of the crowd, climbed into her basket, and lifted off.

There she was, soaring higher and higher above the crowd, wearing a white dress and white hat, waving a white flag.

She was an angel, if ever there was one.

And then, a spark ignited her balloon.

Unable to descend due to high winds, she was blown off course.

Minutes later, the basket struck the roof of a nearby building, spilling Sophie out and dropping her to her death below.

Today, she's buried in Père-Lachazz Cemetery there in Paris.

Her epitaph makes sense if you know her story, victim of her art and intrepidity.

But visitors are given an extra hint by way of the image carved into the stone above it.

It's an image of a balloon engulfed in flames.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Jenna Rose Nethercott and music by Chad Lawson.

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