The Long History Of Weird Skies [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes, 10 seconds. Contains 2436 words

Welcome back my friends!

I’m your humble narrator for this jaunt down UFO lane.

Call me Stephen and we’ll get to it.

Art by Tom Brogan in DARK FILES by Michael Schratt of the 1896-7 MYSTERY AIRSHIP sighting craze

As we discussed last week, we’re going to be hunting UFO history for signs of intelligence agents. There are still a few more hours to subscribe and help decide which track we’ll go down first.

But enough advertisements.

(There will be another pure ad later this week, but that’s for later as a treat)

We’re here today because I don’t want to address the deeper shit without getting a couple overview posts in first.

This is going to be one of two history posts.

Today we’re going to focus on the overall history of UFOs or to borrow a charming phrase from Jung: Things beheld in the air.

Here’s why: The history of UFOs is very, uh, trope heavy. People interpret things with familiar ideas and will use whatever’s laying about as a framework to explain what they see.

Oftentimes these are quite bad. We’re a species prone to much error in identification. As the old saying goes, anything’s a UFO if you’re bad enough at identifying.

I think it’s important to understand that that and to consider that some of the stranger possibilities may actually have been better explained by past people’s folktales than ourselves.

The Ancient and Mythological Age

Our oldest examples of “UFOs” are the subject of much speculation and, frankly, not much of anything else.

This is a huge field and I’m far from expert in it.

So we’re going to do this quite quickly. If there’s something here you want me to write more about in the future, let me know.

It’s the only way I know what people are interested in.

The Twelfth Planet

We’re going to start off by kind of cheating and talking about someone I do know about: Zecharia Sitchin. We have to cheat because I think he contextualizes a ton about the modern understanding of these stories and does so quite badly as far as I can tell.

Sitchin wrote a book in 1976 called The Twelfth Planet based on his own translations of Sumerian where he laid out his interpretations of their mythology. We’re not going to dwell on the details aside from this: The Sumerian gods were called the Anunnaki and they came from the stars.

This part is true. They were also gods of many other people in the region: Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Sitchin also identifies them as the Nephilim from the bible, which we’ll discuss later.

These are just about the earliest written stories we have from about 4,000+ years ago. The Anunnaki even appear in our oldest surviving written story: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Basically, there’s a lot of interesting things here we’re just going to skip over because we don’t really have time and I’m the wrong guy to explain it.

The Descendants of the Star-People

Speaking of things I’m very much not the guy to explain, quite a few indigenous people’s identify themselves with people coming from the sky.

We’re not going to give this subject anything like the time it deserves here but it’s worth noting that for all the pure grifters like Erich von Däniken, Giorgio Tsukolas and Graham Hancock trying to use their stories to advance their own early human narratives.

Actually, let’s take a short moment to address Ancient Aliens since I’m MUCH more qualified to talk about them.

Even if they were right, they’re arguing their point so dishonestly they’re liars

This isn’t going to be anything like a debunking. I’m just going to give you the cliff notes: Von Däniken wrote a book called Chariots of the Gods? where he does the “just asking questions” thing where he’s clearly got conclusions but claims they aren’t.

A few decades later Graham Hancock repeated this using much of the same evidence but focused on Atlantis instead of ancient aliens. And Giorgio is a fan who became the main host of the show Ancient Aliens.

All three are dishonest enough that it’s hard to think they’re sincere. One example will have to suffice: The Egyptian Pyramids were built over the course of about a thousand years and show progressive development of sophistication from early step pyramids to the Great Pyramids of the Giza complex.

What super-intelligent aliens needed a thousand years of practice? No, that’s human development. Others have debunked all three at length and I don’t think their ideas are particularly interesting for us, except as far as they’re an example of what Moxy O'Brien referred to as a neo-volkish movement. A thing we’ll be coming back to a lot over the next year.

I’ve long since wanted to teach a class on dishonest rhetoric using the show ancient aliens. It really is a masterclass of stacking half truths to make them more pyramid shaped.

Anyway, back to the important thing: Indigenous stories of descending from the stars.

This belief is particularly popular in North America with a variety of Native Nations having stories to that effect and even calling themselves the star people.

I got *very* lost researching this because I don’t want to err and I found a very good short essay by Ruth Burns I’m going to link to instead of trying to explain myself.

She goes into more detail on the relationship felt by peoples such as the Cree, Zuni, Hopi, Lakota, Dakota, and Anishinaabe. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

And Ruth ends her column with a reminder about how the interconnection of beings goes far beyond humanity and we should not rely on colonial thinking to try to understand UAPs. Seems sensible to me.

Nor is it confined to North America. The Dogon people are an ethnic group in West Africa who are famous for their astronomical beliefs and incredible masks.

We’re here more to deal with the probable myth about their beliefs started by French Anthropologist Marcel Griaule that’s become popular in new age circles: That they possessed advanced knowledge of astronomy that couldn’t be acquired without telescopes or other tools.

New agers have used this idea and thus the idea of the Dogon themselves as a people visited by aliens in the past.

The truth might be more prosaic and honestly a lot funnier. I’m just going to quote from wikipedia on the subject:

Wouter van Beek concluded after his research among the Dogon that, "Though they do speak about Sigu Tolo [which is what Griaule claimed the Dogon called Sirius] they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for some it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the sigu [festival], for another it is Venus that, through a different position, appears as Sigu Tolo. All agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule."

So, in trying to verify Griaule’s findings van Beek found out the source was not aliens but… Griaule himself.

Spectacular. What a perfectly human thing to do?

I hope that story is right.

Quick Intermission: Uh… wow, so we’re 1,300 words into this and we’re not even really within written history yet.

Lighting round time: Nephilim? The kids of angels and humans, killed by God in the flood. Seeing weird stuff in the sky? Happens pretty much everywhere. Where there are written records, there’s written records of the sky being weird. Where there aren’t there are stories about it.

The Sky? It’s there and sometimes it does funny things.

The Romans? saw flying shields. It’s a whole thing. Was going to go into it but fuck em. The Vedas? Sometimes included weird shit in the sky. The Hebrew Bible? Weird shit, in the sky. You guessed it. Even the New Testament dabbles with guiding stars and the like.

European Middle Ages? You best believe they saw weird shit in the sky. Folk stories about lost time, little people, and strange visitations? May be more accurate than we’ve assumed.

OK, that’s enough of that. We just did a bit of extreme sports jumping over 1500 words. If you want me to go back and talk about that stuff… you know what to do.

Before WW2

Alright, so that 1500 words we skipped over? It’s also the better part of 4,000 years of recorded history. It’s now 1850 or so, and things are getting interesting because we now have just about modern newspapers popping up everywhere you can fit a printing press.'

What’s really cool about these, particularly in the 1800s is they’re completely uncontextualized. There’s not really much theorizing. It’s just, “Yeah so someone reported this weird thing so we’re telling you about it.” Kinda rules, tbh.

"On its body, elongated like a serpent," one of the alleged witnesses declared, "we could only see brilliant scales, which clashed together with a metallic sound as the strange animal turned its body in flight."

-A Chilean newspaper as reprinted in The Zoologist in 1868 (I’m trying to track the full text of this down)

These sightings are often reported shortly and with minimal context let alone enough detail to do more than think, “Huh, neat.”

They’re not even really particularly geographically located.

Sometimes they sound like modern sightings, sometimes they don’t. It just varies.

And then we come to probably the most famous thing of the era: The Mystery Airship sightings of 1896 and 1897 we started this off with a bit of art from.

We could do a whole episode on these but instead I think I’m just going to hand things off to the Arkansas Gazette.

This man gives *amazing* 19th century. “OF COURSE I SAW THE AIRSHIP and you will be safe in banking on what I tell you.” What else are you selling Captain?

Honestly, I realize this isn’t exactly a UFO but this is definitely my favorite report ever. I would absolutely buy Jim Hooton a whiskey and listen to his opinions on well regulated air locomotives.

Absolute king shit.

At some point I need to really organize sightings into some kind of database or hook up with one of the UFO orgs that already has one.

*sigh*

It’s probably worth noting that by this point hot air balloons had been a thing for over a hundred years and gliders had been around for a few decades.

We’re going to move pretty fast here because all the shit I want to write about happens after WW2. So let’s take a moment to wave at the Wright brothers in 1903 as we move past them.

In the decade before WW1 there were a few random sightings of airships of varying description around Europe: Denmark, Sweden, the UK, etc. As well as sightings in the USA, New Zealand and Australia.

I found a bunch of collected newspaper articles on this stuff and some of them are very interesting.

The earliest example I’ve seen of some real geopolitical anxiety about airships. “What if they’re very much Identified Flying Objects tho?” Pretty fair this close to WW1.

With WW1 starting we have the beginning of air warfare and that cartoon in the Liverpool courier became all too real.

But even then airships weren’t exactly great weapons of war but functioning airplanes would now be a very real threat to both military and civilians the world over.

Great.

“Great”

You get the idea though.

Lots of rumors and very justified panics about military action. And the Terror of bombs from Above.

Angels Above The Trenches

All this brings us to what might be a wartime legend or bit of propaganda: The Angels of Mons

I could see quite plainly in mid-air a strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon, nor were there any clouds in the neighbourhood. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the centre having what looked like outspread wings, the other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the centre one. They appeared to have a long loose-hanging garment of a golden tint they were above the German line facing us.

-An anonymous Lance-Corporal testifying about what happened on August 28th 1914 as quoted in Harold Begbie’s On the Side of the Angels.

I first found out about this incident or non-incident from Mike Carey’s comic The Unwritten, where one of the characters who discovered where stories came from and how to call on their power decided he very much didn’t want to die in the trenches of WW1 and created sighting like posting a meme: With a rumor.

None of the surviving accounts really seem to predate a June 1915 article in the Liverpool Echo titled: The Bowmen and other Legends of the War where Arthur Machen tells the story. He later claims to have made it up.

There are also accounts of people seeing a mess of other figures in the sky including Joan of Arc and St Michael the Archangel.

There don’t seem to be many actual eyewitnesses to these and even UFO experts tend to think this was purely a media story rather than an authentic sighting of something else.

But the thing that’s interesting is how this compares to later claims that UFO sightings themselves reduce purely to hysteria because of media prompting.

And it must be said that we are very gullible when it comes to media priming. But here we have an example of that that produced almost no eyewitnesses. Strange, no?

Reminds me a bit of the visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima a few years later which itself has been compared with a UFO experience.

Wrapping Up

Alright, I’m calling this here. I want this out while there’s still time to pop over to our Thank you episode for paid subscribers and influence that if you see it in time; the poll closes around 7pm est. Paid subscribers have been very patient with me and I still very much appreciate that.

So I guess next week’s episode is going to be 100 Years of UFOs since we mostly ended in WW1?

A bit more than I intended but I think it’ll work itself out.

I’m going to try to have that out on Thursday.

There will be more content for the paid subscribers coming as well, loathe as I’ve been to actually gatekeep content. If you want access to that but don’t want to pay for it, you can always just ask me and I’ll comp you a few months no questions asked.

Alright.

Whew.

That was fun, yeah?

What I find most fascinating about UFOs is there’s simultaneously so much history and so little you can really hold onto. Sure, there’s *something* going on up there, but it’s provoked just about every possible explanation humanity can think of.

OK. I’m done. See y’all next week.

-S

P.S. Don’t forget to tell me whatever’s on your mind and maybe share this with someone.