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“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
–Mark Twain
Glance up at the sky: during the day you’ll see clouds and the sun – and at night it’s the moon and stars. But what most folks don’t realize is that what they are also gazing up at is (metaphorical) ink blotches on white paper.
You see, for many the sky is a kind of a Rorschach test: when faced with something up there we can’t quite figure out we humans will transform it into something we can — through a filter of the age and the technology we happened to be living in at the time.
Who knows what early man saw when they looked up … but in the Middle Ages angels and demons cartwheeled across the sky, during the Second World War foo fighters and Swedish ghost rockets were secret Nazi weapons, in the 1950s it was all flying saucers and Little Green Men…
And in the 1800s the craze was to see mystery airships.
In 1896, for instance, both the San Francisco Call and the Sacramento Bee reported wrote of a unknown flying machine that one night buzzed the California State capital. A Mr. R. L. Lowery described it as a pedal-powered dirigible – sporting a passenger compartment – operated by two men. Lowery also said that he could head someone on board bark orders to climb to avoid colliding with either a church steeple … or a local brewery (depending on who was asked). Mr. Lowery wasn’t the only witness, however: others were quoted as having heard singing from the craft as it floated overhead.
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