Some more UFO stuff

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Going the distance on this one...

UFOs, hieroglyphics, and sulphur...in a newspaper article, published in 1865.

A meteor, aliens or just a magnificent view?

Cadotte Pass was the sensational subject of speculation in 1865.

CADOTTE PASS – This is big country up here on the Continental Divide, even bigger if you’re searching for the skid marks of an 1865 UFO.

Whether or not James Lumley, “an old Rocky Mountain trapper,” was telling a tall tale when he got back to St. Louis, his story thrust this low crossing over the main spine of the Rockies into a national spotlight of sorts. Newspapers from east to, well, the Midwest reprinted the St. Louis Democrat’s account in the last three months of 1865 as news of the Civil War subsided.

Today Cadotte Pass is all but forgotten, tucked on the Continental Divide Trail between Rogers Pass and Highway 200 three miles to the south and Lewis and Clark Pass seven miles north.

Around the middle of September 1865, the Democrat reported, he was trapping in the neighborhood of Cadotte Pass.

“Just after sunset one evening he beheld a bright, luminous body in the heavens, which was moving with a great rapidity in an easterly direction. It was plainly visible for at least five seconds, when it suddenly separated into particles, resembling, as Mr. Lumley described it, the bursting of a skyrocket in the air.”

A meteor, right?

A few minutes later Lumley heard an explosion that jarred the earth, followed by a rumbling sound “like a tornado sweeping through the forest.” There followed a strong wind and a peculiar sulfur smell that filled the air.

Lumley was impressed but said he wouldn’t have thought much more about it. But the next day, two miles from his camp, he encountered a path several rods wide as far as he could see. A rod, Barney Google tells us, is 16½ feet, a fact we presume didn’t require further explanation in 1865.

The trail of destruction had been cut through the forest, uprooting or breaking off giant trees near the ground, shaving off hilltops and plowing the earth.

“Great and wide-spread havoc was every-where visible,” the newspaper related.

OK, again — a meteor that turned into a meteorite when it hit the ground.

But here the story turns weird. (Cue “Twilight Zone” theme music.)

Ol’ Jim followed this “track of desolation” to an immense stone driven into a mountainside. The rock was divided into compartments and carved with “curious hieroglyphics.” Lumley said he was sure the pictographs were the works of human hands. Fragments were of a substance that resembled glass, and here and there were dark stains “as though caused by a liquid.”

“The stone itself, although but a fragment of an immense body, must have been used for some purpose by animated beings,” Lumley ruminated.

Maybe this helps explains 2020.

“It was evident that the stone which he discovered was a fragment of the meteor which was visible in this section in September last,” the Democrat reported. “It will be remembered that it was seen in Leavenworth, Galena and in this city by Colonel Bonneville. At Leavenworth (Kansas) it was seen to separate in particles or explode.”

Ah, Col. Benjamin Bonneville. He was 69 years old by then, commander of the Union Army’s Benton barracks in St. Louis and renowned explorer of the West. He is namesake of schools, a county and a mountain peak; of salt flats, dams and power administrations; of liberty ships, Pontiacs, and a crater on Mars.

But up in Montana Territory?

“Strange as this story appears, Mr. Lumley relates it with so much sincerity that we are forced to accept it as true.”

And so, so are we.

Full article: A meteor, aliens or just a magnificent view?



UFO crash, Cadotte, USA 1864