Nineteenth- Century UFOs
Merriam-Webster’s definition of folklore is “1: traditional customs, tales, sayings, dances, or art forms preserved among a people; 2: a branch of knowledge that deals with folklore; 3: an often-unsupported notion, story, or saying that is widely circulated.” It is possible that quite some time from now this entire book could be considered folklore. One thing that folklore has bred, besides the stories themselves, is “folk-belief.” In his foreword to the book Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, Dr. David J. Hufford writes that “this term was, and still is, generally reserved for beliefs that are at odds in some way with the official modern worldview.” This sounds a lot like it could be describing ufology.
Medieval and other early civilizations have described UFOs as “flying shields” and contemplated the idea of humans from the sky, or what we now call “star people.” A famous sighting of unexplained flying objects was depicted in a 1561 Nuremberg woodcut, where the “globes” and a “spear” were shown in the midst of an aerial fight with one another before descending in smoke to the earth. (Search “Nuremberg woodcut” on the web to see this fascinating image.) Also, there are numerous stories from the New England area, including one from 1644 in Boston, Massachusetts, where witnesses observed “man-shaped lights”; one from the Bay of Fundy in 1796 where fifteen “ships” were seen flying in the air; and an 1820 story from New Hampshire where a man claimed to have been followed home by “several glowing balls.”
The state of Maine had UFO and extraterrestrial folklore of its own just waiting to be uncovered. Two stories from the early nineteenth century are recounted below. The sightings they depict remain unexplained to this day.
Abraham’s Encounter
The first paranormal investigator in the United States could very well be Reverend Abraham Cummings. He was a skeptic with an inquisitive mind. He was well educated, having received a master’s degree from Brown University. In 1826, he first published his book entitled Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense: In Which is Contemplated the Doctrine of Spectres and the Existence of a Particular Spectre Addressed to the Candor of this Enlightened Age. It tells the tale of Nelly Butler, a poor young woman who tragically passed away in the small town of Sullivan, Maine, but continued to be seen by hundreds of townspeople for years after her death. Starting in 1799, Nelly communicated, it was said, with multiple groups of people at the same time, almost begging for belief in her afterlife. Abraham Cummings shared reports that “she promised nearly fifty
people to convince them of her being such as she professed to be … ” He spoke with numerous eye witnesses during his investigation, some of whom said they would see Nelly in “personal form” roaming the fields, roads, and pathways. Others reported hearing her disembodied voice, or witnessing “a mere mass of light.”
Five years later, Rev. Cummings had an encounter one evening with an entity in a field. He presented a firsthand account of this “spectre in the field.” I ask you to challenge yourself while you read the following tale: Does the event he describes read more like a ghost story, or more like an encounter with an extraterrestrial being?
On a mild July evening in Maine, the reverend was sought out by two men. They had just been crossing the field near town when they saw what they believed was the spectre; in earlier sightings, this being was described as being “white as the light” and moving “like a cloud above the ground in personal form and magnitude.” After their encounter, they were naturally distressed and eager to share their story with Cummings. The reverend was certainly intrigued by their claims and assured them that he would investigate.
I can picture him as he walked toward the field, the sun setting. He was curious to discover what had frightened the men so badly, so he purposefully looked for anything out of place. He eventually observed a white rock a distance away on the ground, which did not at first seem unusual. But then, without warning, the “rock” began to ascend. Cummings watched in amazement, for it appears to have been glowing brightly. He had been sure that the two men he’d spoken to earlier were drunk, mistaken, or both, but here he was, alone and witness to the very thing they’d told him about. He described the event in detail: “The white rock was in the air; its form a complete Globe, white with a tincture of red, like the damask rose, and its diameter about two feet.” As he gazed upon the spectacle, it suddenly came toward him, and he saw something emerge from the white globe. He gawked at its oddness and described it as “a personal form with a female dress, but [it] did not appear taller than a girl seven years old.”
It is interesting to note that the entity Rev. Cummings saw was depicted as small and child-sized. The stereotypical “alien” is often described in this manner. It is also worth noting that he appears to have spoken telepathically with the being as it stood before him. Although he was convinced that this entity was the ghost of Nelly Butler, it looked nothing like her description. He was confused by this and wanted to communicate with it but found that he could not speak, so instead he thought of what he wanted to say. He recounted that “while I looked upon her, I said in my mind, ‘you are not tall enough for the woman who has so frequently appeared among us.’ Immediately she grew up as large and as tall as I considered that woman to be.”
Perhaps this is more conjecture on my part, but Cummings seemed to describe the being as shape-shifting right in front of him, taking the form of a recognizable figure, as in the movie Contact. Toward the end of that movie, Jodie Foster’s character has a scene with an alien that shows itself in the form of someone familiar to her. Maybe this was what happened in Cummings’s case. Then again, perhaps he was speaking in some sort of hyperbolic sense. Or maybe he could not find the words to accurately describe his encounter. Furthermore, maybe the figure did not appear as a woman at all and “spectre” was his only and closest word for it. Because of that, he may have formed the opinion that the entity had a femininity to it. The following statement might support this idea: “On her head was the representation of the sun diffusing the luminous, rectilinear rays every way to the ground.” This is more conjecture, and I don’t mean to go all Ancient Aliens on you, but this certainly sounds more like Egyptian descriptions of gods such as the Kachinas or the Anunnaki and less like a ghost.
Moments after the encounter, it seems, Cummings was suddenly inside his home without quite knowing how he got there. At this point, both the entity and the “rock” were gone.
Abductions and encounters with extraterrestrials are often associated with missing time and confusion as to how one arrived at a different location. You can refer to the Travis Walton case, the Betty and Barney Hill abductions, and the stories “The Woman Who Time Forgot” and “The Great Escape!,” found later in this book, for examples of this.
Reverend Abraham Cummings continued writing books and conducting investigations of the unknown after this encounter, though none come across quite as otherworldly as this one.
The Educator and the Light
In 1978, the Courier-Freeman newspaper (Potsdam, NY) published an article titled “Diary Describes UFO Seen In 1808.” In it, a woman named Cynthia Everett is described as having had a peculiar sighting one evening in Camden, Maine. The event, like Cummings’s incident, occurred in the month of July, and Everett wrote of her experience in a diary. Interestingly, the discovery of this encounter was happenstance. In 1978, Dr. Judith Becker Ranlett, a historian and professor for State University College at Potsdam, was conducting research for a Women’s History project she was working on. The research included a diary loaned to her by her father-in-law; Cynthia Everett was Dr. Ranlett’s husband’s great-great-grandmother.
An educated woman and teacher, Everett began keeping the diary in 1804 and wrote about her life, daily events, and observations. Dr. Ranlett felt as though she truly came to understand who Cynthia Everett was through reading the massive 600-page diary. She observed that Everett was not prone to fantasies of any kind.
Everett would typically write in her diary just before retiring for the evening, and the night of her encounter was no different. A light outside caught her eye. I can imagine her seated on her bed, having just finished her evening ablutions, when she saw it through the window, then rising quickly and fumbling for her diary. She wrote, “At the first sight, I thought it was a Metier, but from its motion I soon perceived it was not.” The diary entry continues with “it seemed to dart at first as quickly as light; and appeared to be in the Atmosphere, but lowered toward the ground and kept on at an equal distance sometimes ascending and sometimes descending. It moved round in the then visable Horison (it was not very light) and then returned back again … ”
That is where her encounter ends, and she did not write of any other sightings.
Given that Everett was educated in astronomy, Ranlett found it interesting that she did not speculate about other natural possibilities for what the light could have been other than a meteor, which she’d quickly dismissed. Everett had written about earthquakes and the appearance of a comet prior to this entry. Ranlett said, “She was the kind of person who would have explained it as a natural phenomenon, if she could have.” Everett was twenty-four years old at the time of this odd diary entry, and she stopped writing in it once she was married.
What do you think the light could have been? In 1808, few man-made lights were in the sky. Some of the few that existed at the time were Chinese lanterns and hot-air balloons. Perhaps it could have been one of these, though one would think that a hot-air balloon would not have been mistaken for a meteor, as Everett first described it. Yet whether extraterrestrial in nature or not, Everett saw something that evening that was significant enough for her to write about. I, for one, am thankful that she and Rev. Cummings had stories to add to Maine’s extraterrestrial folklore.