Notes towards tha myth of things seen in the sky
Since this year’s Solstice, Kevin Randle has been writing on the purported crash of an airship in Jefferson, Iowa in April 1897, providing a wealth of original material and even a photograph of an airship that landed in Waterloo, Iowa. He has gone on to contrast this story with that of the other, more famous, crash in Aurora, Texas the same month.
Randle concludes that both stories are hoaxes, perpetrated by the newspapers of the day to increase circulation. Of course, from the point of view of the mythos, what is important is that the waves of both 1897 and 1947 present with what Leonard Stringfield would term “Crash/Retrieval Syndrome”. Indeed, what is most valuable from a textual point of view is that, as Randle notes, the debris from the Aurora crash were dumped down the town’s well, which links the tale, at the level of the signifier, to that most famous crash/retrieval story, that of Roswell, i.e. Rose-well, a name that will bring to the minds of some readers the expression “sub rosa“…. ‘Aurora’, too, is a more suggestive name than ‘Jefferson’ in this context, as well.
For these, and other very likely contingent, reasons, my initial poetic treatment of the Phantom Airship Mystery includes the crash at Aurora, which I include below:
The railroad passed
An epidemic just
The West Side burned down
Weevils got the cotton
*
One came in from the north low over Wise County with the sun
Ten twelve miles an hour dropping toward the ground
Clear over the square right at Judge Proctor’s windmill
Three miles away they saw the flash and explosion
Fragments over three acres east and northeast
Windmill and watertank wrecked
flowerbeds ruined
What remained of a small man disfigured past human resemblance
And his hieroglyphic log penned in violet
Together were buried in the cemetery that day
*
I was in school that day and nothing happened
He saw the air ship when it swung in low to crash
They wouldn’t let me see it but told me all about it
They went to the crash and saw the wreckage and torn-up body
I heard about it all my life
It passed like any other story
In the Masonic Cemetery no unmarked graves
Never was a windmill at the Judge’s
Tons of metal found by the son down the well years later
Thanks to The Anomalist, I discovered this site administered by novelist Neil Rushton on Faerie lore. It resonates, as anyone familiar with the work of Jacques Vallee or Hilary Evans will know, with my concerns here.
One aspect of said folklore is the Faery Light, Ghost Light, or Will o’ the Wisp, the topic of a poem from my first trade edition, Grand Gnostic Central, that links a sighting of Yeats’ recounted in his autobiography with tales told me by my great Uncle Peter and Aunt Julia on my father’s (Hungarian) side of their experiences in Saskatchewan; it is also a phenomenon dealt with by a number of researchers, most importantly Paul Devereux, and touched on here under the rubric of the Electro-Magnetic Hypothesis.
Will of the Wisp
You say suddenly you saw
A light moving over the river
Just where the water rushes fastest
Brighter than any torch or lamp
Later a small light low down
Then over a slope seven miles off
You knew by hikes and your watch
No human pace could so quick
Here they trail wagons in blizzards
Swoop like owls to rap at windows
Come in view like oncoming engines
Over no tracks up to those waiting
Just last week, a friend recently publicized a chapbook of mine composed and published 
over twenty years ago, and the response, livelier than any to any of my work in recent memory, encourages me to return to the work that chapbook began.
I shouldn’t be surprised, in a way. This poem was the center-piece of the performances I gave during a tour of Germany in 1996, and then, too, the response was gratifying: one audience member excitedly came up to me to say he would buy everything I would publish, and a friend I made during that tour, the German novelist Georg Oswald, approved with pleasure the approach I took to the material. And a few years later this sequence was well-received by Terry Matheson, a professor of English who has applied narratology to alien abduction reports and who was kind enough to even teach the poem below in one of his classes.
So, for interested parties, I append one of the first poems from this project, the last poem of my first trade edition, Grand Gnostic Central and other poems. and return to back-engineering this “modern myth of things seen in the sky”.
Flying Saucers
Tuesday three in the afternoon 24 June 1947
Kenneth Arnold of Boise, rescue pilot, businessman, deputy sheriff and federal marshal, U.S. Forest Serviceman
At 9,000 feet crystal-clear conditions
Alone in his Callair between Chehalis and Yakima
An hour’s detour searching for a lost transport
Out of the blue a flash like just before a midair crash
Made him look left north of Mount Rainier
To see at ninety degrees
Nine seeming jet planes in a V pointed south
The echelon vaguely bobbing and weaving
Flashing reflections
Twenty-four miles off
Against Rainier’s snows, tailless—
Flying nearly forty miles
Between Mounts Rainier and Adams
Three times the speed of sound
The first crossed the ridge bridging the mountains
As the last came over its north crest five miles back
Nine crescents needing to be
Half a mile long to be seen
Flying that fast that far away
So smooth mirroring sunlight
Like speedboats on rough water
Wavering in formation
Like the tail of a Chinese kite
Wings tipping flashing blue white
Each like a saucer skipped over water
