Notes towards tha myth of things seen in the sky
Today, the penultimate instalment of cantos from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, dealing most notably with perhaps the first cattle mutilation story (a hoax!) and an even more provocative tale that echoes one from the Middle Ages. This last had me scratching my head for a while, until I happened upon the explanation, looking into those Medieval stories of ships in the skies.
Over at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer shares a collection of premodern tales of cattle mutilation, among them the prototypical if not archetypal story told by Alexander Hamilton during the Great Airship Mystery of 1896/7. Spencer’s reminding us of this report opens the door to my sharing my own poetic rendering of the encounter, one of the many smaller poems that compose a long poem On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, part of that larger, “epic” project whose working title is Orthoteny.
Since WordPress does violence to the lineation of poetry, I post the poem, below, as a PDF.
Skunkworks 