Notes towards tha myth of things seen in the sky
Today, I share the closing three cantos from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery. These concern themselves with the rising tensions and paranoia before the outbreak of The Great War, the aerial bombardment of London by German zeppelins, and the myth of Hill 60 from 1915.
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.
Today, I share the next instalment from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, a retelling of the archetypal UFO crash in Aurora, Texas, 17 April 1897. Like the uncannily prophetic depiction of the alien abduction schema in the 1963 film The Haunted Palace, the story of the Aurora, Texas airship crash possesses many of the features of later, similar tales avant le lettre: the crash itself; the small, burnt body of its pilot; strange, heiroglyphic writing found on items in the wreckage; and the “burying” (metaphorically, the cover up) of the body and wreckage. However tall the tale (as Kevin Randle maintains), it is nevertheless canonical and haunts ufology to this day; Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris reference its similarities to the Trinity crash, the subject of their recent book, in all its versions…
Today, the next instalment of cantos from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, here those dealing with five more days in April, 1897: further sightings, debunkings, newspaper articles, landings and encounters with naked, blond aliens decades in advance of George Adamski’s, an event reminiscent avant le lettre of the Maury Island incident, and even an aquatic sighting and encounter on Lake Erie…
This fourth instalment from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery presents the opening cantos from the central section, focussed on the events of April 1897.
Here, the third instalment of pieces from Orthoteny, a booklength poem on “the myth of things seen in the sky.” The first can be read and heard here. The second is the opening section of the chapbook On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery. Following that Prelude is “The Phantom Airship,” another nine cantos that recount salient sightings and reactions, which, in their turn, lead into the momentous month of April, the topic of the poem’s next section(s).
One of the most complete, if unfinished, parts of the work-in-progress was composed quickly after the project was begun. I took extensive notes on the Phantom Airship wave of 1896/7 from all those UFO books I had obtained to that point and rendered them poetically. These texts are woven from certain leitmotifs: triads, the colour blue, and other recurrent details. It is this coherence I was eager to show, if not refer to explicitly.
On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery was originally published as the chapbook On the Mysterious Airships in 1995. I had the opportunity to perform the Prelude at multiple readings in Europe in the summer of 1996, the most memorable being at the Stromlinienklub in Munich before an audience of over 500.
It remains uncertain whether this part of the epic will remain the same in the completed work. It is, after all, and may perhaps remain, as the epigraph says, “…a blueprint, a mock-up, a prototype…”
Skunkworks 