Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/255

Rh perhaps by beings from so far away that they had never even heard that something, somewhere, asserts a legal right to this earth.

Altogether, we're good intermediatists, but we can't be very good hypnotists.

Still another source of the merging away of our data:

That, upon general principles of Continuity, if super-vessels, or super-vehicles, have traversed this earth's atmosphere, there must be mergers between them and terrestrial phenomena: observations upon them must merge away into observations upon clouds and balloons and meteors. We shall begin with data that we can not distinguish ourselves and work our way out of mergers into extremes.

In the Observatory, 35-168, it is said that, according to a newspaper, March 6, 1912, residents of Warmley, England, were greatly excited by something that was supposed to be "a splendidly illuminated aeroplane, passing over the village." "The machine was apparently traveling at a tremendous rate, and came from the direction of Bath, and went on toward Gloucester." The Editor says that it was a large, triple-headed fireball. "Tremendous indeed!" he says. "But we are prepared for anything nowadays."

That is satisfactory. We'd not like to creep up stealthily and then jump out of a corner with our data. This Editor, at least, is prepared to read

Nature, Oct. 27, 1898:

A correspondent writes that, in the County Wicklow, Ireland, at about 6 o'clock in the evening, he had seen, in the sky, an object that looked like the moon in its three-quarter aspect. We note the shape which approximates to triangularity, and we note that in color it is said to have been golden yellow. It moved slowly, and in about five minutes disappeared behind a mountain.

The Editor gives his opinion that the object may have been an escaped balloon.

In Nature, Aug. 11, 1898, there is a story, taken from the July number of the Canadian Weather Review, by the meteorologist, F. F. Payne: that he had seen, in the Canadian sky, a large, pear-shaped object, sailing rapidly. At first he supposed that the object was a balloon, "its outline being sharply defined." "But, as no cage was seen, it was concluded that it must be a mass of cloud." In about six minutes this object became less definite—whether because of increasing distance or not—"the mass became less dense, and finally it disappeared." As to cyclonic formation—"no whirling motion could be seen."