The Turin Shroud: Divine Likeness or Bogus Relic?

On the third day of the 1898 public exhibition of the Shroud of Turin, Secondo Pia was in his darkroom, developing the plates of the first photographs of the sacred object. The king himself had asked Pia, an amateur photographer and the mayor of a small town, to come and capture an image of the shroud during this commemoration of the Italian constitution’s signing. He had set up bright arc lights to illuminate the object, an ivory-colored linen 3.5 feet wide and 14.5 feet long with symmetrical patterns where it had been burned and water-stained while folded, like a Rorschach inkblot, and he had dutifully photographed it while clergymen looked suspiciously on, worried that somehow he would damage the fragile fabric. Now, in the red light of his darkroom, as he bathed the photo-sensitive printing plate of his photograph in developing solution and the image began to appear, he found himself shocked and elated, for there on the negative was a clear image of a man captured in the cloth.

Now, the image of a man was actually something he expected to see, something he had already seen with his naked eye, for the Shroud of Turin had long been venerated as the burial shroud of Christ because of that very image—a bearded, long-haired man, naked, his arms crossed in front of him, with what appeared to be dark bloodstains corresponding to the wounds of Christ. The history of the shroud and its veneration could be traced all the way back to Lirey, France, where in 1453 Margaret deCharny, who had been exhibiting it as a great relic that had come into her family’s possession, traded it to the House of Savoy in exchange for a castle. Thereafter, the cult of its veneration established itself in a chapel at Chambéry before it was transferred among several Italian and French cities for decades, exhibited occasionally around Easter. In 1532, a fire in the chapel at Chambéry damaged the shroud, which was doused with water to extinguish the flames, leaving the marks visible on it even today. Nuns made some repairs by patching sections, and after that, the shroud settled in Turin, where it had remained for most of its years, exhibited less and less frequently, until its 1898 exhibition. 

What Secondo Pia discovered that year in photographing it, therefore, was not that the image was present in the cloth, but rather that, in his negative, it was far more distinct, with greater detail than any had previously imagined. The reason for this was that his negative showed the image as a positive, which meant the image in the cloth was itself a negative, something that thinkers of that era, and even those today, struggled to explain. At first, Pia and his development process came under scrutiny, with many suggesting that he had altered or touched up his photo, something he vehemently denied.

The image in the shroud (left), itself a negative, and a negative of the image (right), itself a positive, via Wikimedia Commons

With the discovery and the controversy, of course, came fame, and soon the whole world—including skeptics, agnostics, atheists, and scientists—were looking very closely at the shroud. One of these, an anatomist and zoologist faculty member of the Sorbonne, Yves Delage, encouraged a young staffer at his biology magazine to investigate the shroud. This staffer, a Catholic biologist and painter named Paul Vignon, threw himself into the work, closely examining the Pia negative and searching for some natural explanation of the image. What he found convinced many, including his boss, Delage, that this truly was the burial shroud of the historical Christ.

The image revealed in the negative depicted with far more exactitude wounds that agreed almost perfectly with biblical accounts of the crucifixion. The man showed wounds that might indicate being nailed to a cross, and though the feet were only visible on the second image, which offered a back view of the corpse, it could be seen that the feet were crossed as though they had been nailed together. Moreover, the expanded and raised rib cage, as well as other aspects of the anatomy, indicate a struggle to breathe because of arms being raised, and the blood stains from the hand wounds appear to have flowed from wrist to elbow, which can only be explained if the hands had been raised while bleeding and then afterward been forced down to their crossed position—which itself would have damaged the body once rigor mortis set it, and some have pointed to what seems to be a dislocation of one shoulder for confirmation of this. But the correspondence does not cease there. In Pia’s image, clear marks from lashes can be seen, as well as injuries on the back and shoulders as from carrying a large and heavy beam and on the knees from having fallen, all conforming to the story of his forced march to Golgotha carrying his cross, even down to the detail that the lash marks on his back appear less distinct than those on his front, indicating a garment had been thrown over his shoulders before he carried his burden and agreeing again with the details of the Bible. Then there was the swelling of his cheeks, which fit with the detail of his being struck in the face, and of course, the wound in his side. Really the only details that didn’t perfectly match were that the wounds, presumably from nails, were in his wrists rather than his palms, which at the time was where most believed Christ had been pierced, and the lacerations on his head as from thorns were not simply around his brow, but over his entire scalp, as though a whole hat of thorns had been employed. But these are details that others would eventually confirm as being even more historically accurate than a forger might have known, for a nail in the wrist, in what has come to be known as Destot’s Space between the tendons, would actually have been necessary to support the weight of those crucified, and a “crown” of thorns, in that region and era, would likely have been more of a full-headed cap than a wreath.

Detail of the hands and forearms showing the wound in Destot's Space and the direction of the blood flow, via The Epistle

Regardless of the anatomical and historical accuracy of the wounds, though, Vignon wanted to find some explanation for how the image had been made, especially in its seemingly miraculous form as the negative of an image that would not be revealed in all its particulars until the development of photography. First, he ruled out paint, as that would have cracked and flaked off the often rolled and folded shroud long ago. Next, he ruled out a dye-job as dyes could not have produced the effect of a negative image and would appear the same whether as a negative or a positive. Therefore, it must have been formed by pressing the cloth directly to a body, a process he then tried to reproduce with a chalk impression. While this did produce a negative image, that image was distorted from the linen being pressed around a three-dimensional face; therefore this process was ruled out as well. Only one technique appeared to hold up in the end: that of a vaporograph, wherein the rising of vapors and a chemical reaction created a negative impression in the cloth. According to Vignon’s final theory, which bore out under experimentation, the shroud had been spread with a balm of aloes and myrrh mixed in olive oil, which became oxidized and stained the cloth brown when the body’s sweat, rich in urea after its torturous ordeal, fermented into an ammoniac vapor. A complicated explanation, but one that could be in some ways reproduced and at the very least did not rely on notions of holy radiance. Nevertheless, some hints at miraculous goings-on remained, for the body could not have long stayed in the shroud without its putrefaction staining the fabric, of which stains there were no signs. Furthermore, Vignon could not account for how the blood stains, which seemed so perfectly formed, had not been disturbed when the shroud had been removed. Did these remaining mysteries hint at resurrection?

Regardless of these persisting questions, Vignon’s employer, Delage, was so taken by the research that he presented it at the French Academy to much approval. However, the atheist secretary of the Academy worked against the theory for seemingly personal reasons, refusing a vote of confidence and censoring the paper to remove mention of Christ. Then a French priest and historian known for discrediting relics weighed in with a discovery of his own. He traced the shroud to its furthest historical appearance to debunk it. The shroud had first appeared in Lirey, France, in 1354 at the castle of a knight of the Crusades, one Geoffrey deCharny—forefather of the Margaret deCharny who would eventually sell it to the Savoys. This relic-debunking priest had come across a document from 1389, the D’Arcis Memorandum, in which a Bishop D’Arcis, upset about the Crusader knight’s son displaying the object as Christ’s burial shroud, claimed he had previously investigated it and “discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed….” After this bombshell, for the veracity of which there was no further evidence, not even the name of the supposed forger, the Shroud of Turin was buried, as it were, in disrepute and obscurity.

The D'Arcis Memorandum, via the Turin Shroud Encyclopedia

In the 1930s it was exhibited again, and again it was photographed. This time, the pictures were taken by a professional photographer, though still with the darkroom help of Secondo Pia, who is said to have exclaimed, “It’s the same!” when the image appeared. This time, with advances in photography being what they were, the image was even clearer, and to avoid similar accusations of chicanery, they invited numerous professional photographers to examine their plates and attest that they’d not been retouched.

Thus one doubt was finally laid to rest, but then so was the shroud, and with the second world war and the dubious inquiries of Nazis to have access to the shroud, it became necessary to bury it even further. The shroud was spirited away to a Benedictine monastery south of Rome, where it was hidden beneath the altar and, if worse came to worst, the monks could secret it away in a cave.

Eventually, it would be brought home to Turin, but during its long absence, it remained at the forefront of many people’s minds. Through these decades, researchers into the shroud remained actively investigating, now using the new and better photographs, which included close-ups of specific portions of the shroud. The study of the relic became a scholarly field unto itself, with a noun coined: sindonology, from the Greek sindon, meaning linen or linen covering. These sindonologists came from almost every field of research and ranged from staunch believers to cynical doubters and every position in between. In 1950, these seekers held the first of many congresses, international conferences at which all kinds of new theories might be put forward and old theories revisited and revised. To give an idea of the kind of work a sindonologist might perform, consider Dr. Pierre Barbet, who, intrigued by the anatomical accuracy discernible in the new photos of the shroud, used his access to cadavers to experiment with crucifixion and its effects. It was Barbet who discovered, during the course of his many morbid experiments, literally crucifying corpses in his laboratory, that driving nails through the Destot’s Space, between the tendons at the wrist, was not only feasible as a means of suspending men on the cross, but was actually necessary to support their weight as victims remained up there, pulling themselves upward by those nails in order to breathe. Moreover, he discovered that driving a nail into that place caused the thumb to draw inward, which just so happened to be another detail of the image on the shroud.

A cadaver crucified by Dr. Barbet, via Mad Scientist Blog

One major project of sindonologists has always been to put together a more complete history of the shroud, for if its passage through time could be confirmed all the way back to Christ, then there would be little more to argue about. The problem was that no history existed before its appearance in France in the 1350s, and even then there existed a variety of cloths venerated as the burial shrouds of Jesus. Sindonologists made a striking connection when they began to notice that many famous depictions of Christ appeared to match the face in the shroud, such that it seemed many were copies of it. Tracing these similar icons led Paul Vignon, the original sindonologist, to a very early supposed image of Christ called the Mandylion, or the Image of Edessa, as it had been discovered in Edessa, in Mesopotamia, in 544 CE. The image, supposed in legend to have been given to a king Abgar V by Jesus himself, was only of Christ’s face. As the legend went, a gravely ill King Abgar sent for the miracle-worker Jesus, and Jesus, instead of coming in person, wiped his face on a cloth, leaving a miraculous image, and sent that to Abgar, a gift that healed him. The Mandylion, a Greek word for veil or cloth, ended up in Constantinople by 944 CE, where it was revered until Crusaders sacked the city in 1204. Now sindonologists have pored over ancient manuscripts listing the city’s treasures and contemporary descriptions of the Mandylion itself to suggest that, in fact, it was the shroud that would eventually turn up in Lirey. They point to some accounts that call it a shroud, and others that indicate it might have had an image of Christ’s entire body, not just his face, and still others that point out it had been “doubled in four,” which if one were to do to the Shroud of Turin, one would end up with just the image of the face on top. Critics of this theory point out, however, that in many of these documents, a shroud of Christ is mentioned as a separate treasure from the Mandylion.

And there remains the question of where this Mandylion or shroud had been in the hundred and fifty years between the sack of Constantinople and its appearance in France. The explanation, for some sindonologists, was the Knights Templar, present at the taking of Constantinople and known for hoarding treasures and relics. Indeed, one of the last Templars burned at the stake was one Geoffrey deCharnay, a name close enough to deCharny that it seems reasonable to assume he was a progenitor of the family that formerly owned the shroud. And some have even suggested that the idol the Templars were accused of worshiping, an image sometimes described as a bearded man and called Baphomet, which I discussed at some length in episode 13, was actually the shroud of Christ. But this is all conjecture, of course. Further scientific advancements in the study of the shroud would not arrive until that wonderful decade, the 1980s.

Abgar receiving the Mandylion, via WIkimedia Commons

In the 1970s, a secret commission formed to advise the church on matters of preserving the shroud and allowing for scientific testing. Under their auspices, scientists have had further access to the shroud, including samples for study. From one such sample, pollens specific to certain regions were extracted that proved the shroud had been exposed to air in Palestine, Turkey, and Europe, which veritably traces the path from Christ’s burial, to Constantinople, to France. In 1982, a group of scientists formed STURP, the Shroud of Turin Research Project, and using microscopy and computer image analysis, they confirmed that the dark marks on the shroud were indeed human blood.

Then the moment of truth: Carbon-14 dating. The test had long been proposed, but whether the church was concerned about damaging the shroud or revealing it as inauthentic, it had always been denied. In 1988, however, a small portion of the shroud from its bottom left corner, away from the image itself, was divided among scientists at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Oxford University, and the University of Arizona. With 95% certainty, each lab independently confirmed the age of the cloth to be between 728-608 years, which placed its origins squarely in the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1380 CE. This effectively shut down the entire debate, making of the shroud a medieval forgery. Time magazine said it had been debunked. The New York Times called it a fraud. And one might think this to be the end of the Turin Shroud…but sindonologists are a resilient and ingenious bunch. That same year, they began to cast doubt on the Radio Carbon dating, protesting that the fire it had survived in the 1500s must have altered its carbon content, not to mention the fact of the likely chemical reactions that had originally taken place in the cloth to form the image. And besides, scientific analysis had proven that the image contained three-dimensional data, which had been modeled on computers, and therefore could not have been made by even the most talented of artists. What did that leave then? The idea that some medieval ascetic had reenacted the passion, including coincidentally historically accurate details they didn’t have at the time, such as the position of the nails in the wrist, and followed burial practices that inadvertently resulted in the vapography of the image? Or perhaps the sample that had been dated was itself suspect. One sindolonogist went so far as to claim, without evidence, that a secret carbon testing had been performed on an adjacent sample that had been dated to much earlier…so…obviously they had to test it again.

This undermining of the Carbon-14 results has continued to modern day, with accusations that the piece tested had actually been a patch added in the Middle Ages. Of course, there had been patches, after the fire, but those were clearly visible. These had been imperceptible, critics of the carbon dating claimed, because of a technique called “invisible reweaving.” Interestingly, one proponent of this theory published a paper in which he claimed to have tested the remnants of the sample used for carbon testing and had detected dye in it, proving the patch had been disguised to match the rest of the shroud. As noted skeptic Joe Nickell pointed out, it was odd to point to the presence of dyes as proof the shroud is authentic, since that proposition relies in large part on the cloth not containing pigments added by man, but regardless, the claims appeared to be wholly false, since the samples tested by the three laboratories in 1988 had been entirely destroyed in the dating process. And Nickell’s criticisms have since been proven sound in a publication of the same journal that had printed the spurious claims. Moreover, as for the notion of pigments having been added, testing has indeed revealed that iron oxide, an ingredient in ancient paints, is present on the cloth. However, sindonologists protest that these particles may actually be blood that has broken off and been spread around the cloth, or that, if it is indeed paint, then there has been cross-contamination from the paintings hung in the many cathedrals where the shroud has been exhibited over the years.

Even just last year, we had yet further developments, on both sides of the argument. First, although it has been proven that human blood is present in the dark stains, it has now also been proven that reddish pigments have been added, as though to touch up those stains, indicating that some form of artistry has been wrought upon the shroud. Then a development that seems more in favor of the notion that the Turin Shroud is the true shroud of Christ, or at least that it’s not a painting, came when a study claimed that the iron particles, rather than indicating paint, actually derive from the blood of an individual who endured great trauma.

So what are we to come away with? What are we to think? To say that it’s shrouded in mystery would be a bad pun and something of a cliché. But it is true. Here we see very clearly the age-old struggle between rationalism and faith writ large. What you see when you look at the Turin Shroud may depend entirely, in the end, on what you see when you close your eyes and think on the greatest mystery of life.

Blind Spot: The Great Los Angeles Air Raid and the Secret Memos of Majestic 12

At a little after three in the morning on February 25th, 1942, the height of World War II, anti-aircraft batteries stationed around defense plants on the coast of California began firing and didn’t let up for almost an hour, discharging 1,433 explosive shells. This incident had its beginnings the previous day, when naval intelligence had warned that an attack might be expected sometime during the next 10 hours. Expectation turned to official alert after blinking lights and flares were spotted near defense plants, but eventually the alert was rescinded. Then, in the early morning of the 25th, radar picked up something 120 miles off coast headed toward Los Angeles. At 2:15 a.m., artillery batteries readied themselves to fire, and at 2:21 a.m., with the object closing the distance to only a few miles, L.A. went into a blackout. If this was an air raid, they were not about to light up targets for enemy bombers.

Strangely, the object then disappeared from radar, but a number of reports of aircraft had artillerymen on edge, and a sighting of a balloon with a red flare over Santa Monica caused some batteries to open fire. After that, the skies were filled with bursting shells and smoke, and the city came awake to the “ACK-ACK” sound of heavy ordnance shattering the quiet night. No one was thinking straight; they turned on their lights despite the blackout, and they went out of doors to search the skies. Some claimed to see swarms of planes moving at high speeds, while others saw slow moving balloons. The artillery men, meanwhile, searched the maelstrom above for their UFO target, and believing they saw it, fired… only to find their shells had no effect on whatever it was they thought they had seen.

Nevertheless, destruction did ensue, below if not above. There were five deaths and numerous injuries, and reports indicated that the wreckage of downed aircraft had fallen into the streets. Within an hour, the artillery fire relented, and eventually, by the light of dawn, the devastation could be surveyed. But that bright morning light showed something unexpected. There had been no downed enemy planes, only fallen shells. Deaths had been from car crashes—people driving in a blackout with their eyes on the sky instead of the road—and one from a heart attack in the panic. Most injuries were the same, clumsy accidents during the blackout: air raid wardens falling off roofs, policemen breaking the glass of bright storefronts to extinguish lights, radio announcers running smack into buildings in their excitement.

A police officer reaching into a hole caused by a dud that fell in Santa Monica, via the Los Angeles Times

When all was said and done, evaluations of the incident varied wildly. The Navy came to the conclusion that there had been no aircraft or any other objects over the city that morning, attributing the entire episode to rattled nerves in wartime. Listeners may liken this to the recent scare experienced by Hawaiians when they received a warning of an incoming missile that didn’t actually exist. During that terror-filled time before the alert was withdrawn, most assumed the missile had been launched by North Korea after all the recent juvenile posturing between our leaders. In the same way, in Los Angeles during Word War II, fears of attack were profound and paranoia was running high, so there is certainly a case for this explanation. To illustrate the paranoia that had gripped the nation, not even a week earlier, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order allowing the Secretary of War and other commanders to designate military areas, from which any individuals deemed to be threats to national security might be excluded—an infamous decision that led to the internment of Japanese-, German-, and Italian-Americans in concentration camps. Indeed, during the supposed air raid itself, the sheriff actually detained Japanese gardeners on suspicion of signaling enemy aircraft. And the fact that naval intelligence had alerted coastal personnel to the possibility of an imminent attack on the 24th also supports the war nerves theory. Everyone was expecting something to happen that night, and for good reason, as the day before, in response to a Presidential speech, a Japanese submarine had surfaced off the coast north of Santa Barbara and shelled an oil refinery. This act of provocation had caused some Japanese-Americans to predict an imminent attack on L.A., perhaps setting the entire chain of imagined events into motion. While insisting there had been no attack, Frank Knox, the Secretary of the Navy, did indicate that the threat of just such an air raid remained very real, prompting him to recommend moving industries vital to the war effort inland. This has since led to conspiracy theories that the entire episode had been staged to demonstrate a credible threat and make clear the need to move defense plants away from the coasts, but this proposition doesn’t withstand scrutiny as no further proof of a threat was needed. A Japanese raider surfacing off our shores and shelling a gasoline plant important to the military surely would have been evidence enough that coastal targets were vulnerable.

Japanese propaganda depicting the shelling of near Santa Barbara, via California State Military Museums

Then the War Department weighed in, reporting to the President—perhaps to save face or perhaps in earnest consideration of eyewitness testimony—that there had indeed been unidentified planes over L.A. on the morning of the 25th. Then why had they dropped no bombs, and why had some been reported to travel at slow speeds? Why, because they must’ve been commercial aircraft flown by foreign agents for the purposes of reconnaissance. Then where had these flights originated? Well, perhaps the enemy had a secret airbase in Mexico… or perhaps they had developed a submarine capable of functioning as an aircraft carrier. Now, for the Secretary of War to suggest this, we must have had intelligence regarding such vessels, as the Japanese were indeed developing a submarine aircraft carrier, but they didn’t go into production until 1943 and weren’t completed until 1945, which rules out the possibility that they lay offshore of L.A. that night, launching bombers into the sky. That left the theory of a secret Mexican airbase, which common sense tells us can’t be true, as no further air raids were ever scrambled from this theoretical installation, and if it existed, the Japanese surely would have used it to full advantage before the end of the war.

Regardless of the embarrassingly public suggestion that the entire incident had been a case of nervous trigger fingers and mass hysteria, the atmosphere of paranoia persisted and even grew worse. Within a month, Japanese internment was being enforced. After the war, not surprisingly, the Japanese insisted they had flown no planes over L.A., and the fact that they had proudly owned other attacks, including Pearl Harbor and the shelling near Santa Barbara, leads one to believe them. Eventually, in the 1980s, the U.S. government would offer a third and rather familiar explanation: a weather balloon had touched off the panic, very much the same as it had at Roswell, New Mexico five years later.  But the 80s would see yet another explanation for the so-called Great Los Angeles Air Raid, and this one would better capture the public imagination. That explanation: extraterrestrial spacecraft.

An ostensibly secret document purporting to brief President-Elect Eisenhower on the existence of a Top Secret intelligence and R&D group known as Majestic 12, via Wikimedia Commons

In late 1984, a television producer, Jaime Shandera, received an anonymous brown paper package that contained a roll of 35mm film. This film contained images of official-looking documents that appeared to reveal some extraordinary things: namely the existence of a committee called the Majestic 12 tasked by President Truman with investigating and covering up UFO incidents like the crash at Roswell, recovering and exploiting extraterrestrial technology, and advising the President on how to engage with ETs. Jaime Shandera, the television producer who received them, happened to be friends with ufologists, and instead of going public, he shared it with them. These documents were held close to the vest, and only revealed in small pieces, making the rounds among other ufologists until, in reaction to the intentions of competing ufologists to publish portions of the Majestic 12 papers, Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman, the ufologist friends of Shandera who had all the papers, went public with them as well as with their further research. They had turned up a memo in the National Archives that mentioned Operation Majestic Twelve, seeming to confirm the authenticity of the papers.

Among the many Majestic 12 documents that came out in this time was a memo supposedly written by General George Marshall, head of the armed forces, to President Roosevelt claiming that after the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, two unconventional aircraft were recovered. The document shared the determination that the craft were “not earthly” and probably “of interplanetary origin.” Ever since this time, the Los Angeles air raid has become the Battle of Los Angeles and is now synonymous with UFOs and aliens. A cursory search of the Internet pulls up numerous examinations of the famous photograph from that night, with searchlights trained on one spot in the sky, running it through different filters and enhancements to reveal that a domed saucer can be seen caught in the spotlights.

The only problem is, that photograph has been altered from the original. And the Majestic 12 documents were long ago systematically debunked.

The retouched photo that sparked much speculation among UFO enthusiasts, via the Los Angeles Times

The simple fact that their recipient, television producer Jaime Shandera, was associated with ufologists and contacted them immediately, before he had even developed the film, throws doubt on the documents from the beginning. Then there is the fact that the memo discovered in the National Archives that seemed to authenticate the papers was shown to have been a planted forgery; it showed signs of having been folded and so perhaps carried into the archives in a pocket, it lacked official stamps and watermarks that would have proven it legitimate, it had typewriter-key impressions showing that it was an original rather than the carbon copy it was intended to look like, and its contents described a meeting between President Eisenhower and National Security Advisor Robert Cutler that couldn’t have taken place in that Eisenhower’s appointment books, which recorded even top secret meetings, don’t show it, and Robert Cutler is confirmed to have been out of the country at the time. Most of the work of debunking the Majestic 12 mythos has been done by noted skeptic Phillip J. Klass. His coup de grace, it seems to me, came when he uncovered the fact that one of Shandera’s ufologist friends, Bill Moore, had actually spoken previously about his plans to forge top secret documents to encourage those with real knowledge to come forward. Klass also showed through document analysis that in one case, President Truman’s signature had been cut from a photocopy of a known document and simply pasted onto the forgery. Then through forensic linguistics, he proved that Moore himself had authored at least some of the forgeries, contrasting a date format that appeared on MJ-12 documents with the date format customarily used in military documents of the time and comparing it more favorably with the way Bill Moore had written dates on other documents. Overall, it is hard to take any of the Majestic 12 documents seriously, including the Marshall-Roosevelt memo that indicates an extraterrestrial angle on the Great Los Angeles Air Raid. And in the end, just as during the blackout of that panic-stricken morning, when the spotlights searched the sky blindly only to find roiling clouds of smoke that obscured whatever might be up there, when we look back on the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, we are peering into a blind spot hopelessly shrouded in hoaxes and conflicting information.  

A Brief History of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Today’s topic was one that my patrons on Patreon expressed interest in hearing. I understand if it’s not for everyone--if it seems too out there, as it were--but trust that I’ll be approaching it with the same spirit of logic and balanced skepticism that I always try to bring to my topics. 

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This time, I'll be broaching an extraordinary topic that, surprisingly, has been in the news recently. On December 16th, less than two months ago, a remarkable article appeared in the New York Times that may have flown right by many people, if you’ll excuse the pun. It was remarkable—and perhaps easy to ignore for many, whose news consumption these days is understandably monopolized by our ongoing political chaos—because it was about UFOs. Its title was “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” and essentially it revealed that since 2007, there has been in existence a top secret operation designated the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP (perhaps an acronym pronounced a-tip and certainly an atypical program, if you’ll excuse another pun). This program, funded at different times by the Pentagon (and therefore taxpayers) and by private groups, has been investigating UFOs, or as some scientific researchers call it, UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena, a term that indicates the fact that, while we are dealing with witnesses seeing or believing they have seen something that appears to be in the air, we don’t actually know whether they are physical objects in flight). The Times article, however, includes some startling video of encounters between Navy jets and genuine UFOs—startling in that, being captured on radar, they do indeed appear to be…something… and their appearance and behavior doesn’t correspond with known aircraft or natural phenomena. Not wanting to jump to the extra-terrestrial hypothesis, which might sully their reputation in the eyes of many, the Times instead quotes an MIT astrophysicist about the need to study unexplained phenomena but also cautioning that we reserve judgment on its origin and nature, as well as a former NASA engineer and UFO debunker who suggests there may be a variety of prosaic explanations for the sightings investigated by AATIP.

While debunkers are already poo-pooing this development, many in the UFO or UAP research community have expressed great excitement that these may be the first stirrings of a long-awaited event called “Disclosure,” or the official revelation by government that we have been visited by extra-terrestrials. Indeed, there are many in the podcast community, and some fellow Dark Myths podcasters especially, that have been discussing this a great deal, their reactions ranging from pessimistic doubt, to cautious interest and even outright anticipatory glee. For a taste of some of the variety of reaction to this Times piece, check out recent episodes from Astonishing Legends and Not Alone, both of which feature UAP authority Rob Kristoffersen of the Our Strange Skies podcast.

In order to give readers some historical context for the phenomenon of people reporting unusual goings-on in the heavens, I will be doing a run-down of sorts intended to demonstrate that the study of strange sights in the sky should not be considered kooky but rather, taking into account the long history of the phenomenon, should be thought of as a valid scientific undertaking, to say nothing of the prudence of looking into the matter as an evaluation of threats from above. 

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Many people only look as far back as 1947 for the beginning of the era of UFO phenomenon. That year, in the state of Washington in the northwestern united states, an experienced search and rescue pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold witnessed what would be the first sensational and widely reported UFO sighting of the modern era. 

Kenneth Arnold was a college educated family man, a skilled pilot with over 9,000 hours in the air, over 4,000 in high altitudes among mountains, and by all accounts a trustworthy and serious man. In June of 1947, returning from a business trip with clear skies, he flew in his little two-seat monoplane near Mt. Rainier hoping to catch sight of a recently crashed U.S. Marine transport, and when he landed in Yakima, he had a crazy story to share with his friend, the airport manager. He claimed to have seen flashing lights that at first he took for reflections on his windows, but after rocking his plane and fiddling with his goggles, he realized they were aircraft. There were 9 of them, flying in formation and passing in front of Mt. Rainier, dark against the snow on its slopes, but they did not look like any aircraft he knew. He thought they must have been some kind of new military craft on a test flight, but it gave him such an eerie feeling that he felt he had to share it. Soon his story spread, and he was talking to reporters. The whole thing basically went viral, and Arnold’s comparison of the crafts to pie pans and saucers led to a very catchy term that spread through the papers like wildfire: flying saucers. The next month, in Roswell, New Mexico, something described as a flying disc crashed. The military said it was a weather balloon, and claiming there had been no military test flights around Mt. Rainier a month earlier, they speculated that Arnold had just seen a mirage, but it was too late. There was a full-blown UFO flap on, with hundreds of similar sightings, and for decades, most UFO sightings involved disc-shaped objects, flying saucers just like Kenneth Arnold’s, but strangely, Arnold claimed he had never described them as saucer-like in shape.

Kenneth Arnold and his boomerang-like UFOs, via Wikipedia

Kenneth Arnold did describe the crafts he’d seen by comparing them to discs, but only on one side, for he explained that they were more like a crescent or a semicircle, “like a pie plate cut in half.” And he did compare them to a saucer, but only to describe their erratic motion, saying they moved the way a saucer skips across water. Nevertheless, the term flying saucer struck one reporter’s ear just right, and that’s what was transmitted to the world. And it is indeed puzzling that, even though Arnold hadn’t seen a disc, most sightings after this were discs. One explanation for this discrepancy is what is called in ufology the psychosocial hypothesis. Martin Kottmeyer in 1988 suggested that the fact the shape had been misreported as a saucer and then that the majority of sightings thereafter were of saucers proves that the entire phenomenon is cultural in nature. Moreover, this psychosocial hypothesis was able to explain something problematic in ufology, namely the phenomenon of flaps or waves of sightings. It didn’t make sense that extra-terrestrials would visit lots of places in bursts then disappear, unless they just came around when Mar was closer in its orbit, but astronomers ruled this out. However, if you thought about one sighting setting off the others, whether they were hoaxes or mistakes or hallucinations or psychological manifestations of a cultural phenomenon, then UFO flaps could be explained.

Of course, this explanation fails to account for sightings with evidence, such as those reported in the Times article, with radar and video records of strange objects in the sky. These can often be dismissed as secret military aircraft or drones, or in an earlier era, as weather balloons, of course. And this is similar to previous explanations that they were simply unidentified airplanes piloted by private citizens or perhaps foreign agents, or during the late 19th century wave of airship sightings, that they were just that: dirigibles piloted by men on unadvertised flights. Perhaps no one was aware of the flight plans of these crafts or who crewed them, but that did not make them extraterrestrial or even extraordinary.

I’ll have more to say about the Mystery Airships, but that is for another episode. For the purposes of this brief prehistory, it is more important look further back, when unidentified aerial phenomena cannot be blamed on manmade aircraft, in order to show that the UFO is by no means a historically discrete phenomena or an invention of the 20th century. Long before Kenneth Arnold’s flying half-saucers, back all the way at the furthest edge of recorded history even, we find remarkably familiar sounding reports of strange sightings in the sky. We will find that these “celestial wonders” or “prodigies,” as they were usually called, were most often interpreted as miracles with religious connotations, as signs from a god or gods. This is simply an example of the way people interpret phenomena through the lens of their worldview. From a modern perspective, many of these sightings from antiquity through the early 19th century will likely be dismissed as astronomical or meteorological events—shooting stars, meteor showers, ball lightning and whatnot. But might not this also be an example of people interpreting phenomena through the lens of their worldview. There are a great many such sightings, 500 in fact, all compiled by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck in my principal source, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. And while some of the reports may seem easily explained with a flippant gesture and mention of weather or comets, there are others that are not. It’s these, the most interesting to me, I have chosen to feature here.

We shall start with Ancient Egypt, where text discovered by archeologists on a monument to the conquests of Thutmosis III describes a star that descended in 1460 BCE, in Lebanon, to strike his enemies, the Nubians, spooking their horses and positioning itself above to illuminate their faces with fire. Now this account could easily be dismissed as a fabrication mythologizing the power and majesty of this conqueror, but if we meet the report on its own terms, it represents the record of an unidentified aerial light that appears to have been directed by an intelligence that chose sides in a battle, coming to the aid of one army in opposition to another.  Then, according to inscriptions on another monument, Pharoah Akhenaton was out for a walk by the river in 1347 BCE when a “shining disc” descended and communicated with him, directing him to found a new Egyptian capital, and Akhenaton did so, going even further to establish a religion worshipping the so-called Solar Disc. Here again, the report could easily be disregarded as religious claptrap or perhaps just as a mystical visionary experience, but if we take it at face value, we are hard-pressed to explain what was reported as a natural phenomenon.

Akhenaton worshiping the Solar Disc, via Wikimedia Commons

There are as well some passages of the Bible that describe strange aerial phenomena in association with what might today be termed abductions. In 2 Kings, we have the story of Elijah the Tishbite, the only biblical prophet who never died, as he was taken up by a whirlwind to climb aboard a chariot of fire. And in Ezekiel, we have a vivid account of strange, winged, multi-faced visitors and objects described as “wheels within wheels” that rumbled like an earthquake. During the course of this encounter, Ezekiel was miraculously transported to a mountaintop. Now perhaps these accounts were influenced, as has been suggested of many miraculous visions in the Bible, by hallucination, maybe due to ergotism--which we discussed in Episode  4: The Dancing Plague—or maybe due to the unknowing consumption of some other hallucinogenic substance, or perhaps these visions were experienced during epileptic seizures. Then there is the possibility that these books and other such scriptural accounts of anomalous phenomena were actually written years later by scribes who embellished previous accounts. We don’t know, and so we take the descriptions as they come to us. As we continue in our survey of anomalous history, though, we may begin to ask whether all of these sightings can be so easily explained away.

In Ancient Rome, a variety of similar “prodigies” were recorded for posterity. In the 3rd century BCE, there are reports of ships (as in seagoing vessels) and other objects, some described as round, appearing in the sky, and men in white clothing, like clergymen, standing atop them. There are also reports from the same century, and well into the next, of lights in the sky that were thought to be secondary suns or additional moons, implying that they remained stationary and were of great size. And at the end of the second and beginning of the first century BCE, reports indicate more than mere lights, with descriptions of what sounds like aerial conflict, witnesses claiming they saw flaming spears and flying shields that moved in different directions before clashing together in what appeared to be battle.

Into the Common Era then, and for several centuries we continue to find sporadic reports of torches and globes of light in the sky and objects compared to burning pillars or flying chariots above not only Italy but the Mid-East and the far East, with multiple sightings in Japan and China as well, where phenomena sighted in the skies were often identified as dragons. Whereas, when we look to Northern Europe, and the anomalous phenomena preserved in their records, we begin to see a recurring theme with the reporting of shields in the sky, doing battle. Specifically Medieval Ireland offers some reports of interest. In 698, according to a manuscript transcribed in the 17th century, three shields of different colors were seen not just in flight but “as it were warring from the east to the west.” Less than a century later, also in Ireland, 15th century annals chronicle sightings of aerial ships on which were seen actual crew members. These reports seem to correspond with others in Europe, specifically in France during the reign of Pepin the Short, when apparently many ships, with full complements of crew members, had been seen aloft in the skies. These accounts have doubt cast on them because they appear nearly a thousand years later, but there do exist contemporary accounts that confirm the people of France in that era believed in ships that sailed the clouds and the men who sailed them. 

In one of his many treatises, St. Agobard, a Spanish priest and archbishop of Lyons in the 800s, described a common belief that France received visits from a race of men who piloted airships coming out of a mysterious land called Magonia. Agobard scoffed at these beliefs, which actually went hand in hand with another bizarre notion: that when terrible weather occurred, it was often literally raised by weather wizards. This idea had a long history even then, and it asserted that certain men called Tempestaires or Tempestarii could, by means of sorcery, call forth storms and floods upon the land. This they did for the purpose of selling the fruit that had fallen from the trees during the foul weather as well as the livestock that was killed by the floods and storms. And it was to the airship navigators of Magonia that these Tempestaires sold their ill-gotten goods, creating a kind of black market economy between thieving sorcerers and extra-terrestrials. St. Agobard shared one particular story that was especially troubling, in which some townsfolk held a meeting about stoning four prisoners, three men and a woman who had been chained up and captive for days. They claimed the prisoners had fallen off of a Magonian cloudship. It’s unclear whether they believed these captives to be Magonians who had tumbled overboard or Tempestaires who had only been aboard the ship to conduct their underhanded commerce. Regardless, it seemed being either was enough to warrant execution in their minds. As for Agobard, he believed they were “blinded with profound stupidity” and talked them down from stoning the four people. 

St. Agobard speaking on behalf of those accused of falling from Magonian cloudships, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s clear that these notions were already considered fringe and absurd in Agobard’s time, for he describes believers as being “overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity.” And it certainly appears that these ideas were destructive in that they may have led to more than one lynching or witch-hunt–type hysteria, for this may not have been the first and only time people were accused of being Tempestaires or Magonians, and others may not have been so lucky as to have a skeptical archbishop around to talk sense into their captors.  Nevertheless, it remains interesting as it seems to suggest that sightings of these cloudships were even more common than it appears from the records we have, for entire mythologies had been developed to interpret and explain them.

We see much of the same kind of prodigies across Europe and the Orient through to the end of the millennium: lights in the sky, sometimes called stars or suns, often described as spherical objects or globes, behaving in a fashion that seems out of character for meteors. In Germany, 944, there are globes described as being composed of iron that burned the countryside. And in Japan, on more than one occasion, what appeared to be groups of three objects were seen flying in formation—in 944 in a triangular pattern and in 989 converging from different direction upon the same point. And in the first half of the second Millenium, the prodigies continued. In addition to much more of the same unidentified lights, we see further descriptions of what appear to be craft engaged in aerial combat! 1023, France, two stars were said to have fought each other throughout the fall season, flying at each other from east to west, one of them repelling the other with a “mane of light” so that it couldn’t come near.  In China, 1169, two dragons were seen during a storm, doing battle in the skies, during which combat, two “pearls like wheels” fell to the earth. In England, in October of 1253, three stars emerged from a black cloud, two small and one large. It was reported that the two small stars charged the large one over and over, sending sparks falling earthward, until the large star reduced in size, or at least, as we might assume, in brightness. And on to Italy, in 1284, where a Franciscan monk recorded that some women in a town called Saint Ruffino witnessed two stars chasing each other around and colliding repeatedly, a sign which he says presaged the outcome of a subsequent naval battle.  Then away east, in Japan in 1349, flying objects were seen coming from different quarters of the heavens, displaying acrobatic maneuvers as they approached each other and emitted flashes of light, as if, one might imagine, they were discharging weapons. After that, back westward, to France in 1395, when there is another report of small stars in combat with a large star, this time five small luminosities pursuing and seeming to attack the larger one. This particular sighting also included the booming sound of a shouting voice and the vision of a spear-wielding man hurling fire at the large star, but make of that what you will. And in October of 1461, in another region of France, 25-foot-long fiery phenomena appeared more than once in the sky, accompanied by a great tumult of noise and behaving as if doing battle. This trend of unidentified aerial phenomena that behaved as if engaged in warfare reached its peak in the 16th century with the so-called Battle of Nuremberg.

A bizarre event recorded for posterity in a broadsheet, complete with woodcut illustration, occurred in Nuremberg at dawn on April 14th, 1561. Two cylinders appeared suspended in the skies over the city. They faced each other in the morning sunlight, standing vertically. In the long history of unidentified aerial phenomena up to this point, there had been numerous accounts of columnar objects in the skies. Often described as pillars, sometimes luminous, they have been known to offer guidance on occasion. Just think of the pillar of fire that lit the way for the Children of Israel in their Exodus. And there are similar tales of fiery sky pillars in ancient Rome and Ireland and Russia, but it’s doubtful that the people of Nuremberg made this connection themselves. Still, you might say there’s some precedent for objects like these. In Nuremberg, however, they did not appear to be flaming pillars. Instead, out of these cylinders flew numerous disks and balls of various colors. The description, in translation, is more than a little confusing, explaining that “within which small and big pipes were found three balls also four and more,” which seems to also indicate that there was a difference in size between the two cylinders. To further confuse the matter, the woodcut illustration accompanying the text depicts three of these pipes—called rods in some translations—rather than two, as well as a great many bars or lines like streaks in the sky. These are described as blood-red strips in the text, and they might be interpreted as long objects themselves or as beams of light or even as contrails produced by the exhaust of the spheres that were apparently flying to and fro, launched from the pillars. Further corresponding to other strange sightings that had been described in preceding eras, crosses are also depicted in the sky at the event in Nuremberg, and a massive black spear as well. One thing is certain. The account is explicit in insisting that the spheres and disks launched from the pillars engaged in a terrible fight, stating that they “flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.” And before it was over, some of these battling globes crashed to the earth, burning and smoking.

Glaser's broadsheet with woodcut depiction of the celestial wonder, via Wikimedia Commons

Now skeptics often dismiss this quite famous incident by pointing to a modern debunking of the show Ancient Aliens, called creatively enough, Ancient Aliens Debunked, which casts doubt on the broadsheet, comparing it to the tabloids of today and saying its author may well have fabricated the entire event, even though the broadsheet asserts that the event was witnessed by many people, both in the city and in the countryside beyond. In truth, this is a broad generalization, and we simply don’t know enough about the printer of this broadsheet to discredit it. His name was Hans Wolff Glaser, and he appears to have mostly practiced his woodcutting in portraiture and religious work. While his work may be considered “coarse” today, there is no evidence that he was a hoaxer or that he ever made comparable claims before or after.

Meanwhile, these same debunkers, unable to decide if it was a hoax or if something actually was seen in 1561, go on to suggest that the Nuremberg sighting was simply a case of trying to construe a natural phenomenon to the witnesses’ limited understanding of the world. From this perspective, it was only a parhelion, or sun dog, an atmospheric optical illusion caused by the reflection of light on ice particles in clouds that results in mock suns and crescents—think gratuitous lens flare in a J. J. Abrams film. This phenomenon actually does offer a valid and reasonable explanation for many UAP throughout history, especially those that describe lights in the sky as additional suns. However, it doesn’t really work in the case of the Nuremberg incident, as there remains the problematic detail described in Glaser’s text and illustrated in his woodcut that during the battle over the city, these mysterious objects fell burning to the ground, where they emitted great plumes of smoke as flames consumed them.

And this event does not stand alone in this time period, either, for in Basel, Switzerland, just five years later, another battle of spheres is said to have taken place. Again recorded in a pamphlet complete with an immortal illustration, these balls, which were described as black, were said to have flown at each other and to have collided and burst into flames and burned away to nothing. Certainly this event can be dismissed by casting doubt on the publication as well, or by suggesting the Swiss witnesses had actually seen parhelia, even though the blackness of the spheres against the sun seems to preclude such an explanation, but when you take off your historical blinders and widen your focus beyond a single event or two, you begin to recognize many sightings that appear to share elements: in the same city the next year, for example, a black sphere reportedly obscures the sun for an entire day. In Italy four years after that, a flaming column that might be compared to the cylinders over Nuremberg is seen at night by the papal fleet. A year after that, in Turkey, more crosses are seen in the sky, as in Nuremberg. In 1589, in France, what appears to be another sky battle is reported, this time with clouds flying and hurling fiery spears at one another. And in 1590 Scotland, another tubular object is seen by peasants to hover over a town before vanishing. Can all these be attributed to sun dogs? 

Original publication depicting the Basel, Switzerland, celestial wonder, via Wikimedia Commons

As we enter the 17th century, reports increase to once every year or two, if not multiple sightings in a year—visions of ships and battles in the sky as well as signs and prodigies like lights and objects including globes and wheels and pillars. In 1665, we find a story out of Germany worth noting for a number of reasons, the foremost of which being that the phenomenon is described as being like a plate with a dome, similar to a man’s hat. In the previous century, there had been several sightings of objects said to be like hats in the sky; these cases, not to mention all the sightings of flying shields, make it clear that the notion of saucer-shaped flying objects may have been around long before Arnold’s time, making the fact of saucer sightings after Arnold’s miscommunication of the shape far less problematic. The story is as follows: in Stralsund, some fisherman reported a flock of sea birds that changed form before their eyes to become battle ships engaged in aerial warfare—once again, a common theme in UAP for centuries. Strangely, though, after this vision faded, they saw a singular object that can most simply be described as a flying saucer. This domed plate hovered over their church for the rest of the day, and the witnesses reported pain and trembling in their limbs the next day, as if their proximity to the object had physically harmed them, an account that calls up notions of radiation poisoning. And toward the end of the century, Germany again saw a strange visitation, over Mecklenberg and Hamburg, in the form of two massive, glowing balls or wheels. After remaining in the sky for fifteen minutes and drawing a crowd of thousands, the objects gave out a loud bang sound and disappeared.

The 17th century also saw the rise of the telescope, an invention that was improved and made more practical by Isaac Newton and others until, in the 18th century, there existed many astronomers, both learned and amateur, all searching the heavens for phenomena of interest. It’s no surprise then that many of the unusual sightings from this era onward, especially after the 1733 development of the achromatic lens, were seen by means of telescopes. In particular, many astronomers believed they saw an unknown planetoid in orbit around Venus, usually observed when Venus was in transit across the disc of the Sun. These are strange enough, since today we know of no Venusian satellites, but even more oddly, astronomers also caught sight of other, unidentified objects passing in front of the sun. These sightings continued into the 19th century, when as we approach the age of aviation, unidentified aerial phenomena become even more complicated by the presence of manmade crafts in the skies. However, we still find some reports that prove hard to explain away.

As discovered in a manuscript archived at the Russian State History Museum, a senator in Moscow wrote a report in 1808 of an object appearing on the horizon and then approaching almost instantaneously with a great, audible crack. Described as a “long, straight plate,” it seems unclear whether it appeared to be saucer-like or was simply flat like a sheet of metal. Regardless, after approaching at phenomenal speed, it stopped and floated in a circle over the Kremlin. Then with a burst of phosphorescent flame from one end, it lit the city as if it were daytime. Thereafter it departed straight upward, shrinking in the distance until it was no longer visible. A remarkable document, it appears to have passed historical scrutiny as the writing style and the age of the paper indicate authenticity.

An illustration accompanying the 1808 manuscript found in the State History Museum, via Information Liberation

And in this same era, as might be expected, reports begin to arise in the young United States as well. One such can be found in the papers of Thomas Jefferson. In an 1813 letter, one Edward Hansford, a carpenter and the harbormaster of Portsmouth, Virginia, informed Jefferson that he and another man had seen a huge ball of fire, which he describes as “agitated.” As he writes it, the brilliant sphere emitted smoke that occasionally obscured it and then changed its form to that of a turtle, which strikes a chord of familiarity, for what else is a turtle shell but a domed oval, similar indeed to a domed disc. 

And we must wrap up our brief history of UAP with some incidents that seem to encapsulate many of these reports, in that they appear authentic and certainly tantalize with their strange details, but with close examination we see they may derive from less than reliable sources. In an Ohio town called Jay, one Henry Wallace and several others are said to have seen an unusual vessel, mechanical in nature with wheels and other workings that could be observed from below as it passed by, flying about a hundred yards above the ground at a speed of around 6 miles an hour. According to this report, the witnesses saw the occupants of this vessel and estimated they were, on average, about twelve feet tall. Now this story comes to us from an 1858 book that is primarily medical in nature, which also touches on other fringe science, and purports to be a story told to the author firsthand by the witnesses themselves. As with many of the sightings I’ve already recounted, this one can easily be doubted based on its source. Researchers trying to confirm some particulars in it have only been able to ascertain that a town called Jay existed, but not as late as 1858, having seemingly ceased to be after 1842, and that a Henry Wallace lived in a nearby county. The rest of it must be accepted on credulity alone.

And here we are already in the age of ballooning, as Jean-Pierre Blanchard crossed the English Channel in a hand-powered balloon in 1784, and in 1852, Henri Giffard made the first known flight in a steam-powered balloon. Thus, the Jay, Ohio, sighting may be one of the first sightings of the mystery airships that would proliferate in the 19th century. In 1861, for example, the New York Times reported the passage of a manned balloon over New York City but could not ascertain who had built or piloted it. And in this vein comes the last account I’ll share from Vallee and Aubeck’s chronology, which again presents 500 reports throughout history and would make a great coffee table book and conversation piece if you’re into this kind of stuff. This story, like the last, seems to indicate, strangely, that the nearer we come to modern accounts, the less reliable these sightings become. It at first appears to be the tale of a mystery airship, as Frederick William Birmingham, an alderman of Parramatta, in New South Wales, Australia, reports that he witnessed a flying ark touch down near his cottage. He describes its motions and structure with great precision, noting that its hull appeared tremulous and metallic, likening it to the scales of a fish. His story goes on to become even stranger, with a disembodied voice asking him to board the vessel and his being lifted off the ground and carried aloft to its upper decks. An occupant of the vessel, looking like a normal man, invited him down steps into the craft’s interior and awarded him with blueprints to build an airship of the same design. Thereafter, Birmingham experienced what ufologists might term high strangeness, with further signs in the sky and even poltergeist activity in his home. Quite an astounding tale, but in tracing it to its source, researchers have found it dubious. It comes to us through the writings of a ufologist who claimed to have transcribed it in the 1950s from a handwritten book that, first discovered by a teacher in the 1940s had thereafter been passed from person to person before getting into the hands of ufologists and astrologers and promptly disappearing. In fact, there appears to be no evidence of the original manuscript’s existence.

Thus as the late modern period approaches contemporary history, we find reports of UAP more and more problematic, based solely on the presence of explainable aircraft and the proliferation of hoaxers and UFO enthusiasts willing to fabricate incidents. And of course, it is also true that all the long parade of sightings throughout history might easily be dismissed as scientifically explainable meteorological phenomena or atmospheric optical illusions that witnesses simply had no understanding of or could not process without interpreting them according to their understanding of the world, or perhaps as hallucinations or tall tales spread by religious zealots or mischief makers, for such people seem to have been around since time immemorial. Moreover, sightings by early astronomers might easily be called mistakes chalked up to the science of astronomy and the use of telescopes still being in their infancy. But what this brief history of unidentified aerial phenomena certainly demonstrates is that UFOs are not a phenomenon peculiar to contemporary history. While they might have been called signs or prodigies in different eras, they’ve been reported throughout history, as have even more bizarre reports of abductions and encounters with actual mystery beings.

Therefore, considering this historical context, a news story about the Pentagon evaluating the threat of UFOs should not seem like fringe lunacy or a waste of taxpayer money. Rather, if one does not turn a blind eye to this phenomenon’s long history, it seems a prudent and practical program, and one that, along with the rigorous scientific study of what many consider fringe theories, has been sorely lacking for a long time. So kudos to the Times for printing their recent story despite potential embarrassment, and kudos to Jacques Vallee for peering around the blind corners of our past and recording oddities to which other historians would rather shut their eyes.

Blind Spot: Three Men Gone from Eilean Mor, the Missing Keepers of the Flannan Isles Light

Steeped as it is in folklore and mummery, I feel I must first tell the story of the Great Lighthouse Mystery as it is most often received, as something of a scary campfire tale, before illuminating it with the light of scholarship and skepticism, as this is a tale of the darkness that reigns when a guiding light is left untended. Thus, we may begin with the reports of December 15, 1900, when in the dangerous waters of the Outer Hebrides, two ships, the Fairwind and the Archtor, expecting to see the 140,000 candle-power warning light shining from the lighthouse atop the 150-foot cliffs of Eilean Mór, the largest of the craggy Flannan Isles, saw instead only darkness. And in that darkness, as some have told it, the crew of the Fairwind saw some ragged men like specters rowing a boat toward the benighted isle. While the Fairwind appears not to have reported the extinguished light, the Archtor eventually did, upon finally arriving at Leith port after considerable delay. The Archtor had bottomed out on a rock and taken on water; her captain had to beach and lighten her before she could make it into port. This delay, as well as a further 10-day delay on the part of the Archtor’s agents to report the outage of the light and a failure on the part of the Northern Lighthouse Board’s lookout to note and report the problem himself, meant that no one was aware of anything out of the ordinary on Eilean Mór until the Hesperus, the NLB lighthouse tender, arrived on December 26th, Boxing Day, with supplies and relief. On board was Joseph Moore, a lighthouse keeper coming off his two weeks’ leave. When the Hesperus came close enough to sight the lighthouse and saw no signal flag, it blew its steam whistle and fired a rocket, neither of which elicited any response from above. 

Moore was dispatched with the second mate and a third sailor in a longboat that docked at the small landing carved into the rock at the base of Eilean Mór’s cliffs, and he left the crewmen behind then, climbing the steep, hand-carved steps up to the grassy embankment at the top and making his way past the ruins of an ancient chapel to the living quarters of the lighthouse keepers in his search for the three lighthouse keepers that had been alone on the island for weeks. One can imagine him shouting their names as he approached, James Ducat and Thomas Marshall—or perhaps Jim and Tom to Joseph Moore—and Donald MacArthur, the Occasional keeper who may not have been so well-known to him. He found the outer door closed, and through a passage, the inner door to the kitchen was shut as well. Inside, he found an unfinished meal of potatoes and salt-mutton, and an overturned chair. But it was not until he noticed that all the clocks had wound down and stopped that Joseph Moore became certain the lighthouse keepers had not been there for some time.

The hand-carved steps of Eilean Mor, via Wikimedia Commons

Hurrying back to the boat, he enlisted the other two men to help him search. In the lighthouse tower itself, they found the light was clean and full of fuel, as though well-tended to the very last. When this second search failed to turn up any sign of the keepers, they all returned to the Hesperus to report, whereupon Moore and three others were promptly dispatched back to the lighthouse to illuminate the night. The next day, Moore and the other replacement keepers searched the entire island for any indications of what had transpired there. At the west landing, which faced the vast open Atlantic, they discovered some evidence of severe weather. The rails of a steam-powered tramway, installed for hauling supplies up the cliff face, had been bent out of shape and dislodged from the rock by some powerful force, and a box of mooring ropes that should have been firmly anchored in a cleft of rock was simply gone. Then, back at the residence, they found a disturbing sign: a coat, still on its peg. Each of the missing lighthouse keepers had protective weather gear that he would not have ventured outside without wearing, especially in inclement weather—Ducat had his waterproof, Marshall his oilskins, and MacArthur, the Occasional, his wearing coat. It appeared that MacArthur’s wearing coat had been left behind, such that he must have gone out of doors in a state of undress.

Within a few days, the Superintendent of Lighthouses, Robert Muirhead, arrived to write his own report, and his investigation noted some further signs of foul weather having struck the island: a one-ton boulder had tumbled down the slope to rest on a concrete path, and along that same path, an emergency buoy had been somehow forcefully ripped from the railing, not as if by a man seeking to use it but rather as if by some brute and unthinking force, for it had left behind fragments of canvas. This damage was at 110 feet above sea level, a fact that would prove troublesome to some theories as they developed.

And finally, an important piece of evidence was the lighthouse log, in which the keepers kept dated track of weather and sea conditions as well as anything the Northern Lighthouse Board might need recorded. The last entry was dated December 15th, the very day that passing vessels had first noticed the lighthouse was dark. Much has been written about these final log entries in the years since, as interest in the Great Lighthouse Mystery has evolved, for in some ways, as we have received them, they appear to be odd and foreboding. On the 12th of December, Marshall writes about a storm the likes of which he’s never seen, and mentions in passing how quiet Ducat was and how MacArthur had been crying. Then on the 13th, he makes sure to put down that all three of them took to prayer, such was their disquiet and dread. Then, on the 15th, he notes that the weather has calmed, stating cryptically, “God is over all.”

From left: Donald MacArthur, Thomas Marshall, James Ducat, and Robert Muirhead, via Hushed Up History

As the legend of Eilean Mór grew, so did the theories of what transpired there proliferate. The most common of these, and still the most believable, have to do with poor weather somehow sweeping the three lighthouse keepers into the sea, whether by wave or by wind. However, in later years, reports of the mysterious log entries—which seemed to indicate that weather could not have been the culprit, having calmed before their disappearance—have led to speculation of supernatural or paranormal explanations. So, if it had not been weather, perhaps it was aliens? Because that’s the next logical jump, right? Or perhaps we should remain grounded in history and look at the lore surrounding the island itself. The only former inhabitant of Eilean Mór was St. Flannan, a Celtic monk who according to legend had miraculously floated to Rome on a rock to be consecrated, was known to pronounce curses on robber-barons, and on account of a prophecy that he might become a monarch, asked God to miraculously disfigure his face in order to avoid kingship, which prayer the Lord supposedly answered. The ruins of this saint’s chapel remained, and the lighthouse keepers passed it by daily. Perhaps, then, the keepers offended the spirit of St. Flannan, and the monk showed his scarred face once more to curse the men.

Then again, the history of the isles extends back much further than the 7th century. According to folklore recorded in the 17th century by Martin Martin, the island had once been home to the Losbirdan, people of low-stature whose little bones had been discovered in the soils there. Some have turned these legends of small folk into talk of mischievous elves or spirits of dead sprites who might have acted in some impish way on the men. Regardless of the accuracy of this interpretation of the lore, though, it can’t be argued that superstition surrounded the island. Martin recorded a number of strange traditions followed by those few who visited the islands to gather eggs and down from the nests of sea birds. They believed they had to have an easterly wind in order to approach the island, as a westerly wind was a fell omen. Upon passing the ruins of St. Flannan’s chapel, they stripped to the waist, placed their upper clothes on the altar and prayed three times. And while fowling on the island, they felt they must avoid using certain common words, relying instead on synonyms or alternate nouns. Whether these men feared retribution from St. Flannan or the little Losbirdan is unclear, but it’s almost certain that the lighthouse men failed to follow these ancient precautions. Could it therefore be that they incurred the wrath of something that had lain dormant on the island for centuries? So go the fanciful theories of ghost story enthusiasts, at least….

The problem is that most of the evidence pointing to anomalous goings-on has proven unreliable. First, the unusual log entries that supposedly prove weather could not have caused the three men’s disappearance: Fortean Times contributor Mike Dash, in a very well-researched paper that has served as my principal source for this episode, scoured contemporary sources and found no evidence of such entries. Moreover, he shows how illogical they are, containing chronological errors, being kept by only one lighthouse keeper and not the lead keeper, and noting things that wouldn’t belong in the log, such as melodramatic language and petty observations on the other men’s behavior. Moreover, the log entries don’t seem to have appeared until years after the fact, not so much as a hoax but more as a dramatic embellishment added by one author who thought it made for a better story, and thereafter picked up and included in other renditions. This is how history becomes mythologized, and it seems to have happened in this story in more than one regard. For example, the entire story of the Fairwind spying pale and ragged men working the oars of a lifeboat and heading for the island on the 15th also seems to be apocryphal, as it only appears in a few less than reliable sources. And again, Dash proves that the entire element of the unfinished meal appears to have been fabricated and added to the story somewhere along the way, as he digs up contemporary reports that show the kitchen was clean and tidy, and that indeed a chair may not have even been overturned as so often gets included in the tale. The same, he points out, is true of the Mary Celeste, whose myth grew to include a fictional abandoned meal, as though the diners had vanished mid-victuals. It’s enough to make one doubt reports of the ribs and pea soup in the Carroll A. Deering tale.

The Flannan Isles Light, via Wikimedia Commons

However, the unusual details that the Occasional keeper, MacArthur, had left his wearing coat on the peg and that the outer and inner doors of the living quarters had been found shut remain problematic. There are a few remaining theories, but these facts trouble all of them. First, weather: disregarding the dubious log entries, there may well have been a violent squall at the island. It would be unusual for the men to have gone out in such weather at all, but as Dash points out, lighthouse keepers could be docked pay for being so careless as to lose equipment, and Ducat and Marshall may have donned their weather gear and gone out to secure the box of ropes which later turned up missing. Then either a gale-force wind or a great rogue wave threatened to take them, and seeing that they were in danger or hearing their cries for help, MacArthur rushed out in his shirtsleeves to help them, whereupon all three had been swept away. The problem with that theory, however, is that MacArthur rushed out without his coat but still had the presence of mind to shut every door behind him as he went.

And there are other problems with the theories of a gust of wind or a wave taking the men. Some have claimed that, considering the wind’s direction at the time, they would have been blown up the grassy slope, not into the sea. That leaves rogue waves, which, some will argue, are not known to reach such a height that they could wash the men into the sea. There was, however, hard evidence of damage at as high as 110 feet on the island, for the buoy had been violently torn from the path’s handrail. While open ocean waves aren’t known to reach that height, it remains a possibility that local conditions among the rocks and cliffs of the island somehow contributed to the creation of a monster wave. For example, one Christopher Nicholson has pointed out that the geos, or narrow gullies, along the coastline could channel the crashing sea into gargantuan waves.

Others, likely encouraged by the mythical log entries and rejecting weather as the cause altogether, have theorized that the Occasional, MacArthur, went stir crazy or came to resent the other two keepers, and simply snapped, leaving his coat and going out to attack the men; whereupon he shoved them over into the sea and fell with them during the struggle. There is no real evidence for this rendition, though. The man was a 40-year-old former soldier with a wife back on the mainland. If any of them might have snapped, one would think it might have been the unmarried, 28-year-old Marshall.

Then there are other theories: perhaps they were taken off the island by a ship, perhaps by the secret service or foreign agents. But a weather disaster remains the most viable. Mystery indeed persists, but to me, it seems boiled down to a matter of a coat on a peg and some shut doors. What could have compelled MacArthur to go out of doors without any protection from the weather? Whatever the reason, it must have been something that caused him to run out in a mad rush, which doesn’t correspond with the fact that doors had been neatly shut behind him. So in the end, we don’t really know what happened that day on Eilean Mór, an island that is essentially just the tip of a massive undersea mountain, and so, as far as we know, the disappearance of these three men itself may be just the visible tip of much larger story that is hidden from our view by the murky waters of the Atlantic. And just like ships passing the darkened lighthouse in December of 1900 expected a spotlight to illuminate their way but were instead engulfed in shadows, so too we, looking back on the Flannan Isles Lighthouse Mystery, find ourselves floating helplessly in the darkness of a historical blind spot.

The Carroll A. Deering, Ghost Ship of Cape Hatteras

At dawn on January 31st, 1921, from the lookout perch at the U.S. Coast Guard’s Cape Hatteras Station, Surfman C. P. Brady peered out at the morning fog and spied a dark shape out on the shallow waters of Diamond Shoals, that collection of ever changing sandbars just off the coast, which, together with the other shoals off the Outer Banks, was known for claiming ships and earned the area the sobriquet “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.” But there had also been another name among native tribes for this particular island now called Hatteras, a name listeners should recognize; it had once been called Croatoan by its inhabitants.

This morning, Surfman Brady squinted into the mists, unsure if his eyes were playing tricks on him in the crepuscular light and the morning’s brumous haze. But as the soupy mist receded, there could be no mistaking it.  Somehow, in the night, a schooner had bottomed out on a sandbar of the Diamond Shoals despite the clear warning of the nearby Cape Hatteras Light, atop the black and white spiral stripes of its lighthouse tower.  And what’s more, she looked to be a magnificent vessel, 255 feet from stem to stern, all told, with five grand masts and all its sails set. It must have been quite the sight, a relic from a bygone era appearing out of the fog of the past.

When the news of the shipwreck went out from the Coast Guard station, it was acted on by local boatmen, for there were many in that region who stood ready at a moment’s notice to plunge into the choppy waters of the Cape when a ship had run aground. First, there was the Lifesaving Service, which had stations seven miles apart up and down the coasts of the Outers Banks and had men marching the beaches on constant watch for ships in distress, none of which sentries had managed to spy the five-masted schooner out on the shoals. Then there were the wreckers, those who would have sought to salvage anything aboard the schooner before the waves that had scuttled it battered it to pieces. This was, after all, not far south of Nag’s Head, where as I discussed in my episode on Theodosia Burr, there was a long tradition of wreckers or bankers who would lure ships ashore and strip them of goods. Those still at the family business in the 1920s, of course, were of a decidedly less piratical bent, but they’d still make all haste to a ship that had foundered on the shoals. The seas, however, proved too rough for any of these lifesavers and wreckers and even for the Coast Guard cutters that were eventually dispatched to the wreck, and none could approach any closer than a quarter mile to the ship.

When finally, days later, on the 4th of February, the tugboat Rescue captained by James Carlson was able to board the schooner, it had been so battered by the sea that it was taking on water, its fore and aft decks rolling independently of one another with each crash of the waves. They made a search of her and found no one aboard, unless one counted the starved and mewling ship’s cat—or cats according to some versions. As in  the stories of the Mary Celeste, a meal had been prepared; there were ribs in a pan, pea soup in a pot and coffee on the stove. Unlike that other ghost ship, though, there were clear signs of the ship’s abandonment. The ladder was hanging over the side and its lifeboats were gone—there had been a dory and a motorized yawl, and their falls had been simply cut as if to abandon the ship in haste. Moreover, all the crew’s belongings had been taken, as had the nautical instruments—her sextant and chronometer and telescope—and the ship’s papers. Oddly, in the head, or the toilet area, Captain Carlson found the ship’s charts strewn about, and elsewhere, he found the steering equipment disabled—the wheel had been shattered, the rudder disengaged from its stock, and the binnacle box staved in and broken. A sledge hammer leaned ominously near at hand, but Carlson could not tell if it had been utilized as an instrument of sabotage or a tool of repair. Further evidence also suggested the schooner had not been in working order even before it had foundered on the shoal, for both of its anchors were gone, and strangely, it seemed that the ship had simultaneously been sailing with her running lights and her emergency lights lit, as all were burned out. The latter, two red lights situated high up in the rigging, were signals meant to indicate an out-of-control vessel.

In the days after Captain Carlson of the tug Rescue was finally able to board the schooner, wreckers salvaged what they could for auction, which wasn’t much—some sails that could still be reused, some furniture. As it continued to be battered against the shoal by the relentless ocean, it was eventually declared to be a menace to the navigation of other ships. So an order was given to dynamite her, and most sources say that is what was done. At least one version gives a far more dramatic ending, however, asserting that even as the Coast Guard cutters put out to sea with the explosives to carry out these orders, a sudden storm whipped up and finally shattered the ghost ship. Either way, whether by man or by nature, she was certainly reduced to a patch of debris and timbers floating far and wide to wash ashore up and down the Outer Banks. And somewhere among that flotsam could likely be seen the transom, which as it drifted away still bore the schooner’s name and origin: Carroll A. Deering, Bath.

The stern of the schooner, via the National Park Foundation

The five-masted schooner had been the largest and the last ship ever constructed by G. G. Deering Company in Maine—the finest accomplishment of the 99 ships Gardiner Deering built, and thus he had named it after his own son. And she was something of a ghost from the moment she was christened, as the days of wooden sailing vessels were dwindling when she was launched in 1919.

Designed to carry coal at a capacity of 3,500 tons, this she had done well until in late 1920, with a hold packed with coal bound for Rio de Janeiro, her captain became ill and the crew of the Carroll A. Deering was obliged to accept a substitute captain, an able old salt named Willis Wormell, on what would prove to be its final voyage. And it was the daughter of this new captain, one Lula Wormell, who would later demand a federal investigation of what had happened to the 10-strong crew of the Carroll A. Deering, as she was certain that if the crew had simply abandoned the ship on Diamond Shoals, they would have easily found help from the Coast Guard on shore and Captain Willis Wormell would have reunited with his family shortly thereafter.

The investigation uncovered some strange and foreboding details when looking into their journey. It turned out that, during a stay in Barbados en route to Norfolk, Virginia, after delivering their shipment of coal in Rio, Captain Wormell found another Maine sea captain who happened to be in port, one G. W. Bunker, and spent a day speaking with him, expressing some grave concerns over the crew he had found himself leading. He considered them unruly, especially his first mate, Charles McLellan. Meanwhile, McLellan had been enjoying the local rum and gotten deep into his cups, whereupon he found himself jailed and awaiting Captain Wormell to post his bail. This the captain did, but not before McLellan had supposedly been overheard making threats against the captain, swearing at one point that he would “get the old man” before they reached Norfolk.

After weathering several extremely stormy weeks on the Atlantic, the Deering was next sighted by a lightship 90 miles south of Hatteras. According to the captain of that lightship, one James Steel, the Deering’s crew appeared to be milling about on the quarterdeck, where crewmen were not typically allowed. A tall and thin red-haired man who did not speak or act like an officer addressed the lightship with a Scandinavian accent through a loudspeaker, claiming the vessel had lost its anchors south of Cape Fear near the Frying Pan Shoals while attempting to wait out a windstorm, and asked that the owners of the ship, G. G. Deering Company in Bath, Maine, be informed. The next afternoon, another vessel spotted the Deering plying waters on a course that would take it right onto the Diamond Shoals. These eyewitnesses, however, saw no one on her decks and simply disregarded the schooner, assuming her crew would eventually spot the Cape Hatteras Light or the Diamond Shoal Lightship and thereby avoid foundering on a sandbar.

Color drawing of Cape Hatteras Light by Paul McGehee

But of course, they didn’t. And these piecemeal reports of the schooner’s final voyage, stitched together, appeared to point to one explanation: mutiny. And in support of this theory, there were some few other tantalizing details reported by Captain Carlson of the tug Rescue. It seems that there had been handwritten notes in Captain Wormell’s own hand in the margins of some of the recovered maps that had been dated up until the 23rd of January, 1921, after which the marginalia had been scrawled in another hand. Moreover, in the captain’s quarters, Carlson noted that the spare bed had been slept in, and he discovered three pairs of boots there, none of which belonged to Captain Wormell. These details along with the report of the men loitering on the quarterdeck, which was usually reserved only for the captain, and the fact that a red-haired Scandinavian man had addressed the lightship as if he were the captain, led many to assume that perhaps McLellan had made good on his threat, or that perhaps his mutiny had been quelled but not before it had claimed all those of high position on the vessel, as there were indeed Scandinavians aboard: six Danes, all sailors, and one Finn who served as boatswain. Perhaps the survivors of the shipwreck had all fled the Deering in fear of imprisonment.

However, the federal investigation, spearheaded by then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, turned up some further items of interest as well. No sign of the lifeboats had ever been found, nor any wreckage or corpses. Nearby ports were all put on alert for any surviving crew members, but despite some false alarms, none ever turned up. As there was no way the men would have been able to run off with these boats carried over their heads, that meant either the ocean had swallowed them entire, survivors and all, or they had purposely sunk the lifeboats to cover their tracks. The only other possibility was that the boats, and perhaps the crew as well, had been taken up by another vessel. And indeed, as it turned out, another ship, the SS Hewitt, an oil steamer of the Union Sulphur Company, had disappeared off the Carolina coast around the same time. This has since led to speculation that the whole affair might be an early case of anomalous phenomena related to the Bermuda Triangle, suggesting that both of these ships met with unexplainable fates while in the northernmost waters of that mysterious patch of ocean, but at the time, these details pointed to a far more prosaic if no less unbelievable explanation: piracy. Unbelievable, I say, because this was far from the age in which piracy was common; it was the roaring 20s, not the 18th century.

Nevertheless, some information appeared that seemed to support this notion. For example, another ship, the Cyclops, had earlier disappeared in the area, further giving credence to the idea that pirates had been preying on ships in those waters. And shortly after James Steel, the captain of the lightship south of Hatteras, had encountered the Deering and spoken to the red-haired man on its quarterdeck, he spied an oil steamer and hailed it, thinking its crew could pass on the red-haired man’s distress message since his own wireless communications equipment was not in working order. This steamer, however, did not respond, and Steel, his interest piqued, examined the vessel and found he could not see its name displayed. He then blew his whistle, and contrary to maritime law, the steamer simply ignored him and changed its course. Could this have been the Hewitt, piloted by the pirates who had taken her?

The S. S. Hewitt, via Wikimedia Commons

Adherents of the piracy theory did not have to wait long for a smoking gun to tilt the case in their favor, for in April, an area fisherman named Christopher Columbus Gray discovered a message in a bottle while combing a beach north of Cape Hatteras. The fisherman turned it over to the Coast Guard, and the federal investigation then confirmed that the bottle was of a kind manufactured in Brazil, and the paper on which the note had been written matched a type commonly made in Norway. Moreover, those who knew the crew of the Deering identified the script as matching the handwriting of an engineer aboard the Deering—indeed the only member of the crew that Captain Wormell considered a stalwart friend—as it followed his unusual habit of capitalizing words mid-sentence. The message read:  “Deering Captured by Oil Burning Boat Something Like Chaser taking Off everything Handcuffing Crew Crew hiding All over Ship no Chance to Make escape finder please notify head Qtrs Of Deering.”

The press, getting wind of the investigation, took the piracy theory and ran with it. The New York Times admitted it was a remote possibility but nevertheless a valid one, and the Washington Post took the matter much further, adding the intriguing angle, based on the message in Gray’s bottle, that said pirates had a torpedo-boat chaser or perhaps even a submarine obtained from a foreign government after World War One. These pirates, according to speculation, could be smugglers of bootleg alcohol, rogue Germans still fighting the war out of some African port, or Russian Bolsheviks looking to carry their spoils back to their fledgling Soviet Fatherland! The bootleggers theory was an especially popular one, this being the Prohibition era, as the Deering had come through rum-soaked Barbados. And the Deering’s hold would have been able to carry something like a million dollars’ worth of contraband alcohol, thereby making the vessel extremely valuable to booze runners. However, the idea that Bolshevists were preying on American ships off the coast of the Carolinas gained traction as well. Other ships that had gone missing in that general time frame were compiled in a list as victims of these supposed pirates, and it was pointed out that some of the cargo on ships reported missing was material denied the Communist regime under terms of embargo. Then a raid on a New York Communist front group turned up papers calling on revolutionaries to steal American vessels and cross the Atlantic to bring them to Russia, and rumors of ships appearing in Russian ports with blacked-out names began to circulate.

Of course, all of this should be considered in the context of the Red Scare, which was in full swing after the strikes, bombings and riots of 1919. Other news outlets, like the Wall Street Journal, and actual experts on nautical risks like meteorologists and Lloyd’s of London tended to downplay the idea that pirates were involved at all. Pirates would not have kidnapped the crew and abandoned the vessel, as the vessel itself or its cargo would have been their prize, and they certainly wouldn’t have needed the lifeboats, having presumably boarded the schooner from their own boats, so that was another mark in favor of the mutiny theory or the rather bland theory that the crew simple ran aground and then drowned in rough seas when they abandoned the schooner. Other theories suggested freak weather catastrophes that compelled the crew to abandon ship long before running aground or that the Deering had struck a floating mine left in the water from WWI. However, it seems unlikely they would not have reefed their sails during such inclement weather, and reports indicate the ship was intact on its sandbar and did not start taking on water until it had suffered days of crashing waves there, which would rule out the floating mine suggestion. Still other theories pointed to tropical disease and mass suicide, but these were even more far-fetched and couldn’t account for the lost lifeboats or the crew’s missing belongings.

And what of the message in a bottle? In August, a federal agent got close with the discoverer of the note, Christopher Columbus Gray, and coaxed from him an admission that he had forged the note as a hoax. At first, Gray evaded arrest, but later, rather stupidly accepting an invitation to start employment at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, he was captured and confessed again to the imposture, explaining that he believed the renown from finding the message might land him a coveted job in the lighthouse.

Newspaper headline of September 1921, via the State Archives of North Carolina

One by one, these tall tales seemed to collapse beneath the weight of their own supposition, as the majority of the 10 missing ships presumed to be victims of pirates were thereafter blamed on an especially severe hurricane season. The federal investigation officially petered out in 1922, but no one theory remains a clear and certain answer. Did the ship lose its anchors and steering equipment in a storm and run out of control into the shoal? If so, why had they prepared and set out a meal before abandoning ship? And what happened to them afterward? Were their boats overwhelmed by waves?

Or had there been a mutiny against Captain Wormell led by First Mate McLellan? If so, how did they come to lose their anchors? Or was it perhaps both mutiny and foul weather that befell the ship? And then, what about the SS Hewitt? It is thought that this steam vessel would surely have survived any foul weather in the area. Does anything other than being boarded by pirates explain the disappearance of the Hewitt? Christopher Columbus Gray admitted to forging the message in a bottle, but that itself still seems mysterious, for how did this Carolina fisherman get the Brazilian bottle and Norwegian paper? Nor does he appear to have explained how he was able to effect such a convincing imitation of the engineer’s handwriting—or was that just a coincidental likeness or confirmation bias on the part of those who identified the writing? And even without the note, could not some act of piracy still be a viable explanation, at least in part? Couldn’t it be both, somehow? Or all? Could not the Deering have suffered a mutiny and then encountered disastrous weather, whereupon they encountered pirates who had earlier taken the Hewitt and then took the Deering as well? Perhaps it was these pirates who, discovering the schooner beyond repair, aimed it for the shoals and abandoned it for their true prize, the Hewitt.

If this were the 19th century, it might easily be assumed that the wreckers and bankers of the region had hung lamps from their horses’ necks to fool the ship’s crew into thinking they were entering safe harbor, only to founder themselves and be boarded and murdered. But this was the 20th century, and the Coast Guard was stationed nearby, and besides, there was no sign of violence aboard and nothing had been taken from the ship for salvage.

If pirates don’t float your boat, so to speak, would you rather look for some far more unexplainable explanation? Did the vanishing of the Hewitt and the disappearance of the Carroll Deering’s crew have something to do with that nexus of mysterious happenings, the Bermuda Triangle? Or perhaps to you this bears too striking a resemblance to the disappearance from that same neighborhood of over a hundred colonists at Roanoke some 330 years earlier. Perhaps, if Captain Carlson’s men had had examined the ghost ship just a little more closely before abandoning it a second time to the merciless sea, they might have glimpsed a mysterious word carved into one of the schooner’s five masts and recognized it as the ancient name of the island off whose shore it had foundered: Croatoan.

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Thanks for listening to Historical Blindness, the Odd Past Podcast. My principal source for this episode was Hatteras Island: Keeper of the Outer Banks by Ray McAllister and the non-fiction novel Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering by Bland Simpson, which I highly recommend and which you can find a link to on the website’s reading list.