Free The UFO Singularity by Micah Hanks

in time—more than a century, in fact—to an era when the evidence for a variety of unique, advanced, and intelligently controlled technologies may have already begun to surface here on Earth.

Chapter 3
Divergent Potentials: Mysterious New Technology
    In one’s frustration it is all too easy to seize on an explanation of the “Men from Mars” variety and to ignore the many UFO features unaccounted for.… We may be inadvertently and artificially increasing the significance of the conspicuous features while the part we ignore—or that which is not reported by the untrained witness—may contain the clue to the whole subject.
    —Dr. J. Allen Hynek,
The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry

     
    T he year was 1889, and a sudden frenzy had erupted among the members of a respected Philadelphia-area flight enthusiasts’ group known as the Weldon Institute. There, in the midst of the respectable assembly, a stranger had appeared—or rather, had
intruded
—whose imposing physical stature “was a regular trapezium with the greatest of its parallel sides formed by the line of his shoulders.” 1 The man had willingly cast himself as a pariah on the afternoon in question, after boldly claiming in midst of the world’s greatest proponents of dirigible aircraft not only that the future of aviation lay in the use of heavier-than-air flying machines, but that he had already mastered the skies with this very sort of device.
    “As man has become master of the seas with the ship, by the oar, the sail, the wheel and the screw, so shall he become master of atmospherical space by apparatus heavier than the air,” the infidel proclaimed to the angry congregation before him. “For it must be heavier to be stronger than the air!” 2
    Blasphemy, they thought, just as the members of the Weldon Institute spilled into the hallway, chasing this irreverent bastard and his trifling ideas from the room before he further befouled the sanctity of their gentlemen’s lodge. And then, as abruptly as he had managed toenter their secluded little world, this man seemingly
vanished
right in their midst—or so it had appeared. While the bewildered members of the Weldon Institute conversed excitedly with one another about this upset, their strange guest had been whisked into the air above, spirited away into the open sky by an enigmatic new flying technology he alone had managed to innovate.
    Of course, the observant reader may already be aware that the dramatic portrayal of events unfolding were not recovered from the minutes of any real aviation club’s proceedings, nor was this man Robur, the dissident in question, ever the captain of any real heavier-than-air flying vehicle that had already managed to conquer the skies by 1889. The only real truth behind these events is that they appeared in print for the first time in 1886 under the title
Robur-le-Conquérant,
having been translated later into the English language and released to American audiences as a novel called
The Clipper of the Clouds
and, more popularly,
Robur the Conqueror.
3
    Robur’s indignant approach to staking his claim on the open air, as envisaged by science fiction author Jules Verne, may have seemed like utter fantasy to most readers, and even Verne himself, who masterfully was able to pen accounts of people and places in countries he had never once visited. And yet, the enigma of Robur, so-called “Master of the World,” and, of course, his unusual flying vessel, may have been far closer to reality than Verne himself, or many of his readers, had ever realized.
    The entire episode really began to coalesce with a well-known series of events that took place on the evening of Tuesday, November 17, 1896, in the skies over Sacramento, California. Just after eight o’clock a bright light was seen traveling through the sky, initially making no noise, as it appeared over the eastern horizon. The craft had been traveling slowly, occasionally bobbing up and down or from side to side