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Magical Realist
Feb 17, 2025 08:12 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 17, 2025 08:17 PM by Magical Realist.)
A few historical excerpts from the article to wet your appetite:
"Observations of UAP at sea have been recorded in ship logs for several centuries [1, 5, 6] making it clear that not all UAP can be explained away as being advanced secret, military, or commercial craft. It is important to examine some of these old cases and appreciate both their diversity and similarities to modern encounters.
When we explore the old encounters, we find many intriguing events that never receive the attention they appear to deserve. The following event from 1887 occurred near Cape Race, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada [244][245, pp. 442–443][246, pp. 167–168][6]. It reads as follows:
Captain Moore, British steamship Siberian, reports, ‘Nov. 12, midnight, Cape Race bearing west by north, distant ten miles, wind strong south by east, a large ball of fire appeared to rise out of the sea to a height of about fifty feet and come right against the wind close up to the ship. It then altered its course and ran along with the ship to a distance of about one and one-half miles. In about two minutes it again altered its course and went away to the south-east against the wind. It lasted, in all, not over five minutes. Have noticed the same phenomenon before off Cape Race, and it seemed to indicate that an easterly or south-easterly gale was coming on.’
This event is interesting because the fireball emerged from the sea and appeared to maneuver intelligently by both moving against the wind and by changing course. Following this report, in Fort [246], there is a note of a similar event that occurred on the \nth18 of June 1845 where from the brig Victoria in the Mediterranean Sea about 900 miles east of Adalia in Asia Minor, ‘‘three luminous bodies were seen to issue from the sea, at about a half a mile from the vessel. They were visible about ten minutes.’’ [246, p. 168]. The pheonomenon, which was reported from Syria and Malta, was described as two very large bodies ‘‘nearly joined’’ [247, p.82–83].
Such events would seem extraordinary if reported today. When one considers that this was recorded roughly a century and a half ago, it takes on even greater significance. As seems typical of such events, it was reported once and then forgotten. Such events have sometimes been explained as ball lightning. However, such an explanation seems unlikely given that the objects emerged from the sea and had such long durations.
Another fascinating early encounter with an odd light phenomenon that reportedly engaged with the water occurred in West Africa in the late 1800s. This is a puzzling incident that is difficult to explain conventionally. In 1893, Mary Kingsley was on an exploration of Lake Ncovi between the Ogowe (modern spelling Ogooue) and Rembwe rivers [248] where she had collected species of fish unknown to western science 4
The fish species Mormyrus kingsleyae and Ctenopoma kingsleyae are named after Kingsley. Ctenopoma kingsleyae is a species of climbing gourami, which are named for their ability to climb out of water and walk short distances using their fins and tail for propulsion and gill plates for support.
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This area was in the Niger Protectorate and Gabon, about 250 miles inland from the West African coast. Kingsley wrote that late at night, she went out alone to bathe and canoe on the lake waters. Then she saw something extraordinary: [249, p. 254]
'Down through the forest on the lake bank opposite came a violet ball the size of a small orange. When it reached the sand beach, it hovered along it to and fro close to the ground. In a few minutes another ball of similarly colored light came towards it from behind one of the islets, and the two wavered to and fro over the beach, sometimes circling round each other. I made off toward them in the canoe, thinking — as I still do — they were some brand new kind of luminous insect. When I got onto their beach, one of them went off into the bushes and the other away over the water. I followed in the canoe, for the water here is very deep and, when I almost thought I had got it, it went down into the water and I could see it glowing as it sunk until it vanished in the depths.'
She later spoke to locals in the area who explained her sighting as an encounter with an ‘‘Aku,’’ or a devil bush.
It is not surprising that Kingsley herself thought that she had seen a new type of glowing insect. Perhaps this was a reasonable assumption, except that we do not know of any such insect as she described. These objects might not be USOs in the sense that we tend to think of them, in other words, as a structured and advanced submersible craft. However, we must keep in mind that UAP are not a single type of phenomenon. What is important is that they were luminous (violet in color), unusual, and had the ability to enter bodies of water. That is, they appeared to be transmedium objects, whatever they were made of. Furthermore, they appeared to act intelligently and evasively. That is, when Kingsley attempted to approach them, they moved away from her."
