Around a hundred years before stories about alien abduction emerged into public knowledge, The Cleveland Daily Plaindealer, of Ohio, published a remarkable story.1
On 1st November, 1851, they printed an account2 which reads like a modern close encounter. An “Aerial Excursion,” describes an ascent in a balloon propelled by a “new motive power,” flying “globes of golden light”, a capture within a luminous “molten silver” cloud, of communication with radiant, intelligent beings and the narrator missing time3 and waking some hours later.
The account is described in a letter addressed to the paper’s owner and editor, Joseph William Gray. Its anonymous author begins by describing a new-found interest in spiritualism—the notion that communication with the dead, who provide advice or instruction to the living via “physical demonstrations,” such as moving objects or making sounds, is possible.
According to the story, this was 1849, and the early days of Spiritualism. The Fox Sisters claimed to be able to provoke such messages in the form of rapping sounds, and had convinced many with their displays of mediumship. (These rappings were later revealed to be a hoax, the sounds made by the women cracking their joints). However, the Plaindealer makes use of the current trend with its subtitle “The Spiritualist Rappings Outdone,” promising even more wondrous things.
The author claims that after investigating mediumship and becoming convinced of its reality, he found some facility for it himself. When alone, he began to receive personalised messages from spirits. “You are being prepared for your mission,” they told him. He was instructed on how to build a balloon to a special design involving magnets—although the specifics are not shared. This craft would allow the author to escape from the “magnetic tractions and corruptions of the earth,” whereby the spirits—whoever they were—could then “propel him from one point to another,” even “from one planet to another.” The spirits, perhaps proselytising, also insisted that he disclose these events to the public by seeking publication of his journal.
Before setting out the events of the Aerial Excursion The Plaindealer prefaced the letter with a disclaimer. It acknowledged that fabricated stories had appeared in newspapers before, such as the famous Moon Hoax of 1835, a series of articles by journalist Richard Adams Locke, which ran in the New York Sun and convinced many that the inventor Sir John Herschel, had used a fantastic new telescope to detect creatures inhabiting the moon.
In fact, newspapers in the early 1800s often credulously featured dubious accounts of ghostly apparitions, mysterious happenings, or anomalous electrical phenomena.
Slightly more believable (although still containing exaggerated claims) were the diary entries from the pioneers of ballooning, which frequently made the papers around that time. Readers were given glimpses into the adventures of aeronauts, delighted and awed by their excursions miles above the Earth, as well as the grizzly, gorey deaths of those who’s flights were less than a complete success.
For example, by the date the Plaindealer ran this Aerial Excursion story in 1851, notable balloonist Mr. John Wise was already reporting on his 131st successful aerial voyage in his “noble airship” Ulysses. His prose described how he ascended into the clouds, dodged thunderstorms and lightning, and marvelled at spectacles that only a “true poet” could do justice to.4
Other early balloonists told of attaining a new moral perspective as they ascended above the clouds, and of baffling unenlightened farm workers as their newfangled flying machines occasionally made unscheduled descents into their fields.
These wonderful tales, though, lack the external agency of the Plaindealer’s story, which takes on a form much closer in character to later science fiction and real reports about encounters with beings from other worlds interfering in the lives of humans.
Regardless of whether the Aerial Excursion is a hoax, fiction, or has any truth, it is remarkable for several reasons:
It appeared a few years before the trend in occult texts that were said to have been the product of automatic writing—channelled messages from the spirits—such as Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1878), John Ballou Newbrough’s Oahspe (1882), or Frederick Spencer Oliver’s Dweller on Two Planets (1886-1894).
It preceded the semi-religious writing of French astronomer and populariser of scientific ideas, Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) who proposed that beings existed on all the planets of the solar system and had adapted their physical forms to their environment.
It also came before the genre-defining science fiction works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, written between 1863 and 1941 that would flesh out these ideas.
Most significantly, as we’ll see, this short story fits the narrative structure of alien abduction accounts which would not be discovered for well over a hundred years.
“Whether truth or fiction” The Plaindealer says, the story “may be given a place among the curious and wonderful things.”
This much seems true.
Bullard’s Abduction Pattern
In what is considered the most comprehensive study of supposed contact with, and abduction by, aliens, folklorist Thomas E. Bullard identified their pattern, their motifs, and narrative structure.
His detailed comparative study for The Fund for UFO Research published in 1987, reviewed around 300 abduction cases of varying quality. Titled UFO Abductions: The Measure of A Mystery It identified an eight part structure to abduction episodes, with most accounts featuring something from one or more of the core elements. Most significantly he found these features nearly always occurred in the same order.
To quote Bullard these elements are:
1. Capture. Strange beings seize and take the witness aboard a UFO.
2. Examination. These beings subject the witness to a physical and mental examination.
3. Conference. A conversation with the beings follows.
4. Tour. The beings show their captive around the ship.
5. Otherworldly Journey. The ship flies the witness to some strange and
unearthly place.
6. Theophany. An encounter with a divine being occurs.
7. Return. At last the witness comes back to Earth, leaves the ship, and reenters normal life.
8. Aftermath. Physical, mental, and paranormal after effects continue in the wake of the abduction.
Historical Abduction Stories
The catalogue of reports Bullard studied spanned the period from 1985 back to what might be considered the earliest known examples in newspapers and literature.
Bullard pointed out that some of the antecedents to abduction accounts that exist in folklore, and mythology are “oblique and speculative,” meaning that stories of encounters with fairies, or shamanic initiations, which resemble later encounters with aliens, only do so vaguely—they may not include all of the above components, and so are not a perfect match, but still serve as useful references.
One early example said to share some elements of Bullard’s structure is the attempted abduction of Colonel H. G. Shaw. The story made the front page of The Evening Mail, Stockton, CA, on 27 November, 1896. In it, tall, indescribably beautiful warbling “Martians” with skin like “polished ivory” and “lustrous eyes” attempted to pick Shaw up and take him to a strange airship of immense size hovering twenty feet above a nearby canal. However, these wispy aliens lacked the physical strength to lift Shaw, and so failed to progress with their abduction.
Author Jenny Randles points us toward another possible early alien abduction story: an 1868 account from Frederick William Birmingham in Australia. In his notebook he described receiving telepathic instruction from a “spirit” that showed him mathematical formulae which he was instructed to learn. He lost consciousness and woke up with vivid images in his mind. However, this is described as a dream rather than a real event.
Even earlier accounts of contact with non-human entities exist, but they are described as non-physical events—visions or dreams. Most notably, scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg in Other Planets (1758)5, described how alien spirits from several other planets conversed with him “not through words but through mental images.”
This Aerial Excursion story from 1851, is less oblique and speculative than these cases. It appears to be a direct and concrete example that neatly matches the structure Bullard identified—with the exception of a bodily examination. In this one respect it more closely resembles the first “contactees” of the 1950s, who reported only respectful conversation with their alien visitors. The sexual contact or the cold medical bodily invasions would become more common from the 1960s onwards after the famous Betty and Barney Hill case. In the Plaindealer story we see no evidence that a physical examination took place, but we perhaps can’t rule it out because our narrator is overcome and loses consciousness before waking up back where he started his journey hours later. This was also long before hypnotic regression was considered a tool to “recover” lost memories from traumatic events.
The rest of the story follows Bullard’s same general narrative order, and with this in mind, it is a remarkable story and may be the first “nuts-and-bolts” abduction story to involve, a vehicle (a flying machine) physically manipulated by intelligent non-humans.
How the story fits Bullard’s pattern
Capture
Typically at the beginning of an encounter the movement of the witness is disrupted in some way. For example, most reported abductions before 1985 involved people who were doing activities outdoors or driving vehicles, rather than asleep in their bed—which after Whitley Streiber’s 1987 book Communion would be where most abductions begin.
This disruption is typically memorable— what comes after, less so. They are somehow stopped in their tracks by invisible forces or beams of light, or their vehicle is suddenly immobilised, horses halt, or vehicles inexplicably cut out. Jenny Randles coined the term “the Oz factor” to describe the witness noticing that the normal sounds of life, such as birds singing, cease. Time seems to stand still and they find themselves isolated from the world.
To visualise this motif we need only refer to the films Fire In The Sky, (1993) where logger Travis Walton is allegedly locked in a beam of light from a flying saucer, or of Roy Neary’s first encounter with a UFO in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) where his truck’s engine stops and his electrical equipment goes haywire then fails momentarily. Both works of fiction were inspired by allegedly true abduction events.
Like with many future abductees who feel a tingling or prickling sensation indicating the start of their experience, the lead up to our narrator’s encounter begins with him feeling electric shocks as the spirits communicate. His specially designed balloon, the “air ship” Celestia, reaches a point where it is immobilised: “It hung immoveable in the high heavens.” Then, prefiguring the drawing force of a tractor-beam found in so many science fiction stories, it begins to move “at will with or against air currents” in the opposite direction as if under external control. The narrator finds himself isolated in: “an atmosphere of harmony” surrounded by the most “inconceivable melody” which he likens to sounds thought to be produced by heavenly bodies; the “music of the spheres.”
His airship accelerates “swifter and swifter” and he expresses terror as the sensation of weightlessness overwhelms him. Under some unknown influence it is as if he “could walk on the pure and rarified air”. The charged atmosphere is apparent when he touches the cords of the balloon and hears “vibrating tones as sweet as any I had ever heard upon a violin.”
Although it is unusual for an abductee to see a UFO during their encounter—most witnesses find themselves suddenly inside of one—the narrator of this story sees “globes of golden light flit past” him and converge into one, becoming a “luminous cloud” of “molten silver” which envelops him. Another image that seems ahead of it’s time and could now be interpreted as alien technology.
Otherworldly Journey
At first, our narrator’s aerial voyage sounds like any other balloon ride, with the balloonist marvelling at their vantage point over the earth and feeling the temperature drop as the altitude increases. But, the oddity of this view quickly becomes apparent as he remarks, “beneath me lay the earth like a vast bowl.” This description of seeing the earth recede away from the witness is found in several abduction accounts, implying that the witness is embarking on interplanetary space travel.
For example, in 1955 early alien contact Orfeo Angelucci describes looking upon the earth from a flying saucer out in space. Similarly, Carl Higdon, while hunting in Wyoming in 1974, reported looking through the transparent floor of an alien craft as it sped him away from earth. Below him, the planet appeared the size of a basketball.
Eventually, Earth is lost sight of completely and the narrator is surrounded by stars of “immense magnitude,” suspended bodily in “illimitable space”.
Conference
No words are reported spoken during the narrator’s capture, as he becomes overwhelmed and loses consciousness. However, he later believes a dialogue of sorts had occurred between him and “beings which people the air.” The experience was enjoyable, one of “spiritual glory,” and he’s certain the beings are both friendly and encouraging, saying “I am among friends” – which anticipates the 1950s contactees, like George Adamski, who designated alien visitors as benevolent “space brothers”.
This hints at mind-to-mind communication, or telepathy, that would become an almost ubiquitous feature in alien contact reports.
Tour
The narrator is granted glimpses of the cosmos. He’s taken to a place where the earth is no longer visible, where stars shine brightly around him. He is promised a tour of Jupiter on a future voyage, and communion with its “inhabitants”. However, he’s told that travelling there will require preparation, in the form of further ascents into the sky. This is another direct parallel with the notion of repeated alien contact and abduction (whether voluntary or not) and of the concept of “targeted persons” a concept that would only later find form with the Contactee’s of the 1950s and the investigations of Budd Hopkins in the 1980s, with reports of repeated genetic experimentation by aliens of particular human bloodlines.
Theophany [encounter with a divine being]
Again, the narrator’s encounter is described as a religious revelation. Floating in space, separated from the safety of his airship, he senses the presence of shadowy forms that become brilliantly illuminated. “Spectre hands”—possibly humanoid?— “extended towards” him, and at the climax of the experience he feels the dissolution of self, entering a kind of rapture:
The intensity of the enjoyment—spiritual glory—which now flowed upon me was beyond the power of language to represent. I endeavoured again to satisfy myself that the brilliant stars shone around me. I had no power of perception beyond the radiant forms which encircled me; I seemed to rise up from their midst; I stood above them, and — I was lost.
The narrator goes on to describe an out-of-body experience:
I did not seem to see any longer with my natural eyes—infinite perception was my sight. I knew not whether I dwelt in the body or out of it.
This is another sensation commonly reported by alien abductees (as well as those claiming Near Death Experiences).
Incidentally the “infinite” perception he describes is very similar to the “spirit vision” that would be described by Flammarion years later in Lumen (1872). In that story a disembodied alien spirit in conversation with the narrator describes his physics-defying ability to see events and places in detail across the vast distances of the universe—a perception that is not limited to or dependent upon light.
A similar experience would later be reported by abduction witnesses, who describe vivid visions of distant worlds, or cataclysmic events occurring to the Earth. These visions are often provoked by the mesmerising gaze of aliens’ large, black eyes. In this story there are no little grey aliens. The beings are defined no more clearly than “radiant forms,” but their influence on the narrator echoes the sensation of being taken away reported by future abductees. For example famed abduction researcher Dr. John E. Mack surmised that his subjects “felt their experiences are not occurring in our space/time universe, or that space and time have “collapsed.””
Return
After embarking on the voyage at 4 pm on 10 May, 1851, the narrator loses consciousness. He wakes up in the balloon’s basket, back on earth at the point of his departure 15 hours later at 7am, with no memory of the intervening hours or how he descended..
Needless to say this supernatural lapse of time is a well established motif in both fairy tales and later alien abduction reports, where blocks of “missing time” are considered enforced amnesia—enforced by aliens. Investigators attempt to probe these gaps (…) using hypnotic regression to try to recover lost memories.
Aftermath
Like many future abduction witnesses, the narrator is certain that what occurred to him was neither a dream nor a vision, but an actual physical encounter. “Was all a vision? He asks himself. “No. I had left the earth” is his response. He believes it was not an astral projection but a tangible experience. Similar to the 1868 case, the author is given instruction from the spirits. These instructions helped him build a balloon of some novel and secret design, with the promise of further Jovian revelations.
Although frightened at first, the narrator emerges changed for the better. After a brief moment of “ontological shock,”6 he expresses acceptance of a transformed worldview and a thirst for more knowledge about the beings encountered. After a short period without contact from the “spirits”, his paranormal reception of their messages resumes, which gives him hope that future space missions lie ahead.
For those following today’s conversation about UFO disclosure and of retrieved alien technology supposedly in the hands of the US intelligence community, the narrator’s coyness about the specifics of his balloon’s design, the mysterious “new motive force,” and his promise to reveal all, once certain conditions have been met, may strike a cord. It might even seem eerily prophetic, considering the age of the story.
So, its both intriguing and amusing, that in this story we can read elements of today’s conversation about excessive government secrecy and overclassification of materials which might better serve the public good if they were to be disclosed, and also UFO stigma. The author expresses concern that if he reveals his identity before he can offer definitive proof of his contact with another intelligence that he will be considered “insane” and his friends would intervene to prevent further investigation that could lead to self-harm. He’s cautious and wants to be able to provide verification of what he’s seen, because he sees the “great revolutions in the world of thought and opinion” that would could come of it. This is all very familiar.
Was it early science fiction?
In 1851, there wasn’t a huge amount of science fiction literature to draw inspiration from. If this newspaper story is a hoax, where could our author have borrowed ideas to create such a remarkable narrative? Why does it seem such a coincidence that it so closely parallels what future witnesses to alien abduction would report?
As Bullard and other UFO writers point out, fairy tales and shamanic rituals often include a similar narrative structure: a person is whisked away to another world, witnesses strange electrical or atmospheric phenomena, experiences supernatural lapses of time, encounters intelligent non-human beings that they can’t quite remember, and return home fundamentally changed. However, these analogous tales tend not to include a technological element—yet this one does.
Could it have been a real experience?
Perhaps not, because there are some early science fiction works that may have inspired this story. These works don’t fully align with Bullard’s abduction pattern, but offer the seeds of the Aerial Excursion’s structure.
From the very beginning of our conception of flight there have been stories about us ascending to above the earth and reaching for the moon and other planets—even as Edgar Allan Poe describes in The Unparalleled Adventures Of One Hans Pfaal (1835), using flimsy balloons “manufactured entirely of dirty newspapers” or the whimsical levitating powers of glass vials of dew suspended around the waist of Cyrano de Bergerac and to be heated by the sun causing lift.
However, there are a couple of such stories which share some of the more science fiction elements found in the Plaindealer’s story – particularly the guidance of non-human intelligences.
One example is Short Narrative of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and New Planet Discovery by Dutch author Willem Bilderdijk (1813). It bears some resemblance to the Plaindealer story, as it involves another balloon flight in which the pilot is also overcome in mid-air and endures a (physically painful) transmission to another place beyond earth. The strange world he enters is a solid and three dimensional, and contains relics of a lost civilization—as well as strange beasts, (at one point, he’s mistreated by a group of pecking turkeys!).
Another earlier example is The Aerostatic Spy (1785)7. In this anonymously written story the narrator, again a balloonist, has a “supernatural companion”, named Amiel, who fills the balloon with a mysterious gas. Typically balloonists have a limited resource, the gas that provides lift, which must be allowed to escape in order to control their altitude, but Amiel seals this balloon shut. Despite this apparent hindrance to control, they can fly their “machine” all around the world inexhaustibly, hovering over cities and ascending and descending at will.
At each stop along the way the balloon is concealed from view until they are ready to depart again. Amiel, seemingly an “alien” of some kind (whether extraterrestrial or from some distinctly different group), singlehandedly prepares the balloon for flight each time. He appears as a guide to human technological development, but refuses to hand over the secrets directly. Instead, we hear that “mortals” must work incrementally toward mastering the magical technology they are using:
“For (said he [Amiel]) though you see I can easily carry you to any part of the World; yet it will be necessary for you to accustom yourself to machines of mortal construction, in which you are destined to make improvements”
This notion of the narrator being “destined” to be a conduit for human advancement in “Aerostatic Science” is echoed in both the Plaindealer story and later reports from alien contacts.
There’s another allusion to extraterrestrial visitation in that story: at one point, the narrator sees a “cloud” appear over his head. Believing himself to have left the atmosphere, he knows a cloud of any kind should be impossible. He calls it “an aerial vehicle” and an “emanation of fire lighter than air,” a description that future ufologists might interpret as an alien mothership.
A Coincidence, or Something More?
With these two examples in mind perhaps the Plaindealer story is merely a product of the trends of the time: a frontier mentality, emergent balloon technology, popular fascination with spiritualism, the growing belief in life on other worlds, and of hopes to make contact with their inhabitants. These combined forces may have—by coincidence—produced a narrative fitting Bullard’s pattern.
The Plaindealer story appears to satisfy, as Bullard’s study is named The Measure of a Mystery, it adheres to pattern yet to be devised, and we have to ask whether that’s because alien abduction is a real phenomenon or if the ingredients have existed in our culture for much longer than previously thought.
We’re left without a satisfactory answer. The author promises to reveal his identity once his claims can be verified using astronomical details that only he would know from his next journey beyond Earth. He concludes saying: “I must remain unknown at least until I have made another voyage.” It’s unclear from newspaper archives whether the second voyage to Jupiter occurred — perhaps it is still underway…
Further Reading [public domain]
Transcript of the full Plaindealer article.
UFO Abductions: The Measure Of A Mystery. Volume 1: Comparative Study of Abduction Reports. – Thomas E. Bullard (1987)
UFO Abductions: The Measure Of A Mystery. Volume 2: Catalogue Of Cases. -Thomas E. Bullard (1987)
UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative Returns in Technological Guise – Thomas E. Bullard (1989)
Footnotes
- A reprint occurred on 20 November 1851 on the front page of Gallipolis Journal, Ohio, which is in the public domain and available at the Library of Congress historical newspapers archive. Here: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038121/1851-11-20/ed-1/seq-1/ ↩︎
- First published on page 3 of The Cleveland Daily Plaindealer, Vol.7, No. 182, Ohio, Saturday 1 November, 1851.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-evening-post/150383008/ ↩︎ - The phrase “missing time” was popularised by artist turned alien abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, whose 1981 book Missing time: a documented study of UFO abductions was a defining text on the topic. ↩︎
- A Thrilling Narrative – Mr. John Wise’s One Hundred and Thirty-First Aerial Voyage ↩︎
- Other Planets – Emanuel Swedenborg, (1758). ↩︎
- A phrase popularised by Dr. John E. Mack. It describes the “realisation that one’s conception of reality does not hold”. ↩︎
- The Balloon or The Aerostatic Spy – anonymous (1786) Part 1 and Part 2 ↩︎
