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overhead wisely cut the rope and took off. The anchor remained behind, as in the other stories, and was installed on the church doors. Researcher Lucius Farish remarked, ‘Reviewing the similarities of these reports, one is almost tempted to speculate that someone merely updated the ancient accounts. Yet, a citizen of Merkel, Texas, possessing a copy of the Speculum Regali [or the Otia Imperialia] in 1897 would be fully as fantastic as the reports themselves!” A farmer fifteen miles north of Sioux City, Iowa, Robert Hibbard, claimed a distressing experience with an anchor-dragging UFO early in. April 1897. A dispatch which appeared in the April 5 edition of the Saginaw, Michigan, Evening News stated that ‘‘Hibbard’s reputation for truth has never been bad, and the general opinion is that either he ‘had em’ or dreamed his remarkable experience.” The article continues: On the night in question, he says he was tramping about his farm in the moonlight... when suddenly a dark body, lighted on each side, with a row of what looked like incandescent lamps, loomed up some distance to the south of him at a height of perhaps a mile from the ground. He watched it intently until it was directly over his head. At this point the skipper evidently decided to turn around. In accomplishing this maneuver the machine sank considerably. Hibbard did not notice a drag rope with a grapnel attached which dangled from the rear of the car until suddenly, as the machine rose again from the ground, it hooked itself firmly in his trousers and shot away again to the south. Had it risen to any considerable height, the result, Hibbard thinks, would have been disastrous. Either his weight was sufficient to keep it near terra firma, however, or the operator did not care to ascend to a higher level. On the bank of the dry run, where the farmer finally made his escape, grows a small sapling. Hibbard passed near this obstruction in his flight, and as a last resort, grabbed it with both hands. Instantly there was a sound of tearing cloth and the machine went on with a section of Hibbard’s unmentionables, while Hibbard himself fell precipitately into the run. He related his experience to several neighbors and despite their grins of incredulity, firmly maintains the truth of the story. We have only two choices: We can either dismiss all four of these stories as being somehow derivative of one another and pure poppycock; or we canassume that mysterious airships, all dragging anchors, appeared in 956, 1200, and 1897. There are, in fact, a number of other reports in which UFOs were said to be dragging something along the ground. That still doesn’t prove that anchors are standard equipment on some of the 154 / Operation Trojan Horse