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three other local authorities who confirm my report,’’ Liabeuf wrote. “Not to mention the dozens of peasants who were present.” As the crowd gathered around the mysterious object, ‘‘a sort of door opened, and there came out a person, just like us, but dressed in a strange manner, in clothes adhering completely to the body, and seeing this crowd of people, this person murmured something incomprehensible and ran into the wood.” The peasants backed away from the object fearfully, and a few moments later it exploded silently and nothing was left but a fine powder. A search for the mysterious man was launched, ‘‘but he seemed to have dissolved in thin air.”” Here, in 1790, we have a description comparable to the modern ufonaut reports of a man wearing a tight-fitting coverall type of garment. (According to a story filed by the Lusitania News Service in April 1960, hundreds of villagers in Beira, Mozambique, East Africa, saw a whistling orange object land in a field, and ‘“‘tiny little men” leaped out of it and ran into the forest just as the thing exploded violently. Those “little men”’ could not be found, either.) The Zurich Central Library has an old drawing of the strange event that took place over Germany on April 14, 1561. A large number of “plates,” ‘‘blood-colored crosses”’ and ‘‘two great tubes” staged an aerial dogfight on that date, enthralling and frightening the whole population of Nuremberg. Five years later a similar group of objects is said to have appeared over Basel, Switzerland. Some of them turned red and faded away, just as modern UFOs have been reported to do. A sketch of this incident is also in Zurich’s Wickiana collection. The late Charles Fort, an eccentric but indefatigable researcher, spent much of his life wading through yellowing newspapers and forgotten history books to ferret out Ripleyesque items. Without realizing it, he became the first ufologist, and his Book of the Damned and other works are treasure troves of unexplained aerial phenomena. He discovered that 1846, for example, was a most peculiar year. It rained blood—real blood according to the newspaper accounts of the day—in several areas around the world. And all kinds of odd lights and shapes were seen in the sky. Some very peculiar people also turned up in Europe at that time, prancing around the English countryside in silver uniforms, capes and helmets, with red lights on their chests. These beings were human in size but seemed to possess the ability to leap great distances. So the British newspapers referred to them as ‘‘spring-heeled Jacks.”’ Old Jack got plumb away from all those who turned out to search for him after each Machines from Beyond Time / 67