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Five The Grand Deception The ‘“‘secret’”’ of the flying saucers was exposed in 1896, not by the phenomenon itself but by the hidden patterns now revealed in UFO activity of a single week that November. The pattern was a classic of carefully planned confusion and deception. Thanksgiving week 1896 marked the beginning of the great “‘airship mystery”’ in the United States. Strange luminous objects and cigar-shaped craft were first reported over California. The mayors of both Oakland and San Francisco went on record as having seen the things. All the descrip- tions as published by the San Francisco Call, San Francisco Chronicle and other leading journals of the period fell into the now-familiar categories. Brilliant multicolored lights, bobbing and weaving as if they were on yo-yo strings, were seen over Sacramento. People in Oakland reported an egg-shaped vessel about 150 feet long with four rotorlike arms; a giant light mounted underneath. It lit up the ground below. A San Jose, California, electrician named J. A. Heron claimed that the airship pilots enlisted him to make some repairs on the machine. He was taken to a desolate field north of San Francisco for the job and was rewarded by being taken on a flight to Hawaii. He said the craft made the 4,400-mile trip in twenty-four hours. Later his wife told reporters that he had been home in bed on the night of the alleged trip. Another man, William Bull Meek of Comptonville, California, told Teporters that the airship landed near his home and that he enjoyed a brief chat with the pilot—a bearded man who told him that the ship ‘‘had come from the Montezuma Mountains.”’ Crews on ships were seeing glowing spheres and saucer-shaped machines rising out of the water and flying away while the Wright brothers were still fussing with gliders. These ocean-bound disks and “wheels” apparently concentrated their activities around the coasts of Japan and China throughout the Gay Nineties, but they were also seen in