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to keep from being detected. I will make an attempt to visit the planet Mars before I put the airship on public exhibition. Weight is no object to me. I suspend all gravitation by placing a small wire around an object. You see I have a 4-ton improved Hotchkiss gun on board, besides about ten tons of ammunition. I was making preparations to go over to Cuba and kill off the Spanish army if hostilities had not ceased, but now my plans are changed and I may go to the aid of the Armenians. To use this improved gun we only have to pour the cartridges into a hopper and press a button and it fires 63,000 times per minute. No, gravitation is not in my way. I place my wire around this 4-ton gun and hold it with one hand and take aim. Oh, I could place my anti-gravitation wire around the national Capitol building and take it by the dome and bring it over and set it down in Harrisburg as easy as I could an inkstand. Distance is almost overcome; why, we came over the suburbs of Dallas at 12:10, less than an hour ago, and we have traveled very slowly. I could take breakfast here, do my shopping in Paris and be back here for dinner without inconvenience, as soon as I get my new propellers completed. He offered Senator Harris a ride in the craft, but Harris declined. So the man and his crew of three climbed back aboard, and the object rose into the night. Now this whole tale sounds like another editorial concoction. There has never been any kind of gun that could fire 63,000 times per minute, and all of the talk about antigravity smells of a put-on. Yet the story contains some interesting ingredients. The interjection of the Cuban crisis that then existed, and which later led to the Spanish-American War, and the mention of the Armenians who were then being slaughtered by the Turks, falls into a familiar pattern found in all contactee stories; i.e., the total awareness of contemporary events. And if the story isn’t a fabrica- tion, then the bearded man chose, either by accident or design, a first-rate witness to tell it to—an ex-Senator. In the story he carefully planted the important points that the airship was a secret terrestrial invention that would soon be made public. Other contactees in other areas were repeating the same thing. Our final contactee is that ‘well-known Iron Mountain railroad conductor,”’ the redoubtable Captain James Hooton, who claimed to have seen the airship, talked to men aboard it, and who drew an elaborate sketch for the newspapers, which showed a cigar-shaped vehicle covered with vanes, wings and propellers. ‘Those. who know Mr. Hooton will vouch for the truth of his statement,’’ the Arkansas Gazette of April 22, 1007 nwAsna 1897, noted. The Grand Deception / 79