Page Content (OCR)
of the period and would have been completely impractical. The only available lights in the 1890s and early 1900s were dim incandescent lights, and they would not have produced the blinding glare so often described in these reports. The few automobiles of that time used kerosene or gasoline lanterns as headlights. It was not until the middle 1960s that airliners and military planes began regularly to employ powerful strobe lights and new, more brilliant landing lights. The landing lights are, of course, used only during takeoffs and descents. The strobe lights are now often mounted on the tops and bottoms of the fuselage and flash off and, on with a brilliant white glare. They are easily recognizable and seldom mistaken for the prismatic UFO lights. There has also been some recent experimentation with searchlights mounted on helicopters. Let’s compare a searchlight story of 1875 with a more recent one. Harold I. Velt’s The Sacred Book of Ancient America quotes from a contemporary account by J. J. Cornish: On account of working at daily labor this baptism was performed on Wednesday, late in the evening of December 29, 1875, an intensely dark night. After our prayer meeting Mrs. John Taylor and Miss Sarah Lively were baptized by me in the River Thames in London, Ontario, Canada* when suddenly there came a very beautiful light from heaven, which rested on all — both members and nonmembers — brighter than the sun at noonday...It came down with a sound like a mighty rushing wind. We could hear it far above in the distance, and as it reached the place where we stood we were enveloped in the brightest and most beautiful light I ever saw — the glory of the Lord. The light was round, straight up and down, like a shaft from heaven to earth, and just as bright on the inside edge as it was in the center, and so far as we could see it was just as dark on the outer edge as it was a mile away... After baptism and dismissal the light did not go out, but gradually went up until it vanished from our sight... electromagnetic energy (which is what light is) that did not reflect on the area outside of the immediate beam. This is conumonly described by UFO witnesses. The witnesses to the Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, landing in 1966 reported that the angular object which settled onto a beach was 94 / Operation Trojan Horse Here we seem to have had a directed and controlled beam of London, Ontario, has been the site of many interesting UFO events in the past twenty years.