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About this time an enormous number of luminous bodies were seen to rise from the horizon in Germany. They shone with remarkably brilliant light and passed horizontally from east to west. A carbonacious (sic) mass like brown coal fell from the sky in Argentina. The red, blue and gray hailstones fell in 1880. An object of quartzite was reported to fall at Schroon Lake, New York. Ricco, at the Palermo Observatory, saw long parallel line of bodies crossing the sun. The wheels of light in the sea were seen again in May and June of 1880, reported from more than one vessel at sea. The three lights moving in the ravine at St. Petersburg were seen on July 30, 1880. Luminous phenomena continued to appear on the moon throughout 1879-80, including a luminous line, cable or wall which was seen January 23, definitely dividing in half the very brilliant interior of the prominent lunar crater Aristarchus, which has been carefully studied for centuries by those who suspect the moon of harboring life in some form. This was seen and sketched by Trouvelot, one of the few skilled astronomical observers with artistic ability. A dead "sea serpent" was found at sea in early 1880, and sailors danced on its upturned belly. Something similar, like a turtle sixty feel long and forty feet wide was reported in the New Zealand Times, in December 1883, and there were several reports of huge marine animals during the comet years. IF SO CALLED "SEA MONSTER OR SERPENT WAS A L-M SHIP IT /S STILL THERE UNDERSEA IF IF S-Ms NEUTRALIZED IT: THE L-MS WILL NOT HAVE COME BACK OR CALLED FOR IT, IN S-M TERRITORY. The flying machine over Louisville, Kentucky was of 1880 vintage, and also the thing changing shape over Madisonville, Kentucky. The British trading ship, Atlanta, bound for Bermuda, was lost in 1880 — without trace in that region so well known today as the area of missing planes and ships. There was an invasion of insects — flies — in 1880. Clouds of them, millions and millions appeared over Havre, France, as though from the Atlantic. On August 21, they blackened the air and seemed exhausted when they fell. The same day a cloud of long, black flies, so large that it took twenty minutes to pass, blackened the sky over Nova Scotia. Another cloud on September first. East or west, they seemed to come from the mysterious Atlantic. In November, a host of flies overwhelmed a schooner off the coast of Norfolk, England, lasting over five hours and driving the crew below decks. On September 4 the steamboat Martin was swarmed by a cloud of flies that reached as far as the eye could see; a drift of black snow. On the fifth a cloud of black flies appeared over Gusboro, Nova Scotia; took over half an hour to pass. According to the New York Times, a woman was killed in 1880 in a closed room which nobody had entered. Explanations were that she had been killed by lightning, but bedposts were chopped as by a basen a hatchet. The year 1880 was in the midst of what we have chosen to call the years of the comets. There were six comets in the skies of 1880. The 19th century as a whole showed increasing activity in comet discovery, and in the number of bright comets. In part this can be attributed to increasing interest in telescopic work, and to improved availability and quality of snall telescopes suitable for amateurs who made up a growing body wishing to participate in astronomical research, but lacked the great, fine-quality instruments of the large observatories. But such activity cannot in any way account for the very bright, very spectacular comets of 1880, 1880, and 1882, with their attendant phenomena, many of which can conservatively be described as abnormal. One had two tails; one aft and one forward, and appeared to have nuclei exhibiting independent motion within the head or the coma. 152 There seems almost always to be poltergeist activity in England, but an especially cirulent (sic) case broke out in October, 1880.