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375
The Book of the Damned
·
Charles Fort
318
Or
with
such
power
to
ascend,
I
don't
think
much
myself
of
the
notion
that
it
was
an
escaped
balloon,
partly
deflated.
Nevertheless,
General
Lefroy,
correlating
with
Exclusionism,
attempts
to
give
a
terrestrial
interpretation
to
this
occurrence.
He
argues
that
the
thing
may
have
been
a
balloon
that
had
escaped
from
France
or
England--or
the
only
aerial
thing
of
terrestrial
origin
that,
even
to
this
date
of
about
thirty-five
years
later,
has
been
thought
to
have
crossed
the
Atlantic
Ocean.
He
accounts
for
the
triangular
form
by
deflation--"a
shapeless
bag,
barely
able
to
float."
My
own
acceptance
is
that
great
deflation
does
not
accord
with
observations
upon
its
power
to
ascend.
In
the
Times,
Oct.
1,
1885,
Charles
Harding,
of
the
R.M.S.,
argues
that
if
it
had
been
a
balloon
from
Europe,
surely
it
would
have
been
seen
and
reported
by
many
vessels.
Whether
he
was
as
good
a
Briton
as
the
General
or
not,
he
shows
awareness
of
the
United
States--or
that
the
thing
may
have
been
a
partly
collapsed
balloon
that
had
escaped
from
the
United
States.
General
Lefroy
wrote
to
Nature
about
it
(Nature,
33-99),
saying--whatever
his
sensitivenesses
may
have
been--that
the
columns
of
the
Times
were
"hardly
suitable"
for
such
a
discussion.
If,
in
the
past,
there
had
been
more
persons
like
General
Lefroy,
we'd
have
better
than
the
mere
fragments
of
data
that
in
most
cases
are
too
broken
up
very
well
to
piece
together.
He
took
the
trouble
to
write
to
a
friend
of
his,
W.H.
Gosling,
of
Bermuda--who
also
was
an
extraordinary
person.
He
went
to
the
trouble
of
interviewing
Mrs.
Bassett
and
Mrs.
Lowell.
Their
description
to
him
was
somewhat
different:
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