The Book of the Damned

"An unusual phenomenon noticed by Lieut. Herschel, Oct. 17 and 18, 1870, while observing the sun, at Bangalore, India." Lieut. Herschel had noticed dark shadows crossing the sun--but away from the sun there were luminous, moving images. For two days bodies passed in a continuous stream, varying in size and velocity. The Lieutenant tries to explain, as we shall see, but he says: "As it was, the continuous flight, for two whole days, in such numbers, in the upper regions of the air, of beasts that left no stragglers, is a wonder of natural history, if not of astronomy." He tried different focusing--he saw wings--perhaps he saw planes. He says that he saw upon the objects either wings or phantom-like appendages. Then he saw something that was so bizarre that, in the fullness of his nineteenth-centuriness, he writes: "There was no longer doubt: they were locusts or flies of some sort." One of them had paused. It had hovered. Then it had whisked off. The Editor says that at that time "countless locusts had descended upon certain parts of India." We now have an instance that is extraordinary in several respects--super-voyagers or super-ravagers; angels, ragamuffins, crusaders, emigrants, aeronauts, or aerial elephants, or bison or dinosaurs--except that I think the thing had planes or wings--one of them has been photographed. It may be that in the history of photography no more extraordinary picture than this has ever been taken. L'Astronomie, 1885-347: That, at the Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico, Aug. 12, 1883, about 2,500 meters above sea level, were seen a large number of small luminous bodies, entering upon the disk of the sun. M. Bonilla telegraphed to the Observatories of the City of Mexico and of Puebla. Word came back that the bodies were not visible there. Because of this parallax, M. Bonilla placed the bodies "relatively near the earth." But when we find out what he called "relatively near the earth"--birds or bugs or hosts of a Super-Tamerlane or army of a celestial Richard Coeur de Lion--our heresies rejoice anyway. His estimate is "less distance than the moon."