The Book of the Damned

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: