The Book of the Damned

Scientific American, 46-49: Two triangular, luminous appearances reported by several observers in Lebanon, Conn., evening of July 3, 1882, on the moon's upper limb. They disappeared, and two dark triangular appearances that looked like notches were seen three minutes later upon the lower limb. They approached each other, met and instantly disappeared. The merger here is notches that have at times been seen upon the moon's limb: thought to be cross sections of craters (Monthly Notices, R.A.S., 37-432). But these appearances of July 3, 1882, were vast upon the moon--"seemed to be cutting off or obliterating nearly a quarter of its surface." Something else that may have looked like a vast black crow poised over this earth from the moon: Monthly Weather Review, 41-599: Description of a shadow in the sky, of some unseen body, April 8, 1913, Fort Worth, Texas--supposed to have been cast by an unseen cloud--this patch of shade moved with the declining sun. Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1854-410: Account by two observers of a faint but distinctly triangular object, visible for six nights in the sky. It was observed from two stations that were not far apart. But the parallax was considerable. Whatever it was, it was, acceptably, relatively close to this earth. I should say that relatively to phenomena of light we are in confusion as great as some of the discords that orthodoxy is in relatively to light. Broadly and intermediatistically, our position is: That light is not really and necessarily light--any more than is anything else really and necessarily anything--but an interpretation of a mode of force, as I suppose we have to call it, as light. At sea level, the earth's atmosphere interprets sunlight as red or orange or yellow. High up on mountains the sun is blue. Very high up on mountains the zenith is black. Or it is orthodoxy to say that in inter-planetary space, where there is no air, there is no light. So then the sun and comets are black, but this earth's atmosphere, or, rather, dust particles in it, interpret radiations from these black objects as light.