Wednesday,
October 22, 2014
In January 1644, America's first USO, or Unidentified Submerged
Object, was sighted. A USO is an aquatic UFO. Governor John Winthrop made two entries in his
journal in regards to this unholy affair.
Captain
John Chaddock's ship blew up at Battery Street in the North End. Five men lost
their lives. Soon after, unexplained lights appeared in the sky. The citizens
of Boston eventually ascertained that one of Chaddock's men had conjured up the
spirits of the dead sailors, which was the origin of the mysterious lights.
Chaddock was essentially a pirate, and had previously attempted to colonize
Trinidad with a party of Bostonians.
"Exactly 16 days after the blowing up of
Capt. Chaddock's ill-fated ship and crew, and just at 'the witching hour of
midnight,' as Shakespeare calls it, 'when churchyards yawn and hell itself
breathes forth contagion in the air,' three men in a boat, coming toward
Boston—a strange hour for reputable puritans to be so far from home—saw two bright lights rise out of the water,
at the place where the vessel had been blown up, just off the [old] North Ferry
slip.
They made the still more inexplicable
[observation] that the two lights assumed the form of a man, and sailed leisurely off over the water to the
south, keeping but a short distance from the shore, till it reached a point now
occupied by Rowe's Wharf, at the foot of Franklin St.,
where it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared just 15 minutes before. The
story was told and retold about the town, for the next few days, till the whole
population had reached a mental condition that made them capable of seeing the
ghosts of Chaddock's buccaneers, if given any kind of chance.
A week after the
event just described, the old records say, 'the twin lights were seen again by many,' but this time they arose
off Castle Island, and after traveling through the
air just 12 minutes, vanished at the spot where the remains of the ship were
resting. The restless spirits of the deep continued to make things
satisfactorily terrifying for those who were 'out late 'o night' along the waterfront.
On one occasion, the story was, that at 8
o'clock, a light resembling the
moon rose from the water at the wreck, sailed through the air till it
was over the highest point of 'Nottle's Island,' now East Boston—but then
uninhabited, and an ideal place for ghostly gambols—and there it was met by its
twin light, the two suddenly merging into one, then parting, and thus
continuing uniting and separating, as if in playful mood, many times, all the
while 'shooting out sometimes flames
and sometimes sparkles.' Finally, uniting permanently, the big
illuminated disc floated off behind the hill on 'Nottle's Island,' disappearing
from sight of the wondering eyes of Bostonians.
Later returns from different quarters showed
that while the North enders were watching this pyrotechnic display the people
along the shore from [old] North Ferry to Fort Hill were being treated to a
different sort of hair-raising demonstration, a voice having been heard on the water, toward South Boston—then
also uninhabited—crying out in a most dreadful manner, 'Boy! Boy! Come Away! Come Away!' the voice frequently shifting its
location, in the whimsical manner, from point to point, separated by a great
distance. It was declared that the voice was heard above 20 times 'by divers[e]
Godly persons.'
Three weeks after the perturbed spirits first
began their peregrinations they went finally to rest, as far as our local
annals testify, and on their last appearance the agonizing voice had been
transferred to the scene of the wreck in the North end.
The public discussion stimulated by the
phenomena brought out the fact that the man who snapped the pistol that ignited
the powder that blew up the ship that released the ghost had professed to be a
necromancer [a communicator with the spirit world], and was known to have done
many wonderful things during his last voyage, and was also suspected of having
murdered his master some time before in Virginia, though unfortunately these
important facts had not been imparted to the local authorities until the necromancer
had done his worst.
It was considered a matter of especial
significance that all the bodies of the crew, save only his, had been recovered
before the spiritualistic manifestations began, and, as it was considered one
of the cardinal principles of ghostly etiquette not to walk—or even fly—by
night, after one's 'earthly tabernacle' had been given a reputable internment,
it was reasonably clear that the cause of the psychic disturbance must have
been the failure to recover the body of the missing sailor."
In 1639, the first UFO sighting occurred over Boston Harbor,
and then a major UFO sighting took place at New Haven, CT,
in 1647.
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