Demise of the UFO

If you remember the guys I found watching UFOs out in Hyde Park, well, they've posted a new video from last week.

HardmanChris is right, it doesn't look at all like an airplane.

The thing is, at 8:33 that Wednesday, over in Austin, I was hustling the Cryptopolis writing group outdoors so they could catch a glimpse of the International Space Station. It was about as bright as it gets that night, about as bright as Jupiter.

For anyone who hasn't seen an ISS flyover, you should check out Heavens-above.com and enter in your exact geographic coordinates (which is fairly easy to do with the help of Googlemaps). You can probably catch a couple ISS flyovers a week without standing around watching the sky every night.

There's actually quite a lot of youtube videos of the ISS that look virtually identical to HardmanChris's UFO videos, and the observers express hardly less wonder and amazement.


So, do I have the moral obligation to tell HardmanChris he's spent the last two years of his life videotaping the International Space Station? Is he likely to believe me? Is a delusional faith justified if it makes you feel special?

More robots of the 1920s.

This quartet taken from The San Antonio Light, 16 October, 1928, under the headline "Steel Soldiers May Do Mankind's Fighting."

 

The caption for the above is "Possibly in some grim war of the future the doughboy will have become the "iron boy." The army has enlisted its first mechanical man, "Private Robot," and put him to work at Aberdeen proving grounds.

The Lion Man

You probably don't recognize this. No particular reason you should. But you should tip your hat or salute it anyhow.

This is the Lion Man. (Scan taken from Brian Fagan's very well done Cro-Magnon, which I'll be excerpting here in the near future, 'cause, well, the book has some stuff worth excepting).

The Löwenmensch was taken from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Lone Valley in southern Germany. In 1939 two archaeologists, Otto Völzing and Robert Wetzel, found a Cro-Magnon settlement in the cave, including a huge amount of mammoth ivory fragments. In the late 1960s another archaeologist, Joachim Hahn, started piecing together the larger fragments. The reconstruction was completed in 1988 by Elisabeth Schmid and Ute Wolf.

The finished product is 28.1 centimeters (just over 11 inches) tall. Its pawlike feet don't allow it to stand on its own, so it was clearly meant to be placed in a hole or leaned against something. It is both animal and human.

The Lion Man is 34,000 years old, and is the oldest imaginary being in the world.

I should probably do some riff on the "Most Interesting Man In The World" ad campaign, about how the Lion Man still thinks of dragons as nouveau arrivistes and of the Epic of Gilgamesh as a one-hit wonder, but...the Lion Man is over three times older than the entirety of recorded human civilization. The Lion Man is seventeen times older than the amount of time from the death of Christ to now. I can't summon levity about the Lion Man. Just respect tinged with awe.

Spanish Robots of the Golden Age

Four images of robots from a Spanish newspaper of the 1930s (I've lost the exact citation).
 

 

That's Ruth Elder on the phone with Willie.

 

Ben Thompson, Lawman and Murderer

Ben Thompson stood trial for murder four times, and was convicted once, before the people of Austin made him City Marshal.

I learned about Ben Thompson earlier this year while reading a walking tour guide for a local cemetery. Most of the gravestones on the tour belonged to local figures of stature: Former governors, community leaders, the architectural woodcarver Peter Heinrich Mansbendel, and the sorts of people who have streets and university buildings named after them.

So you can imagine the surprise when I read the abbreviated biography of a man whose life was a bullet-list of bloodshed. Ben Thompson wounded another boy playing guns as a boy, stabbed a Frenchman in New Orleans, shot a burglar, killed three men during the Civil War in non-combat altercations, shot two men in a bar fight in Austin, shot the sheriff of Ellsworth Kansas, shot a theater owner in San Antonio, etc. etc.

The best online writeup of his life is at the Mad Monarchist Blog, which lists the salient murders and shootings, but also throws in relevent biographical info, like how Ben Thompson and his one-armed wife took care of orphans (the Mad Monarchist profiles Ben Thompson because of Thompson's stint in Emperor Maximillian's army).

Looking at such an extensive gunfighter resume, it's a wonder that Ben Thompson isn't more famous. My theory is his name was too dull. Ben Thompson was partners with Bat Masterson, got arrested by Wyatt Earp, and had a business partner killed by Wild Bill Hickok. All those people had far more colorful names. In comparison, "Marshall Thompson" is a pretty plain moniker.

During his lifetime, Ben Thompson had made a name for himself as a ruthless killer. Yet Austin made Ben Thompson City Marshal in 1881 (I haven't found out if this is an elected position). I think about this whenever I write an article about Leonardo Quintana, the Austin police officer who shot Nathaniel Sanders II. I think there is still a part of the collected Austin mindset that sees the world as brutal and cruel, and the only way to protect yourself is to befriend the worst of the lot.

Mall Foxes

Let's consider cryptids. It takes so little for an animal to migrate from the category of pedestrian fauna to an extra-ordinary cryptozoological creature (speaking of which, when did "creature" start to mean an animal that doesn't exist?).

For instance, take the foxes that live at Austin's Highland Mall. They are an elusive animal in an incongruous place. And it takes very little darkness to stymie attempts to record their existence.

I saw two foxes in the mall parking lot last week. They skimmed the asphalt with their noses to the ground, hunting for dropped pieces of food court cuisine. If they were lucky they ate a gumball or licked residual pretzel-dipping sauce. It's amazing how even at a distance they look so little like cats, or dogs, or raccoons, or anything else that you would expect to see.

Each image was more blurry and grainy than the last. I found myself annotating the unconvincing shapes with strident labels.









Even the video seems unconvincing.

Considering this quality of evidence, I could find Bigfoot and chupacabra sleeping in the Dillards dumpsters and never convince anyone.

The Female Spies of China.

Not the current ones, although I'm sure there are some. No, the ones I'm referring to are from decades ago, when we could all root for the Chinese in good conscience.

From the Sandusky Register--yes, Sandusky, Ohio, I'm sure this originated from somewhere else, but I found it in the Register--26 Oct. 1894: 

WAS A FEMALE SPY

She Got  Military Secrets From The Japanese Officers

 

Vancouver, B.C., Oct. 25.--Among advices by the Empress of Japan is news of the arrest at Hiroshima of a female spy, who gives her name as Otaia. She has been using her wiles with effect among Japanese officials, and had several of them at her back [sic] and call, with the result that she was piling up a magnificent load of information for wily old Ei Hung Chang, one of whose extensive household, it appears, she was a member. She is beautiful and accomplished in seductive arts, and as she spoke Japanese fluently, was admirably fitted for the work to which she was assigned. Her accent betrays her Chinese birth. The officers who have been paying for the smiles with military secrets will pay the penalty of their rashness.

 

The context for the preceding was of course the 1894-5 war between China and Japan over Korea.


Thirty years later, almost to the day, in the North-China Herald, 4 October 1924:
 

A Female Spy

 

On Saturday afternoon the Chapel police and military established a guard at the Settlement boundaries and examined women who tried to get out of the native section. They had earlier in the week arrest a woman tattooed on the breast, and assuming, perhaps not without good cause, that an organized band of female spies were at work, they tried to catch others, but it seems that the former victim was the only one to fall into the net. Reports to the effect that this woman had been paraded throughout Chapei for three days are absolutely false, though the woman was marched from the place of arrest to the police headquarters. This promenade probably gave rise to the other story.
 

The context for that article was Lu Rongting's attempt to to reacquire power in Jiangsu, and conflict between the forces of warlords in and around the Chapei/Zhabei section of Shanghai.