Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
Speaker 1: there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the cabinet of curiosities. New technology unlocks something inside
Speaker 1: of us, hope, wonder, a sense of what if. And
Speaker 1: the mid nineteenth century was a great example of an
Speaker 1: era full of hope and wonder, as men, women, and
Speaker 1: families packed up their lives to pursue golden dreams. In California,
Speaker 1: the gold Rush drew folks from all walks of life
Speaker 1: to the West Coast, risking their future on a bet.
Speaker 1: There was no guarantee of fortune or success, but there
Speaker 1: was a chance, a possibility, which is honestly all it took.
Speaker 1: And once they arrived, wasn't hard to see that possibility
Speaker 1: was everywhere. But while many saw it along the river
Speaker 1: beds or deep inside the countless minds, a small group
Speaker 1: of dreamers noticed it quite a bit higher up. They
Speaker 1: found each other due to their love for the sky.
Speaker 1: That was their goal, not to sift for flakes along
Speaker 1: the water, but to explore the great unknown. Among their
Speaker 1: ranks was a man named Charles August Albert Delshu, who
Speaker 1: had come to California from Prussia by way of Texas.
Speaker 1: He was an enthusiastic participant in what can only be
Speaker 1: described as wishful experiments. Charles and all the other members
Speaker 1: of the Aero Club dreamt of soaring high above the
Speaker 1: clouds and designed all manner of machinery to get them there. Rutterers, motors,
Speaker 1: and landing gear were attached to machines powered by balloons
Speaker 1: or in some cases a liquid fuel they called lifting fluid.
Speaker 1: But these high flying contraptions weren't just fantasies to the
Speaker 1: Aero Club. They were real aircraft meant to be flown,
Speaker 1: and according to Charles, some actually were. The group constructed
Speaker 1: several of them, testing their viability among the nearby desert
Speaker 1: and mountains. Of course, none of these inventions have survived,
Speaker 1: so it's only fair to ask what happened to them
Speaker 1: and why most of us have never heard of the
Speaker 1: Sonora Aero Club and its aspiring pilots. Part of the
Speaker 1: reason is because of their secrecy. Club members behaved like
Speaker 1: c I A spies. They donned disguises when meeting in
Speaker 1: public and traveled under aliases. They use codes to communicate
Speaker 1: important information or even portions of their top secret plans.
Speaker 1: In fact, the special fuel they used to power their
Speaker 1: machines that lifting fluid, was the reason for the group's
Speaker 1: break up. Its creator, Peter Menace, died without having told
Speaker 1: anyone else how to make it, and that might have
Speaker 1: been how the history of the Sonora Aero Club perished
Speaker 1: as a secret kept by several dozen men with sky
Speaker 1: high dreams. Charles, it seems, didn't even tell his family
Speaker 1: about how he'd spent his days in the California desert,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately he never got the chance. Just a few
Speaker 1: years later, he lost his wife and daughter to yellow fever.
Speaker 1: He remarried, of course, but his new wife also quickly
Speaker 1: passed away, followed by another daughter. It seemed that there'd
Speaker 1: be no one left to carry on his legacy. Fate, however,
Speaker 1: had a different plan. Long after Charles passed away, his
Speaker 1: estate became the responsibility of his descendants. Among his property
Speaker 1: was his home in Houston, where he had first lived
Speaker 1: before coming to California, but the house caught fire in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties and much of what was inside was lost,
Speaker 1: except for a collection of unusual scrap books that he kept.
Speaker 1: They featured complex illustrations of dirigibles and aircraft, using the
Speaker 1: kinds of technology that we can find on airplanes and
Speaker 1: helicopters today. He also kept journals where he documented his
Speaker 1: travels with the Aero Club. It seems that after his
Speaker 1: wife and daughter had passed away, Charles had started keep
Speaker 1: be notebooks, hundreds of them in fact, by working for
Speaker 1: hours at a time to paint, draw and write about
Speaker 1: his life. His family managed to rescue twelve of those
Speaker 1: scrap books, comprising of more than two thousand double sided
Speaker 1: pages of designs and blueprints for fantastical flying machines. They
Speaker 1: didn't see the value in them, though. They were pretty drawings, sure,
Speaker 1: but not worth anything to his surviving descendants, so they
Speaker 1: decided to trash them. A local used furniture dealer named
Speaker 1: Fred Washington stumbled upon these scrap books in journals and
Speaker 1: took them for himself. A few years later, around nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, to the notebooks were found again, this time
Speaker 1: by a young art student. She believed the books were
Speaker 1: too important to be stowed away in a dark closet somewhere,
Speaker 1: so she acquired the collection. Then she set about making
Speaker 1: them public so that they could be admired and studied
Speaker 1: by flight enthusiasts from all over the world. Charles del
Speaker 1: Sho's illustrations had been very well organized, although it was
Speaker 1: clear that they weren't the only ones created. These were
Speaker 1: just the few that had survived. Imagine how history might
Speaker 1: have been changed. Had Charles simply let the world in
Speaker 1: on his little secret, he and Peter Menace could have
Speaker 1: made names for themselves or launched human innovation into the stratosphere. Instead,
Speaker 1: they kept it all to themselves, which meant the world
Speaker 1: had to wait for another group of innovative builders to
Speaker 1: push it into the age of aviation. That's why the
Speaker 1: pages of history only seemed to remember the Wright brothers
Speaker 1: rather than Charles and his secret group of friends who
Speaker 1: took to the sky fifty years before. Jeffrey Morris was
Speaker 1: not a name anyone at McGuire Air Force Base in
Speaker 1: New Jersey would have recognized. It was a pseudonym provided
Speaker 1: by a man in a tricky predicament. Morris had joined
Speaker 1: the military expecting to defer and his country against all threats,
Speaker 1: foreign and domestic. However, one January evening, he confronted something
Speaker 1: unlike he'd ever expected, and lived to tell the tale.
Speaker 1: Between three and five am that day, Morse had spotted
Speaker 1: numerous unidentified objects flying over the base. They had also
Speaker 1: been seen flying over nearby Fort Dix and seemed to
Speaker 1: hover between the two compounds. A Fort Dicks Military Police
Speaker 1: officer had spotted one of the flying objects low to
Speaker 1: the ground before stopping right over his car. The officer
Speaker 1: described it as an oval shape that glowed a bright
Speaker 1: blue green. The MP's radio also died, and when he
Speaker 1: looked through his windshield, he noticed someone standing in front
Speaker 1: of his car. No, not someone something. It was grayish brown,
Speaker 1: roughly four ft tall, with an enlarged head and gangly arms.
Speaker 1: The officer had never seen such a creature. Not knowing
Speaker 1: if it was friendly or danger us, he got out
Speaker 1: of his car and drew his forty five caliber handgun
Speaker 1: from its holster, and then he fired five rounds. Four
Speaker 1: of them hit the creature, while the last one was
Speaker 1: aimed directly at the flying object above. In response, the
Speaker 1: glowing vessel suddenly flew straight up and then nestled itself
Speaker 1: among eleven other ovals just like it in the sky.
Speaker 1: A person or creature he just shot, however, fled toward
Speaker 1: a wooded area between the two vases. Others at Fort
Speaker 1: Dix and McGuire Air Force Base had watched the objects
Speaker 1: in the sky fly off in a tight formation. The MP, though,
Speaker 1: took off through the shortcut in the woods via the runway.
Speaker 1: He had to see what it was that had escaped him.
Speaker 1: Several men on duty joined him, driving toward the fence
Speaker 1: line separating the base from the woods in search of
Speaker 1: the wounded being. They didn't have to go far, though,
Speaker 1: as it had scaled the fence and died several feet away,
Speaker 1: and it was then that the men realized that they
Speaker 1: were face to face with a creature not of this world.
Speaker 1: It's corpse even filled the air with the smell of
Speaker 1: ammonia that stung their noses. Their revelation, though, would be
Speaker 1: short lived. Troops and authorities quickly arrived to rope off
Speaker 1: the area from views. Teams were brought in to collect
Speaker 1: the deceased creature and flied away to an undisclosed location,
Speaker 1: where it was sealed off from the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: including the men who had confronted it near Fort Dicks,
Speaker 1: the MP who had shot it, as well as Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Morse and anyone else present. At the time were all
Speaker 1: sworn to secrecy. No report was ever written about the event,
Speaker 1: and each person involved was threatened with a court martial
Speaker 1: if they ever told anyone about what they had witnessed.
Speaker 1: Years later, in a letter to a researcher named Leonard Stringfield,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Morris explained that he would be leaving the Air
Speaker 1: Force soon and could talk more about the incident then
Speaker 1: when he got out. Morrise did in fact speak with Stringfield,
Speaker 1: giving him a military report about the shooting to establish credibility. However,
Speaker 1: the report was a photocopy and not an origin and
Speaker 1: all anyone could have fabricated it, which hurt his credibility.
Speaker 1: But even without the report, Morse and his story did
Speaker 1: have other merits. As recently as two thousand fifteen U. S.
Speaker 1: Navy pilots had documented their experiences with UFOs over American airspace.
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Ryan Graves had been in the Navy for ten
Speaker 1: years and reported seeing strange objects overhead nearly every day.
Speaker 1: They would scream across the sky as high as thirty
Speaker 1: thousand feet without leaving any trails in their wake. Some
Speaker 1: even hovered in place for up to twelve hours, more
Speaker 1: than any man made vessel was capable of at the time.
Speaker 1: One year earlier, in two thousand fourteen, another pilot almost
Speaker 1: flew straight into what he described as a sphere in
Speaker 1: casing a cube. Another spotted something on his radar system
Speaker 1: and infrared camera, but couldn't see it at all with
Speaker 1: the naked eye or through the use of his helmet.
Speaker 1: Cam Ufo encounters have become fairly common occurrences among pilots
Speaker 1: since the nineteen eighties, when radar systems were upgraded to
Speaker 1: pick up small, learn faster aircraft. And while that's not
Speaker 1: to say they're all of alien origin, the military still
Speaker 1: refuses to confirm or deny any of the reports, whether
Speaker 1: or not those reports have been true. At least we
Speaker 1: can all agree on one thing. All of the stories
Speaker 1: are certainly curious. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
Speaker 1: of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky
Speaker 1: in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
Speaker 1: winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
Speaker 1: and television show, and you can learn all about it
Speaker 1: over at the World of lore dot com, and until
Speaker 1: next time, stay curious, ye