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