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How Did a Victorian Alien Cow Abduction Hoax End Up in a Rod Serling Documentary?

5/31/2015

17 Comments

 
Last week I mentioned that I had watched UFOs: It Has Begun, a 1979 update of an earlier documentary hosted by Rod Serling about ancient astronauts and UFOs, in which ufologist Jacques Vallée provides thirty minutes of new material about cattle mutilations. In this added footage, Vallée makes mention of something I had never heard of, but which took me a few days to get around to researching. Vallée claimed that in 1897, a UFO abducted and mutilated a cow, the first such claim on record. This was certainly an interesting enough story that I had to look up the text of the alleged statement made by rancher Alexander Hamilton in 1897 and printed April 23 of that year in the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate, a Kansas newspaper:
Last Monday night, about 10:30, we were awakened by a noise among the cattle. I arose, thinking that perhaps my bulldog was performing some of his pranks, but upon going to the door saw to my utter astonishment an airship slowly descending upon my cow lot, about forty rods from the house.

Calling my tenant, Gid Heslip, and my son Wall, we seized some axes and ran to the corral. Meanwhile, the ship had been descending until it was not more than thirty feet above the ground, and we came within fifty yards of it.

It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible - it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said.  

Every part of the vessel which was not transparent was of a dark reddish color. We stood mute with wonder and fright, when some noise attracted their attention and they turned a light directly upon us. Immediately on catching sight of us they turned on some unknown power, and a great turbine wheel, about thirty feet in diameter, which was slowly revolving below the craft began to buzz and the vessel rose lightly as a bird. When about three hundred feet above us it seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year-old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest. 

We went home but I was so frightened I could not sleep. Rising early Tuesday, I started out by horse, hoping to find some trace of my cow. This I failed to do, but coming back in the evening found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of Le Roy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing with its big lights and hideous people.   I don't know whether they are devils or angels, or what, but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don't want any more to do with them.
After this statement, twelve community members signed an affidavit asserting that the cow abduction story was true—well, not exactly. They testified that Hamilton was not in the habit of lying, which wasn’t exactly the same thing. The affidavit—known only from a version printed beneath the article—has never been seen in public records. It might be worth noting that the man whose name is listed first on the affidavit, E. V. Wharton, the newly installed state oil inspector (his term began April 1, 1897), was also a prominent newspaper publisher and editor.

What’s interesting is that this story made it into the 1979 UFOs: It Has Begun since three years earlier, in 1976, one of the last living people to have been present at the time of the cow story explained to a Fortean Times researcher that Hamilton was a prominent teller of tall tales and an upstanding member of the local Liar’s Club. He had made the whole story up as a joke. “The club soon broke up after the ‘airship and cow’ story,” Ethel L. Shaw, then 93, remembered. “I guess that one had topped them all.” According to a 1981 book, three decades before, in 1943, the former editor of the Advocate, Edward F. Hudson, admitted that he and Hamilton had concocted the story as a hoax, calling it “the airship story that we made up.” In fact, Alexander Hamilton told anyone who asked that the story was a hoax down to his death in 1912, at which point he was still receiving letters about the hoax.

This certainly was not the only hoax story told during the months of the Great Airship Mystery in 1897. The Aurora, Texas airship “crash” was another hoax that began as a joking tall tale, and newspapers of the time devoted whole pages to publishing the best “tall tales” about the occupants of such ships.

But that isn’t the only set of facts ufologists have failed to check. The cow abduction story, as reported in UFO and ancient astronaut books like Bruce Rex’s Architects of the Underworld and Maximillian de Lafayette’s various UFO works, alleges that rancher Alexander Hamilton should be believed because he was a member of Congress, either at the time of the abduction (Lafayette) or previously (Rex). This is an easily verifiable claim, and in looking at the list of representatives who served in Congress in the nineteenth century, there is none named Alexander Hamilton. He was actually a member of the Kansas state legislature.

All of the real facts ended up published in Fate magazine in 1977 under Jerome Clark’s byline (having chosen to publish in Fate over the Fortean Times). Jacques Vallée almost certainly would have seen and read the article’s findings.

So how did the story end up in the movie? Easy: Jacques Vallée was one of the first to unearth it from the newspaper archives in the 1960s, along with known fabricator Frank Edwards, and Vallée at first failed to check any of the facts, simply accepting the story at face value because newspapers don’t lie. Why he chose to stick with the story is not known to me; perhaps he was too invested in his discovery to brook challenge. Ironically enough, it was the mass media—movies first, then radio—that killed off the local liars’ clubs and the amusements they provided, as part of the general collapse of civic and community organizations and clubs that continued apace through the twentieth century, to the point that Vallée and Edwards had no inkling of the cultural context of the old newspaper stories they read.

17 Comments
It's a fix
5/31/2015 01:34:20 am

The documentary also featured Lonnie Zamora, who "witnessed a Soccoro Saucer" roughly same period of time when a Ufologist set up his own organization.

Reply
Alaric
5/31/2015 01:58:11 am

I'm pretty sure I've seen this statement before, years ago, in a Daniel Cohen book (I think it was his Encyclopedia of the Strange).

Reply
Shane Sullivan
5/31/2015 12:43:45 pm

I remember Daniel Cohen. 'The Mummy's Curse' was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. I liked the skeptical, anti-Fortean conclusions he usually reached.

Reply
Bob Jase
5/31/2015 04:12:56 am

More likely it was Cohen's 'The Great Airship Mystery' - a pretty good & skeptical book.

BTW, I'd love to be abducted by Victorian alien cows.

Reply
Alaric
5/31/2015 04:59:04 am

Except that I never read 'The Great Airship Mystery'. "Encyclopedia of the Strange' has a section on the airship mystery, though, so I think that's where I read it.

Reply
Clete
5/31/2015 06:19:51 am

Ok, now I understand what happened to the alien that was supposed to be buried in Aurora, Texas in 1897. It was actually a cow flying the space ship that crashed. After the "crash", the citizens of Aurora, Texas had, in the great tradition of the state, had a barbeque.

Reply
terry the censor
6/1/2015 06:18:08 pm

That theory does explain all the facts.

Reply
titus pullo
5/31/2015 08:47:46 am

I seem to remember something in one of Clive Cussler's non fiction books about mystery sea wrecks and his searching for them about the USS Akon the US Navy's dirigible which was seen by residents of Ohio/WV on a scheduled flight exploding. No wreckage was ever found since the flight has been cancelled. But a few years later the airship did crash over the ocean near NJ. I found numerous references to this story just now on the web. I wonder the history of the story...anyone know. Sounds like an urban legend written by some fringe author in the 50s or 60s.

Reply
Colin Hunt
5/31/2015 08:49:16 am

It's for real. Nobody can argue with the facts!! See http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21234_real-ufo-abduction-of-a-cow-google_news

Reply
spookyparadigm
5/31/2015 10:29:49 am

Oh yes, that's a good one from the airship fad.

If you're getting into more "traditional" UFOs, oh man you are going to have a lot of material to work with re: hoaxing and mistakes. Though that said, there seems to have been more work on running these cases to ground contra historical "aliens" (ancient aliens per se (pyramids, Inka, etc. that are explicitly archaeological) get some treatment at least, whereas your efforts at taking on the historical cases before the great airship fad is not common.

PS: Went on a Jack the Ripper tour last night. Talk about your tangle of threads.

Reply
Only Me
5/31/2015 01:41:57 pm

Oh, do tell about the tour. What did you think about it?

Reply
spookyparadigm
6/2/2015 11:51:08 am

The tour was meh despite the guide's good efforts. The problem is, and this was actually a theme he focused on, the reality can't compete with the legend of the fog-shrouded alleys (it wasn't even foggy on the night of any of the murders) and the man in the top hat with the surgeon's bag. Also, too many of the buildings are gone or changed too much, a problem I ran into with a tour I led once in the French Quarter. I tried to take the group on that fantastic bit from the movie JFK, where Guy Bannister and Oswald's offices are on two sides of the same building corner but different streets. Problem is, that was the one part of the tour I had not checked out in person first, and it turns out that building was destroyed for a federal courthouse.

The tour where the guide whipped out dowsing rods at Avebury was much better.

Only Me
5/31/2015 01:40:51 pm

I love your research into these stories. Here, we have aliens traveling about in "airships" powered by turbines, but along comes Von Daniken, claiming they used rocket propulsion and atomic weapons because: ancient texts.

I wonder if AATs have asked why we aren't in space visiting the aliens themselves, using the same technology. :)

Reply
Shane Sullivan
5/31/2015 06:36:33 pm

And then the movie Stargate came out, and the aliens stopped having to bother with clumsy interstellar vehicles.

But not until after the Vril powered UFOs packed with Nazi ETs from Aldebaran showed up...

Reply
terry the censor
6/1/2015 06:31:37 pm

Has anyone written a Star Wars book that injects loads of UFO lore? that would be a hoot!

terry the censor
6/1/2015 06:30:27 pm

This case and Aurora are entry-level tests for how reliable a UFO book is.

Any self-respecting researcher knows they are hoaxes. Jason cites Jerome Clark. Kevin Randle also has run to ground every detail and found these stories to be mere pranks. These guys are unflappable proponents of alien visitation, have swallowed some real whoppers in the past, but when it came to these cases, they said, "Enough!"

But Jim Marrs, in Alien Agenda, uses every mystery monger trick up his sleeve to keep alive Aurora.

(Those citing Daniel Cohen: I am a fan too! Myths of the Space Age [1967] is a great place to start. World of Ufos [1978] is a good read too. I hope to work my way through all his UFO books. They make a nice respite from the partisan wars of ufology.)

Reply
Peggy Hamilton
6/4/2015 06:19:30 pm

I am not related to the Hamilton of the story, but was living with my family (I was ages 6-8) in LeRoy, Kansas in the early 60s. My father got a call from someone who was researching the incident and hoping to get a descendant to confirm it. He was disappointed when my father told him that our being there with the same family name was entirely coincidental.

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