Nov 21 2008
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The World’s First UFO Crash
Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier were wealthy French paper manufacturers with clients as famous as Louis XVI. They are remembered more readily by history because they devised a method for lifting large weights by trapping hot air in huge silk taffeta bags.
When word of their discoveries reached Paris, the French Academy of Sciences invited them to give a demonstration. Less than a month before their historic 41-foot balloon carried a chicken, a sheep, and a duck over two miles at a height of 1500 feet in front of the King, Royal Court and Marie Antoinette, the Academy requested one of their members to try building his own.
Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles was a young physicist who started out with little or no idea about what the Montgolfiers were using to send their inventions skyward. He only knew that they were employing some sort of gas in airtight bags. He had knowledge of the experiments of British scientist Henry Cavendish, who in 1766 discovered a method for producing and trapping hydrogen efficiently. With his assistants, Charles spent three days processing five hundred pounds of sulfuric acid with a thousand pounds of iron to fill a twelve-foot diameter, rubber-impregnated silk balloon with the gas.
On August 27, 1783, fifty thousand cheering Parisians watched Charles’ invention rise to three thousand feet and disappear into the haze. It landed fifteen miles away in the village of Gonesse. Peasants and farmers, well out of the loop on contemporary events, approached it with dread. Writing eighty years later. British historian Hatton Turner described the melee:
…on first sight it is supposed by many to to have come from another world; many fly; others, more sensible, think it is a monstrous bird. After it has alighted, there is yet some motion in it from the gas it still contains. A small crowd gains courage from numbers, and for an hour approaches by gradual steps, hoping meanwhile the monster will take flight. At length one bolder than the rest takes his gun, stalks carefully to within shot, fires, witnesses the monster shrink, gives a shout of triumph, and the crowd rushes in with flails and pitchforks. One tears what he thinks to be the skin, and causes a poisonous stench; again all retire. Shame, no doubt, now urges them on, and they tie the cause of alarm to a horse’s tail, who gallops across the country, tearing it to shreds.
“It sure as hell smells like swamp gas!”
As a result of this panic, the crown issued a statement which began, “A discovery has been made, which the government deems it right to make known, so that alarm be not occasioned on the people.”
If the French government had thought of it, they could have kept the whole thing a secret by telling the public to be aware of strange airships from distant planets which were to be reported immediately to the local authorities, and if found on the Earth, to be left alone until the army could be summoned to dispose of these dangerous denizens from the skies. They could also have spread information that those who believed wild stories about airships were insane.
As it turned out, the French were the first to use balloons in warfare, specifically as an early form of aerial reconnaissance. On June 2, 1794, Captain Jean Marie-Joseph Coutelle rose over a battlefield near the Belgian border, where French forces were battling the Austrian Army. Tethered to the ground, he took along a telescope and reported on the enemy’s movements, which turned the battle decisively for France.
Italy was on the receiving end of the earliest “fugo” attack when in 1849, Austria launched small, unmanned hot air balloons during a siege of Venice. The devices were designed to carry 30 pound bombs with slow-burning fuses which were timed to explode when they settled back to the ground. They didn’t work very well, just like the Japanese inventions of WWII.
The episode in Gonesse shows that humans will often confront something new and unexpected with a sort of frightened awe, and has parallels with the cargo cult phenomenon in the South Pacific islands during and after World War II. Rigid belief systems put us all at a disadvantage, whether in the 18th century, or the 21st.
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November 22nd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I’m invoking Laplace’s Law on this one.
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Drew,
The thing just leaked. No complicated pressure differentials to worry about.
November 23rd, 2008 at 2:46 am
It seems ironic that they combated the Devil with pitchforks.
November 23rd, 2008 at 4:43 am
Adam,
“Use the tools of the enemy against him.”
November 24th, 2008 at 5:53 am
I remember this event from a wonderful French TV cartoon
November 24th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Brilliant!
November 24th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Hey, Greg, not to get too far off topic but there’s a video clip of some sort of crash that I’ve seen in quite a few documentaries. There’s never any comment about it either pro or con that I’ve heard and no information given as to where the video was shot or any of the circumstances. At the end of a recent video article on CNN they play the short clip. This glowing, diskoid shape screaming along and slamming into the ground and apparently fragmenting into many pieces. Do you (or anyone else) know the background on this clip? I’d really appreciate knowing ‘coz I’ve always been curious about this one. Here is the link to the CNN story. The clip is at the very end of the video:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/11/24/obrien.aliens.not.just.crazy.cnn
~Raven~
November 24th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Raven,
I wrote about this one on June 5th of last year. It was never identified, but was promoted by questionable sources.
November 25th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Greg: Last night’s flying dream ended with me being sucked into (or “deflated” depending on your perspective) into this bunch of balloons, each a different color.
November 25th, 2008 at 7:00 am
Drew: You probably were too influenced by the trailer of the UP movie, coming in 2009
November 26th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Ok red pill junkie, you asked for it. Last night I first dreamt that my car was stopped and attacked by these strange chupacabra creatures and then I realized that I was dreaming, while still within my dream, but in fact the creatures from from a Hollywood movie I had watched in an “earlier” dream. Then I was in this perfect fake world — which created everything out of pixels — but I seemed to be the only one to realize that it was a complete fantasy.
Thanks?