crawfords

According to a story in the Indianapolis Journal for September 5, 1891, at 2 o'clock the previous morning a "horrible
apparition" appeared in the western sky, where two men hitching up a wagon saw it. One hundred feet in the air, 20 feet
long and 8 feet wide, the headless, oblong thing -apparently some bizarre variety of living creature - propelled itself with
several pairs of fins and circles a nearby house. It disappeared to the east for a short time and then returned. The two
men, their curiosity exhausted, gave vent to an understandable impulse to take to their heels. They were not, however, the
only witnesses. A Methodist pastor, the Rev. G. W. Switzer, and his wife also observed the phenomenon.

The creature was back the following evening, and this time hundreds of Crawfordsville's citizens saw its volently flapping
fins and flaming red "eye." The creature "squirmed as if in agony" and made a "wheezing plaintive sound" as it hovered
at 300 feet. At one point it swooped over a band of onlookers, who swore they felt is "hot breath."

Years alter, when Charles Fort came upon the story in the September 10, 1891 issue of the Brooklyn Eagle, he was
suspicious, "convinced that there probably never been a Rev. G. W. Switzer, of Crawfordsville." Curious almost in spite of
himself, he investigated and, to his surprise "learned that the Rev. G. W. Switzer had lived in Crawfordsville, in
September 1891." He wrote him at his present address in Michigan, Rev. Switzer replied that he would send a full
account of his sighting as soon as he got back from current travels. Unfortunately, Fort added, "I have been unable to get
him to send that account...

But in time Vincent Gaddis, a Crawfordsville newspaper reporter and member of the Fortean Society, was able to do
better than that. He interviewed the town's older residents, who said the story was true and told him about the September
6 mass sighting, which had not been reported in the press. Gaddis wrote, "All the reports refer to this object as a living
thing" - in other words, one of the hypothetical atmospheric life forms that would.

Bibliography: Clark, Jerome. (1993). Unexplained!. Washington, D.C.: Visible Ink Press.