October 15, 2019 • 10 mins
Today's tour through the Cabinet takes place off the ground. But what we'll see is entirely unexpected.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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
(00:29):
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.
(00:51):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:38):
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,
(02:00):
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
(02:21):
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
(02:43):
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
(03:06):
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
(03:30):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:13):
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
(04:36):
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
(04:57):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:49):
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.
(06:13):
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
(06:33):
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.
(06:54):
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
(07:18):
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.
(07:38):
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.
(08:00):
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,
(08:23):
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,
(08:43):
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.
(09:04):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:48):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:33):
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
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
(00:29):
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.
(00:51):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:38):
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,
(02:00):
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
(02:21):
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
(02:43):
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
(03:06):
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
(03:30):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:13):
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
(04:36):
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
(04:57):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:49):
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.
(06:13):
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
(06:33):
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.
(06:54):
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
(07:18):
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.
(07:38):
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.
(08:00):
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,
(08:23):
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,
(08:43):
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.
(09:04):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:48):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:33):
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
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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