When it comes to exploring the unexplained, UFOs are my favorite topic to investigate. So in honor of Thanksgiving, we will look at some surprising evidence of extraterrestrials that we find deep in America’s past. No, I’m not referring to the hundreds of Native American accounts we have of otherworldly visitors. Everybody knows that unless white folks write it down then it’s just mythology. Believe it or not, pilgrims (the whitest people ever) were the earliest Europeans in North America to record a number of UFO sightings.
The first known incident happened in 1639, just 9 years after the establishment of Plymouth colony. The report comes from The History of New England, 1630-1639, a book by John Winthrop, a puritan and the first elected Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His writings are considered the central source for the history of the area.
One night in March of 1639, James Everell “a sober, discreet man” and two companions boarded a small boat and set out for a trip on the Muddy River in Boston. They had been moving downstream for about a mile when the night’s mysterious events began. The three men were suddenly confronted with the appearance of a huge, bright light hovering in the sky. The light “flamed up” as it hovered and appeared to be about “three yards square.” As they watched, the light “contracted into the figure of a swine” and moved “swift as an arrow” in the direction of Charlton. For several hours, the light moved back and forth in the sky between Everell’s location and Charlton. When the light finally disappeared, the men noticed that they had somehow been carried against the tide back to the place where they had embarked. Wait a second. Either these pilgrims ate some magic mushrooms or this matches perfectly with what some modern UFO witnesses report with close encounters! Winthrop’s book offers us even more strangeness to consider.
In 1644, a rash of bizarre sightings was again reported in Boston. The account says that mysterious lights appeared about 2 weeks after the destruction of a ship commanded by Captain John Chaddock, a pirate whose ship was intentionally blown up in the harbor. On several occasions, Bostonians saw a light resembling the moon rise from the water near the site of the sunken ship that merged with an identical light and then separated again, repeating this over and over while shooting out flames and sparks. The people of Boston attributed the lights to the ghost of one of the dead sailors, a confessed necromancer allegedly responsible for the ship’s destruction. According to Winthrop, this anonymous person had “done some strange things by his art in his Avay from Virginia hither;” to make things even more strange, Winthrop reports:
“all the bodies blown up were found but his, which never was. Hence it is left to be inferred that the master teacher of the black art of necromancy took away the body as well as the soul of his pupil, at the moment of the catastrophe.”
Were the strange lights, the ship’s destruction and alleged sorcerer whose body is never recovered simply a coincidence? Even when examined separately, they are wildly fascinating events worth more investigation. Could the “sorcerer” have actually been an extraterrestrial or a time traveler sent to change the course of history and then teleported away after sinking the ship? It would make for a great movie sci-fi movie script, Pilgrims and Aliens. Unfortunately, the truth about what really happened may remain a mystery like so many events in the distant past. When it comes to unraveling Earth’s biggest mysteries, I need all the help I can get, so your comments and stories are welcome. Keep exploring!
(Murfreesboro Pulse November 2012)
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