96,000 words. 350-plus pages. Photographs, illustrations.IN THE 19th CENTURY'S DYING YEARS, the skies above 20 American States became a stage for awe-inspiring events.Countless witnesses, including public administrators, physicians, police and community leaders testified that they had watched immense winged and propellered 'airships' hovering above cities, towns, lakes and farms. Some of the intruders, seen by thousands below, had raked the landscape with dazzling spotlights. Others had landed - vanishing, when disturbed, in fiery explosions of speed. This was in an era seven years before the Wright Brothers first flew in their slow and flimsy prototype plane. The Great American Airship Flap lasted for 14 months and was chronicled in hundreds of newspapers across the nation. Most reports assumed that the astonishing skyships were exclusive to the United States. But historians have since verified that the futuristic vehicles also spread fear in Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Australia and New Zealand.What were these seemingly miraculous craft? Descriptions and drawings of the time present them as propellered products of clunky Victorian technology - contradictorily endowed with breathtaking maneuverability and speed. More than a century later,the skyships remain one of the profoundest mysteries to have confronted humankind.Author, journalist and screenwriter JOHN PINKNEY has devoted most of his career to investigating strange and bizarre occurrences. In this unique book he describes a myriad of the well-documented enigmas that have tantalized him most: THE GIGANTIC SHADOW ON MARS. On March 27 1989, moments before its communications systems blacked out, the Russian space probe Phobos trasnsmitted two mysterious images to ground control. The first showed an immense cylindrical object; the second a shadow 25 kilometres long which the intruder was apparently casting on the planetary surface. And that wasn't alll. In September Britain's Channel 4 televised further photographs from the aborted mission -images almost too bizarre to be believed... THE GLOWING CROSS THAT ASTONISHED AUSTRALIA. In 1907 a young railway worker died while courageously trying to halt a runaway train carriage. Eleven years after he was buried in a country cemetery the stone cross above his grave began to glow with a white light that illumined the graveyard and the fields beyond. Not until 1978, after the phenomenon had quietly persisted for 60 years,were the nation's major newspapers and TV networks alerted to the phenomenon. Scientific experts visited the site and offered conflicting explanations. But the mystery of the glowing cross remains unsolved... PLUS The magazine article that foretold President Reagan's shooting, in uncanny detail, 3 months ahead. The portraits of a long-dead couple that repeatedly grew in mold on an Oxford chapel wall. The murdered woman who named her killer in a dream. The enigma of the empty lighthouse. Fatal Contact: The Dark History of Aircraft and UFOs.And many more mysteries that neither science nor logic can explain.OTHER EBOOKS by JOHN PINKNEY: HAUNTED: The Ghosts that Share Our World...THE MARY CELESTE SYNDROME: Ships Stripped of all Human Life...AUSTRALIA''S STRANGEST MYSTERIES...A PARANORMAL FILE...THIRST: An Inheritance of Evil...THE GIRL WHO TOUCHED INFINITY...THE KEY AND THE FOUNTAIN.
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