Two.
John F. Winston
In the past I have reported on being given some reproductions
of ancient airships that were in the museum where I work. I
tuned into them and gave my verbal report about them. Two weeks
ago I was led to have the the pictures and information brought
out to me and I went through them again. I gave another verbal
report and told the person in charge that I believe that a person
made the paintings and they were renditions of the ancient
aircraftes that were seen world wide about the 1860s. This person
was a member of a group called the Sonora Aero Club and was
financed by a group that had unlimited funds.
I also stated that this craft was housed at an airport just
South of the Columbia, Calif. airport back then. The airport
that was used by the ancient aircraft is no longer in existence,
as far as I know. The person in charge of the museum said,
"That is the conclusion we came to also.
I had them make a copy of the material and they gave it to
me. It would be very hard for me to put this information on
the internet so hoped that something would happen so that the
information would be sent to me in simple text form so I could
put it on the internet.
During the next few days I found on the Internet three web
sites that contain most of that information and I have
stated them on the end of this part of the material. You
might like to look up this material because it does show the
paintings of the ancient crafts.
Here is the information I found in the web sites.
.............................................................
.............................................................
Subject: Dimension 1890s Airship Puzzle's Missing Piece
In 1899, Charles Dellschau, a grouchy retired butcher, began
to paint amazing airships. His intricate collages show shiplike
decks supported by striped balloon pontoons; they show
bright-colored helicopters and evil-looking striped dirigibles
outfitted for w-r; they show crews of dapper little gentlemen
accompanied by the occasional cat. Many pages are bedecked with
little newspaper clippings about aviation, and text in his weird
Germanic lettering celebrates the pure, unexcelled marvelousness
of the flying machines.
Nearly a century later, folk-art collectors hold the works in
high esteem.
A page from Dellschau's notebooks can fetch as much as
$15,000, a hefty price even in a booming market. A New York
Times reviewer said that Dellschau possesses "a charming style
that presages Monty Python"; the Village Voice called the works
"sweetly bizarre."
It's hard to say what the old man would have made of such
praise; he doesn't seem to have thought of himself as an artist.
It's not clear even whether he intended the notebooks for
anyone's eyes but his own. The drawings are crudely sewn
together with shoelaces and thread, and newsprint is glued on
the edge of each leaf as a spine. Watercolor airships occupy
both sides of the pages.
Taken at face value, Dellschau's collages document the feats
of the Sonora Aero Club, (JW Sonora, Calif. is the town where
I now live. I live close to Sonora.) a se-retive group
dedicated to the creation of "aeros," or flying machines. In
code, and bad spelling in both English and German, Dellschau
recounted how, in his youth 50 years before, he and fellow
club members gleefully ruled the skies of Gold Rush California,
piloting fantastical airships of their own invention.
Perhaps the notebooks' tales were merely fictions,
Dellschau's efforts to entertain himself. Perhaps the old man
had grown a tad deranged. Or perhaps Dellschau was actually
recounting the exploits of his youth, embellishing here and
there, but remaining somewhat faithful to the facts. Oddly,
that last supposition -- the strangest possibility of all --
seems the most likely. One line of thought even ties the
Sonora club to a rash of UFOsightings.
But untangling Dellschau's tale is a complicated matter,
one that involves penetrating many levels of s-crecy,
including that of the very people trying to solve his riddles.
The puzzle of Dellschau's aeros intrigues both art historians
and UFO enthusiasts. Not surprising, most of the hard facts
come from the art world.
Two years ago, William Steen, a mild-mannered frame
designer at the Menil Collection, pieced together documents
indicating the sketchy official outlines of Dellschau's life.
Steen modestly claims to be no scholar, but his four-sheet
chronology of Dellschau's life provides the most reliable
biography available.
Steen found the immigration record that shows Dellschau's
1853 arrival in the United States. The young immigrant told
officials that he was 25 years old; had been born in
Brandenburg, Prussia; traveled here from Hamburg and listed
his occupation as a farmer.
Steen uncovered Dellschau's letter of citizenship, which
traces his whereabouts to Harris County in 1856 and Fort
Bend County in 1860. Between those years, the historical
documents are silent about Dellschau's whereabouts.
And it's precisely during that gap that Dellschau claims
the Sonora club's exploits took place. So far, Steen has not
been able to locate documents showing that Dellschau even
lived in California in the 1850s. Nor do there seem to be
credible reports of unidentified flying objects in the area.
Dellschau rendered some comments in code. Apparently,
whatever it was that he had to say was too private for his
own notebooks.
But where the historical records are silent, the artist's
notebooks make noisy, extravagant claims. Dellschau
represents himself as the club's draftsman and scribe, rather
than as one of its inventors or fliers; he never draws
himself aboard an aero. He illustrates a remarkable number
of designs -- maybe as many as 100 -- for airships with
names such as Aero Mio, Aero Trump, Aero Schnabel and Aero
Mary. (There's even an Aero Jourdan.) All were powered by
a secret formula that Dellschau called both "supe" and
"suppe"; it could both negate gravity and drive the ships'
wheels, side paddles and compressor motors.
One drawing tells the story of Adolf Goetz's Aero
Goeit, recklessly commandeered by an unskilled pilot; the
airship got tangled in a Sequoia tree, and the interloper
died of a broken neck. Another cautionary tale involves
Jacob Mischer, a pilot who went down in flames in the
Aero Gander; Dellschau hints that he was sabotaged by
other club members, who suspected him of using the aircraft
to make money by hauling cargo.
But most of the airships' flights were safe -- and great
fun.
Dellschau depicts his aviators enjoying hot breakfasts,
and delights in enumerating the ships' clever gadgets. He
often bedecked his watercolor paintings with little press
clippings -- from Scientific American, the Houston Chronicle
and an unidentified German-language newspaper -- that
recount air disasters; Dellschau called them "press blooms."
Against paintings of the Sonora club's successes, the
clippings seem intended as an ironic counterpoint.
Dellschau never seems to explain why the club worked
so hard to protect its se-recy, but he shows the members
going to great lengths to do so. By day, the Aero Goeit
was disguised as a gypsy wagon, so it could travel open
roads undetected. Dellschau writes that a club member was
banned from developing a machine because he'd talked to
outsiders. And of course, even years after the club
disbanded, many of Dellschau's own comments are rendered
in code.
Apparently, whatever it was that he had to say was too
private even for his own notebooks.
Often the drawings show the heroic Peter Mennis, pilot
of the Aero Goose and creator of the near-magical suppe.
According to Dellschau's notebooks, Mennis died in the
1860s, and without his secret formula, the club could
fly no longer and was forced to disband. In picture
after picture, Dellschau laments ennis's demise. "Peter
Mennis you are not forgotten," he writes in one; in
another, "no more suppe."
Could such wonders have happened? It's a difficult
question. If the club were as secretive as Dellschau
indicates, the California desert offered privacy. Sonora
was a Gold Rush boomtown, six miles south of Columbia,
now the site of the Columbia Airport. The airport's land
is isolated and flat -- ideal for testing aircraft
-- and is surrounded by mostly hilly terrain.
Dellschau's drawings show equipment that would have
been revolutionary for the 1850s: gliding keels,
revolving generators powered by a chemical reaction,
bendable rubber joints, revolving shear blades, even a
retractable landing gear. It was heady stuff, highly
advanced given the state of technology (the Wright
Brothers didn't make their famous flight until 1903).
But half a century later, when the old man actually
made the drawings, many of those technologies had grown
closer to reality.
The historical record of Dellschau picks up again in
1861. A certificate from that year shows that Dellschau
married Antonia Hilt, a widow with a four-year-old
daughter, Elizabeth. It's not clear where Dellschau
met and married her or where the family first lived
together.
In 1865, they were living in Richmond, Texas, a
haven for newly arrived Germans and Czechs. That year,
Dellschau signed an amnesty oath, swearing that as
a former member of the Confederacy, he wouldn't
oppose the U.S. laws that freed slaves. (W.M.
Von-Maszewski, the Texas historian who translated
Dellschau's journals, thinks he may have worked under
the Confederates as a civilian.) According to that
oath, Dellschau was a butcher. His height was five
feet three inches; his hair, auburn; eyes, hazel;
and complexion, fair. The one verifiable photo of
Dellschau bears out that description and shows him
to be a bit gruff and Teutonic, with a large,
round forehead beneath a line of receding hair and
with bushy eyebrows and a moustache that covers
his mouth.
Dellschau's wife, Antonia, bore him three children.
In 1877, tragedy struck: Antonia died, and their
six-year-old son, Edward, died two weeks later.
Census records show that Dellschau remained in
Richmond for a while afterward with his daughter
Bertha.
In 1889, the phone directory lists both Dellschau
and Bertha in Houston, living with Dellschau's
stepdaughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Anton
Stelzig, a harness- and saddle-maker and the founder
of the Western clothing store that still exists in
Houston.
(JW These are the web sites that discuss the
ancient airships.)
http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/airships.htm
http://www.rawvision.com/back/dellschau/dellsc.html
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1308.htm
Part 1.
John Winston. john...@mlode.com
Subject: Ancient Airships. Part 2. July 15, 2004.
Here's a bit of personal information. I work on tuesdays at the
Tuolumne County Museum from about 10:00am to 12:00am. It's in an old
jail, in Sonora, Calif. and if I come in a little late I take off
early to make up for it.
.....................................................................
.....................................................................
Sometime before 1892, Dellschau's daughter Bertha was diagnosed
with tuberculosis and was institutionalized. By 1898, the sanatorium
wrote Dellschau that she wouldn't live much longer.
For a few years after moving to Houston, Dellschau worked as a
salesman and clerk for Stelzig's saddlery and harness business on
Main Street, between Congress and Franklin. But the aging butcher
-- in his late 50s when he moved to Houston -- never mastered work
in a service industry. "They sent him home," says Leo Stelzig Jr.,
Anton's grandson. "He was kind of abrupt and wasn't smooth with the
customers."
It was then that Dellschau began to fill his days by filling his
notebooks.
He wrote a two-part, 200-page journal and produced roughly 5,000
ink-and-watercolor drawings before his death in 1923. By Steen's
calculation, that works out to the furious rate of a drawing every
day or two. "He had something to say," Steen concludes. "The most
important thing in his life was his work."
Leo Stelzig Jr. was two years old when Dellschau died and, as a
boy, used to rummage through the attic looking for old letters whose
stamps could grace his collection. In the process, he came across
Dellschau's belongings and marveled at the bizarre aeros.
Dellschau's notebooks languished in the attic until sometime in
the 1960s.
According to Steen's search of public records, the fire department
found the house a fire hazard and ordered that it be cleared of
debris. A nurse who'd been hired to care for Anton Stelzig's two
aging sisters attacked the job zealously and in the process
consigned many of the Stelzigs' valuables to a trash heap on the
curb. Among the losses were old World War I uniforms, some very old
records and -- worst of all -- Dellschau's notebooks. Now 74, Leo
Stelzig shakes his head sadly as he recounts the nurse's words: "I
took care of that mess and cleaned it all up."
At the Washington Street dump, an unidentified trash man sold the
notebooks to junk man Fred Washington for $100. Washington took
them to his O.K. Trading Center on Washington Avenue, where they lay
stacked on the floor, covered with a tarp because the building's
roof leaked.
In 1969, Mary Jane Victor was an art history student at the
University of St. Thomas -- and a regular patron of the O.K. Trading
Center. She remembers being amazed to come across the scrapbooks.
At the university art department, Victor was working for art
patron Dominique de Menil, a Schlumberger heiress famous for her
eye for surrealists and the primitive art that inspired them. Victor
promptly told de Menil about her find and put her in touch with the
junk dealer. Soon after, the heiress Washington paid $1,500 for
four of the earliest notebooks.
"Dellschau for her was an eccentric," recalls Steen. "She had a
wonderful affinity for eccentrics." Half joking, she told Steen she
was especially drawn to the coded phrase "DM=XX" scrawled across the
top of many drawings. She thought DM stood for "Dominique de Menil."
And the rest somehow equaled her own death.
Soon after de Menil acquired the notebooks, she exhibited some of
their leaves in "Flight," a University of St. Thomas show on the
subject. And it was there that Pete Navarro, one of the most dogged
investigators of Dellschau's mysteries, first encountered the aeros.
Navarro, a Houston commercial artist, was intrigued by UFOs,
especially by a mysterious rash of airship sightings near the turn
of the century, not long before Dellschau began his drawings.
Navarro read about the St. Thomas exhibition one morning at the
breakfast table. And when he saw Dellschau's drawings, he felt
there had to be a connection to the sightings.
Ufologists believe that between November 1896 and April 1897,
thousands of Americans in 18 states between California and Indiana
saw a curious dirigible-like flying machine floating eastward. No
physical evidence of a ship or a designer has ever surfaced, but
newspapers such as the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, San
Antonio Daily Express and Chicago Tribune devoted space to the
sightings. In this century, authors Daniel Cohen and William
Chariton have published books on the subject.
The mysterious craft was first spotted on November 17, 1896, by
R.L. Lowery, near a brewery in Sacramento, California. According to
various newspaper reports, the craft seemed to travel eastward. In
spring, it was spotted in Texas.
At 1:16 a.m. on April 17, 1897, the Reverend J.W. Smith saw what
he thought was a shooting star in the night sky of Childress,
Texas, then decided it was really a flying machine. Eventually he
recognized it as the much-discussed cigar-shaped airship.
Four days after Smith's UFO sighting, the Houston Daily Post
gave a lengthy account of his and other spottings of the same
airship, a 30-foot-long skiff-shaped contraption outfitted with
revolving wheels and sails.
Jim Nelson, a farmer from Atlanta, Texas, recalled glimmers of
red, green and blue lights and "a glaring gleam of white light"
that shone directly in front of the airship. In Belton, a crowd
witnessed the same vehicle the next night. They claimed its pilots
spoke loudly as they flew overhead, but the ship's velocity was so
great, their words were lost in the wind.
According to other newspaper accounts, witnesses managed to talk
with the pilots. Sometimes townspeople even came upon the crew
members, who were apparently making repairs to their marvelous
machine and were willing to chat.
In 1972, three years after de Menil bought her four notebooks,
Pete Navarro learned that more Dellschau notebooks were collecting
dust at Washington's junk shop. Nobody wanted them, so Navarro gave
the dealer $65 for one book. Hooked by what he saw, he returned
and offered $500 more for the remaining seven.
Navarro tried to sell four of the notebooks to de Menil; she
chose not to buy them -- perhaps because she liked the work in her
own notebooks better. De Menil owned some of Dellschau's earliest
notebooks and believed that they included his best work. As the
artist aged, his works grew looser, more expressionistic; de Menil
seems to have preferred his earlier precision.
But for Navarro, the notebooks weren't about artistic quality;
they were pieces of a historical puzzle. He visited Helen and Tommy
Britton, cousins of Leo Jr. Helen promised she'd try to find more
books and pictures of Dellschau that were hidden around the family's
old house, but she died before she could locate anything. Navarro
also talked to Tommy Britton, who was a preteen when Dellschau died.
Now in his 80s, he may be the last living relative who remembers
Dellschau. (Britton couldn't be reached for this story.)
After culling a vast number of such press clippings, Navarro
created an elaborate map of every Texas sighting and wrote several
papers. Some are on file at the Houston Public Library's Texas
archive; others are available on the Internet at www.keelynet.com.
In "The Mysterious Mr. Wilson and the Books of Dellschau,"
co-written with UFO enthusiast Jimmy Ward, Navarro posits a
connection between Dellschau's clandestine society and a mysterious
pilot named Hiram Wilson mentioned in an article by the San Antonio
Daily Express on April 26, 1897, about a local airship sighting. The
article identifies the airship's occupants as Wilson, from Goshen,
New York; his father, Willard H. Wilson, assistant master mechanic
of the New York Central Railroad; and their co-pilot C.J. Walsh,
an electrical engineer from San Francisco.
In that story, Hiram Wilson divulged to witnesses that his airship
design came from an uncle. Navarro believes that the uncle could
have been another Wilson -- the Sonora club member Tosh Wilson
mentioned in one of Dellschau's watercolors. According to Navarro,
Dellschau's coded messages say that Tosh searched seven years to
rediscover suppe, the lost fuel, and finally succeeded.
Navarro has found no trace of a Hiram Wilson residing in Goshen.
But he does offer evidence of his presence at 1897 airship sightings
in Greenville, Texas (on April 16); near Lake Charles, Louisiana
(on April 19); near Beaumont, --------valde, Texas (April 20);
Lacoste, Texas (April 24); and Eagle Pass, Texas (April 24).
On April 28, the Galveston Daily News ran the headline "Airship
Inventor Wilson." The article reported the inventor's encounter with
one Captain Akers, a customs agent from Eagle Pass. Akers told the
newspaper that Wilson "was a finely educated man about 24 years of
age and seemed to have money with which to prosecute his
investigations."
Based on such reports, Navarro proposes several scenarios. Perhaps
the ship spotted near San Antonio had been flown by both Hiram and
Willard Wilson. Or perhaps each pilot was steering his own airship
across Texas. (This would explain why witnesses living a distance
from one another offered simultaneous sightings of a man who
identified himself as Wilson.) Navarro also speculates that one of
these Wilsons was the same Tosh Wilson who had once belonged to the
Sonora Aero Club. In that scenario, Tosh would have been reliving
the glory days Dellschau could only illustrate in his notebooks.
To confirm the aero club's activities, Navarro has traveled to
Sonora, talked to historians, searched the newspapers and even
visited all the cemeteries. He found nothing. At times, he says, he
couldn't help thinking that Dellschau made everything up.
Eventually, whether the Sonora club was a dream or real stopped
mattering to Navarro. One day, he remembers being absorbed by a
passage inscribed in one of the drawings: "Wonder Weaver, you will
unriddle my writings." Navarro grew convinced that he and his
brother, Rudy, "were weaving wonders." He says of Dellschau, "Maybe
we had similar minds."
To crack Dellschau's 40-symbol code, Navarro enlisted the help of
his brother, Rudy, and a couple who spoke German. He says the
effort took only one month, but he won't release the key or a
literal translation.
Navarro will talk only about the same phrase that enchanted de
Menil: "DM=XX." To Navarro, it stands for "NYMZA," an acronym for
a s-cret society that controlled the Sonora club's doings. Based
on Navarro's papers, some ufologists have speculated that NYMZA
was controlled by -- what else? -- aliens; Navarro doesn't buy
that theory.
Part 2.
John Winston. john...@mlode.com