Ancient Airships. Part 2.
John F. Winston
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.
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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