sent to kidnap an earthling for unknowable but potentially nefarious purposes. This has been seen by some as an early attempt at alien abduction; it is apparently the first published account of explicitly extraterrestrial beings attempting to kidnap humans into their spacecraft. The mystery light reappeared over Sacramento on the evening of November 21 1896. It was also seen over Folsom, San Francisco, Oakland, Modesto, Manteca, Sebastopol and several other cities later that same evening and was reportedly viewed by hundreds of witnesses. One witness from Arkansas – allegedly a former state senator Harris – was supposedly told by an airship pilot (during the tensions leading up to the Spanish–American War) that the craft was bound for Cuba, to use its "Hotchkiss gun" to "kill Spaniards". In one account from Texas, three men reported an encounter with an airship and with "five peculiarly dressed men" who asserted that they were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and had learned English from the 1553 North Pole expedition led by Hugh Willoughby. On February 2, 1897, the Omaha Bee reported an airship sighting over Hastings, Nebraska, the previous day. An article in the Albion Weekly News reported that two witnesses saw an airship crash just inches from where they were standing. The airship suddenly disappeared, with a man standing where the vessel had been. The airship pilot showed the men a small device that supposedly enabled him to shrink the airship small enough to store the vessel in his pocket. A rival newspaper, the Wilsonville Review, playfully claimed that its own editor was an additional witness to the incident and that he heard the pilot say "Weiver eht rof ebircsbus!" The phrase he allegedly heard is "subscribe for the Review" spelled backwards. On April 10, 1897, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a story reporting that one W.H. Hopkins encountered a grounded airship about 20 feet in length and 8 feet in diameter near the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri. The vehicle was apparently propelled by three large propellers and crewed by a beautiful, nude woman and a bearded man, also nude. Hopkins attempted with some difficulty to communicate with the crew in order to ascertain their origins. Eventually they understood what Hopkins was asking of them and they both pointed to the sky and "uttered something that sounded like the word Mars." An April 16, 1897, a story published by the Table