[dropcap]The[/dropcap] modern Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) craze began in the late 1940s, when a wave of people reported seeing strange objects in the skies above America.
Indeed, it was in 947 the term flying saucer entered the popular consciousness after pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed several brightly-lit saucer-like objects weaving in and out of distant mountain peaks while he was flying in Washington State.
This wasn’t the first wave of UFO sightings, however. An earlier wave occurred in Britain in 1909, when hundreds of people described flying objects shaped like dirigibles and emitting beams of light carrying out extremely advanced manoeuvres overhead. A decade earlier, throughout 1896 and ’97, there was a rash on similar sightings in the United States.
But these weren’t the first accounts of alien spacecraft on record. Legends of god-like beings coming from the heavens exist in many cultures. Throughout North America, there are numerous caves that date back thousands of years. These paintings figures and objects much like the modern imagery of aliens and flying saucers.
One intriguing legend comes from the First Nations people of central Ontario. Their ‘Skyman’ tale may in fact be one of the earliest alien encounters on record.
According to the story recorded in 1917 by ethnologist Colonel G.E. Laidlaw, 500 years ago there was a large Ojibwa village about 550 native people living somewhere in our region. One day, a pair of them stumbled upon a stranger sitting on the grass in a field. This figure, a male, was notably “clean and shining bright.”
The natives approached the stranger and asked who he was and how he came to be in the field. “I am not one of you. I do not belong to this land. I dropped down from above,” the stranger explained.
Showing unusual hospitality, the Ojibwa invited him back to their village. The stranger agreed, but on one condition: “Go home and clean the place where I will stay, and when you come back for me, I will go with you for a few days.”
Agreeing, the Ojibwa men went back to their community, told their fellow villagers about their experience, and cleaned the hut where they would house the ‘Skyman.’
The stranger did in fact accompany them to their village, but he was clearly restless. He watched the skies often and told people that in two days something would come and get him to take him back up to the sky.
One afternoon, Skyman looked up and said, “It is coming.” The villagers craned their necks and turned their eyes above and saw something that looked like a bright shining star streak down from the heavens and hover near the ground.
This was the most beautiful thing any of them had ever seen. Skyman entered the shining star and disappeared from view. The shining star then shot back into the sky and faded away.
This tale seems to be a description of an encounter with an ‘ancient astronaut,’ as seen in many cultures and popularized by Swiss theorist Erich von Daniken of Chariots of the Gods fame.
Many modern UFO theorists believe Skyman was a marooned extraterrestrial astronaut whose own craft was somehow damaged or destroyed. They point to the fact Skyman clearly entered the glowing star as proof the object was a spacecraft of some sort. Was he ‘clean and shining bright’ because he wore a silvery pressure suit? Did he request his hosts clean his quarters out of fear of contracting human viruses against which he had no immunity?
Many researchers believe Skyman was no mythological tale, but rather an actual encounter of the first kind between an ancient alien and an entire Ojibwa community. And it was said to have occurred somewhere nearby. Maybe we too should be craning our necks and scanning the skies.