On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’1 of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar […]
Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl
Orac responds to me … sort of: Orac paused, his lights blinking, patterns ever changing. It was almost as though he were thinking, if such a thing were possible by a computer. Then he went on, “Of course, as much as I’ve defended Dawkins before against similarly spurious uses of the Hitler analogy, now that
Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 bomber over Spain, c. 1936, with Fiat CR.32 fighter escorts. Image source: Wikipedia. Exactly seventy years ago, in late November and early December 1936, Madrid was being bombed. The way Antony Beevor describes it, it was the first attempt at something like a knock-out blow: The nationialists’ failure to break through on
This sticker is in the back of a book published in 1940, originally part of the collection of the Public Lending Library of Victoria (itself a part of the Public Library of Victoria, as the SLV was then known). I was struck particularly by no. 4. Were books considered possible vectors for infectious disease —
Bluebird at Daytona Beach, 1935. Image source: Florida Photographic Collection. Well, the title of this post is a lie — there’s only two mysteries that concern me here, and one isn’t particularly mysterious … Sir Malcolm Campbell was a world-famous British speed maniac (there’s no other word for it), setting many records on land and
30 Sqn D.H.9A at 9700 ft over Peri Magurum. A friend has alerted me to a thread on the Something Awful forums (thanks, Mike!) One of the users has access to a collection of photos taken by an RAF sergeant who served with 30 Squadron in the early 1920s, which unfortunately looks like it is
The front cover of Victor Lefebure’s Common Sense about Disarmament (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932); the artist’s name is Douglas L. Dick. (I also have a colour scan — the title is in red and the background is a cream tint — but it’s rather muddy and much less striking than the monochrome version above.) Note
Some recent airship sightings: An airship is currently gracing Melbourne skies, thanks to Holden. I’ve seen it but not with a camera handy, so this picture by Dr Snafu will have to serve. It’s nice to see it floating around, but at only 54 metres in length, I’m forced to say: that’s not an airship.
Note: the photograph turned out to be real after all. See here. In a comment to an earlier post, Alan pointed out that it has been claimed that the photo I used was a propaganda fake. As I have previously discussed the subject of fake combat photos, I was appropriately mortified at the thought of
