A Nebraska Newspaper Hoax from 1884

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“A Celestial Visitor” Revisited: A Nebraska Newspaper Hoax From 1884

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Full Citation: Patricia C Gaster, “‘A Celestial Visitor’ Revisited: A Nebraska Newspaper Hoax From 1884,” Nebraska History 94 (2013): 90-99

Article Summary: Today we would call it a UFO sighting—a blazing aerial object that crashed in rural Dundy County and scattered metal machinery over the prairie. This vividly written hoax came from the fertile brain of newspaper editor James D. Calhoun, who believed that an artistic lie was “one which presents an absurd impossibility so plausibly that people are betrayed into believing it.”

Cataloging Information:

Names: James D Calhoun, Horace H Hebbard, C H Gere, John C Bonnell, Walt Mason, A L Bixby, John G Maher

Nebraska Place Names: Benkelman, Dundy County

Keywords: James D Calhoun, aerolite, Daily Nebraska State Journal, “Topics of the Times,” Lincoln Daily State Democrat, Lincoln Weekly Herald

Photographs / Images: illustration from Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, 1865; James D Calhoun; inset paragraphs regarding “A Celestial Visitor,” Daily Nebraska State Journal, June 8 and June 10, 1884; illustration of a supposed 1897 airship sighting in Nebraska; Horace W Hebbard; C H Gere; Lincoln Directory listing for the State Democrat, 1887; Nebraska State Journal Building; Arlington Hotel offices of the Nebraska Nugget; Calhoun’s house

“A Celestial Visitor” Revisited: A Nebraska Newspaper Hoax From 1884

By Patricia C. Gaster

ne of the oddest events in Nebraska’s history Ellis supposedly intended to file claim to the land was said to have taken place about thirty- on which the remains of the mystery object then Ofive miles northwest of Benkelman on June rested.3 The Journal’s “Topics of the Times” column 6, 1884, when a “blazing aerolite” crashed almost speculated that the “air vessel” might be from an- within view of a group of Dundy County cowboys, other planet “[u]nless the alleged facts are greatly who found metal machinery scattered over the magnified or distorted.” The details “are given with prairie in the wake of the mysterious object. In- a fullness and particularity that almost command tense heat at the crash site prevented them from belief” and reflected “the intelligence of the writer, investigating much further. The Daily Nebraska who is a man that generally knows what he is State Journal’s reports of the singular event (and of talking about.”4 the following disappearance of crash debris) have This strange story was succeeded on June 10 been the source of much interest and controversy by one still more bizarre in which the Journal an- ever since.1 nounced that the aerolite had completely dissolved The June 8 report in the State Journal is as rivet- in a rainstorm: “The Magical Meteor. It Dissolves ing today as it was in 1884. Headlines announced: Like a Drop of Dew Before the Morning Sun. The “A Celestial Visitor. A Startling and Curious Story Most Mysterious Element of the Strange Phenom- from the Ranges of Dundy County. A Blazing enon.” The remnants of the mystery vessel had Aerolite Falls to the Asounded Earth. It is Evidently supposedly melted with the rain into “small jelly- a Machine of Human Manufacture.” On June 6 like pools,” which soon disappeared. The article rancher John Ellis and several of his cowboys were said ingenuously, “The whole affair is bewildering said to have witnessed the impact of “a blazing to the highest degree, and will no doubt forever be meteor of immense size,” leaving “fragments of cog- a mystery.”5 wheels and other pieces of machinery lying on the The discerning might have noted that the June ground,” with heat so intense they could not ap- 10 report seemed suspiciously eager to discourage proach the crash site. After returning the next day prospective visitors to the crash site by assuring they discovered the remains of an object “about them that all trace of the strange vessel had disap- fifty or sixty feet long, cylindrical, and about ten or peared. The Journal on June 11 tried to dismiss the twelve feet in diameter.”2 subject in “Topics of the Times” by turning it into a The article was filled with names and details. A political joke, speculating that the celestial visitor cowboy named Alf Williamson had supposedly had had actually been a Democratic presidential can- his face blistered and his hair singed by the heat. didate because of its disappearance upon contact Williamson was taken to Ellis’s house to recuperate, with water. The Democrats, opposed to prohibition and a telegram sent to Williamson’s brother in Den- and its promotion of water as a beverage, in the ver. Brand inspector E. W. Rawlins, “from whom full presidential election year of 1884 held their nation- verification of particulars is obtained,” and others al convention in July, selecting Grover Cleveland as were said to have visited the crash site on June 7. their nominee from among a number of competing

90 • nebraska history Illustration from Jules Verne’s 1865 science fiction novel, From the Earth to the Moon. “We know a lie when we see one and the article on our first page entitled ‘A Celestial Visitor’ is a stem- winder,” complained the Guide Rock Signal on June 14, 1884. “It reads too much like a chapter from Jules Verne.”

summer 2013 • 91 candidates whose campaign speeches had filled the columns of American newspapers in June.6 Predating by a dozen years the wave of airship sightings across America in 1896 and 1897, this odd tale from the yellowing pages of old newspapers has been given new life by the ready availability of today’s microfilmed periodicals and the Internet. Although widely regarded as a practical joke, it is considered by some UFO enthusiasts to be evi- dence of early extraterrestrial visitors to the plains of Nebraska. It’s been linked with another early “crash” story, which supposedly occurred in April of 1897, when a mystery airship collided with a windmill in Aurora, Texas, leaving the body of a Martian in the wreckage.7 James D. Calhoun. Modern searches have been undertaken to Courtesy of Stephen locate the Dundy County crash site and whatever Hutchinson and Ed Zimmer. remains of the craft that may have survived its mysterious meltdown. Even when explained more than forty years after its supposed occurrence in 1884, the story refused to fade away. The later discovery of chunks of a greenish, glass-like substance with white inclusions (described by one account as resembling “lime jello with cottage cheese”) in the McCook area has fueled recent speculation that Daily Nebraska State Journal, June 8, 1884. these objects may be connected with the 1884 event.8 The Nebraska State Journal in 1927 exposed the two 1884 stories as a hoax, created in the fertile brain of James D. Calhoun, then managing editor. Calhoun’s former assistant, Horace W. Hebbard, recalled the event (and its unintended consequenc- es) for the Journal’s sixtieth anniversary edition of July 24, 1927. Hebbard, who had been associated with the Journal since 1879 and later served in his mentor’s old job as managing editor, said:

The story was written by J. D. Calhoun, managing editor, and among those who read it was Charles W. Fleming, an employee of the business office of the Journal. Mr. Fleming saw visions of a fortune if he could obtain this meteor or whatever it was and exhibit it for a fee to the curious thruout the country. Accordingly he took the train for Ben- Daily Nebraska State Journal, June 10, 1884. kelman the morning the story appeared bent on obtaining possession of the wonder and bringing as inform their readers—and fill space—with sto- it home with him. He was disillusioned when he ries that were wildly exaggerated and sometimes arrived at Benkelman and found no one who had complete fabrications. Columnists and editorial heard anything about the thing.9 writers who could supply colorful copy that attracted readers were in demand and their writings were Newspaper hoaxes have probably been around widely reprinted. as long as there have been newspapers, but their Calhoun, an ex-Confederate and former editor popularity peaked during the late nineteenth of newspapers at Brownville in Nemaha County century. Journalists sought to entertain as well and Bloomington in Franklin County, was well

92 • nebraska history Horace W. Hebbard, longtime State Journal employee and Calhoun protégé. NSHS RG2411-2294

Illustration of a supposed 1897 airship sighting in Nebraska. The 1939 Almanac for Nebraskans, p. 101. known for his humorous tales and storytelling Civil War veterans (albeit from opposing sides), ability by the time he became managing editor of and worked as a team to promote the welfare of the the Nebraska State Journal in 1881. Later in life he State Journal.11 attributed his first lie to Franklin County sheriff Bill Calhoun, as the author of “Topics,” soon gained Deary, who supposedly induced Calhoun to sup- a reputation for stretching the truth. In August 1881 port Deary’s story of a horse in Nemaha County the first of his fictional characters, Mr. and Mrs. that drank from a jug. In Lincoln Calhoun was the Billhandle, appeared in the column, with their author of the Journal’s “Topics of the Times,” a daily humorous account of trapping rats in their sitting column of gossipy paragraphs gleaned from ex- room.12 A philosopher from the planet Mars, re- change newspapers, readers’ contributions, and his cently arrived in Lincoln “by the air line railway,” own fertile imagination.10 was introduced in print by Calhoun, who used him Calhoun’s rise at the Journal, from composi- to voice his lifelong dislike for dogs.13 When re- tor to an editorial chair, seems to have occurred proached by the editor of the Tecumseh Torchlight in response to the growth of the paper itself. He for his departures from the truth, the “liar of the remarked in July of 1881 in “Topics” that the task State Journal” replied cheerfully in “Topics” that C. H. Gere, editor-in-chief of editing a paper the size of the Journal was he didn’t care about the supposed damage to of the Nebraska State more than one man could conveniently manage, his reputation: Journal. NSHS RG1951-973 and that in addition to well-known editor-in-chief Charles H. Gere, there were several subordinates, Dear boy of the Torchlight, and all other boys, including Calhoun. Significantly, he added, “Much if you wake up someday, and find yourselves of their work appears without having been scanned invested with a reputation, use it like an over- by the eye of the chief.” The Republican Gere and coat–wear it only when it is very cold, and at the Democratic Calhoun reportedly got along well, all other times keep it in soak for all you can despite the difference in their politics. Both were get on it.14

summer 2013 • 93 At the [boardinghouse] dinner table one day, surrounded by people from other states, Bon- nell said the only trouble and labor involved in making post-holes around a farm in Nebraska was the planting of a beet seed every eight feet along the line where it was desired to build the fence. I n the fall when the vegetables were ex- tracted from the ground, there were the holes all ready for business. . . .

A curious sort of silence fell upon the company and the land-lady turned to me, “Is that really a true story, . . .?” And I replied, “Madame, it is in every respect entirely true and moderately drawn. And the only reason that portion of the beets which grows above the ground is not uti- lized for posts is that the vegetable as produced in Nebraska is so sweet and nutritious that the stock would eat them all to the ground and thus destroy the fences.”17

Calhoun left the State Journal in the summer of 1886 to edit Lincoln’s Daily State Democrat, where his editorial column “Dots and Dashes” featured the same comic poetry, fictional characters, and humorous anecdotes that had appeared in “Top- ics.” His former Journal column was picked up by other staffers there, including humorist Walt Mason, J. D. Calhoun owned and Calhoun’s fascination with all things mechani- who took over “Topics” in the summer of 1887.18 edited Lincoln’s State cal (reflected in his description of the remains of When A. L. Bixby joined the Journal staff in 1892, Democrat from 1886 to the celestial visitor’s cog wheels, propeller blade, Lincoln Directory for he continued the column under the name “Daily 1888. and inner workings) was also apparent in “Topics.” the Year Commencing Drift.” Bixby, one of Nebraska’s best-known newspa- June 1st, 1887 (Lincoln: He commented repeatedly on contemporary news per columnists and humorists, remained with the Luther E. Fitch & Co.), 10. stories on the Keely motor, which inventor John Journal until his death in 1934. Calhoun counted Keely claimed “can extract from a drop of water both Mason and Bixby among his friends, consider- 15 force enough to lift a ton.” In August 1881 Calhoun ing himself an “impartial friend and foster father to confided toJournal readers that he had learned both the boys.”19 in strict confidence that a “Nebraska genius” had The Democrat failed financially in 1888, and invented an artificial sea serpent for sale to seaside by 1890 Calhoun was editing yet another Lincoln hotels to entertain tourists. Made of India rubber paper, the Weekly Herald. During his four years and propelled by two pairs of oars moved by clock- with the Herald he titled his weekly editorial col- work, the serpent could be made any length from umn “Nothing But Lies,” referring to himself as the fifty to one hundred feet at the cost of ten dollars a “chief liar of the establishment” and the “Ananias running foot. The inventor, according to Calhoun, genius of this column.”20 He used the column to would soon bring out an improved model that give tongue-in-cheek praise to the fine art of lying in could cruise at twenty miles an hour, raise its head, Nebraska and to point out how lies could be made spout spray, turn its eyes in the sockets, open and more colorful and hence more believable: shut its mouth, and dive.16 Another of Calhoun’s humorous tales, which he The telegrapher who sent the wild story from attributed in part to John C. Bonnell of the Burling- Florida about the panther jumping on a railroad ton and Missouri River Railroad, was hatched while hand and tearing him all to pieces is a tame fel- he and Bonnell were at the World’s Industrial and low. . . . He should have had the terrible beast Cotton Centennial Exposition, held November 16, carry the victim to the top of a tall pine and de- 1884, to June 2, 1885, in New Orleans. According vour him alive to the accompaniment of blood to Calhoun: curdling howls.21

94 • nebraska history Truth, he told his readers, was “the clearest ex- visitor had only struck the name of the town,” pression of the best knowledge of the hour,” and the Bee said in a gibe at the spelling of Benkel- hence wholly relative.22 man’s name, “what a millennium it would be for Calhoun sold the Herald and left Nebraska in postoffice clerks et al.” Several days later theBee early 1894, after an unsuccessful bid to secure the remarked: “That meteoric story from Dundy Lincoln postmastership, and lived in Tampa, Florida, county is worthy of the latest creations of until his death in 1915.23 Although once called by Mulhattan’s imagination.”28 a disgusted contemporary an unhappy combina- The Bee’s reference to Joseph Mulhattan, a well- tion of “heartlessness, cheekiness, cynacism, known newspaper hoaxer, undoubtedly recalled misanthropy, and distrust of human nature,” to readers Mulhattan’s famous Texas meteor spoof Calhoun also had the “faculty of always being from the year before—a yarn with which Calhoun interesting.” Although he sometimes addressed as a newspaperman was almost certainly familiar. serious topics, his most memorable writing was Supposedly a giant meteor had fallen in Brown laced with humor.24 County, Texas, hitting a ranch where it killed sev- Calhoun’s most enduring legacy in Nebraska eral head of cattle and destroyed the home of a may well be his two aerolite tales. His colorful ac- Mexican herdsman. The meteor was embedded counts adroitly draw in readers, who may roll their two hundred feet deep in the earth and towered eyes in disbelief and laugh but still read eagerly seventy feet above ground. The Bee’s article on to the end. The accounts are not tall tales (actual the event from April 19, 1883, was headlined: “A happenings “with what we might with charity re- Monster Lie. The Most Gigantic Fiction of the Cen- fer to as embellishments”) so much as whimsical tury. The Author Buried Two Hundred Feet Under flights of fantasy.25 As one of the state’s longest-lived Ground. Texas Takes the Bakery.”29 newspaper hoaxes and among the most widely re- The McCook Weekly Tribune linked the 1884 printed Dundy County stories of all time, they rival meteor incident with a slightly earlier hoax from any hatched by Nebraskan John G. Maher. southwest Nebraska about a waterspout that sup- Maher’s reputation as a hoaxer emerged during posedly swept away eleven cowboys during a his work as a western correspondent for the New roundup near the Frenchman River. The Tribune York Herald. His inventions included the supposed on June 5 ridiculed the extent to which the bogus discovery of a prehistoric petrified man near Chad- waterspout story had been reported in the regional ron; bogus sea monster sightings in a Sandhills press, noting on June 12 in a brief mention of the Nebraska State Journal lake; and the fanciful account of Maher’s discovery even more fantastic aerolite tales that “southwest- Building at Ninth and P, of the perpetrator of the Maine explosion in 1898. ern Nebraska, and Benkelman, in particular, has Lincoln, sometime after He once warned Nebraskans of the threats of Brit- been prolific of wondrous things recently.” The 1881. NSHS RG2158-248 ish reprisals on O’Neill and the Irish population of Nebraska for their supposed support of a Fenian invasion of Canada. According to Maher, the British planned to send warships up the Mississippi River system, navigate the Niobrara, capture Valentine, and send a party overland to take O’Neill.26 Contemporary newspaper reaction to the State Journal’s two aerolite stories in 1884 was mixed. No Dundy County paper mentioned it, because the county’s first such publication, theDundy County Pioneer, edited by Frank Israel, was not established until the next year. (Calhoun noted its advent in “Topics,” on May 2, 1885.) Although the county had been organized in 1873, in 1880 it was still unsur- veyed, with a sparse population.27 The Schuyler Sun reprinted only the June 8 item from the “Topics” column that called attention to the supposed dispatch from Dundy County an- nouncing the fall of the aerolite. The Omaha Daily Bee, which covered southwestern Nebraska news, considered the stories a joke. “If the heavenly

summer 2013 • 95 waterspout hoax, said by a Sidney newspaper S. B. Newmeyer, editor and publisher of the to be the product of an “able-bodied liar,” may Guide Rock Signal, agreed with Hyde that the story have attracted Calhoun’s attention to sparsely was suspicious. He reprinted both articles about settled Dundy County, suggesting a locale for his the fall of the meteor and its dissolution on the own invented tale shortly afterward. A follow-up, Signal’s front page on June 14, but noted on the tongue-in-cheek mention by the Tribune on June 26 editorial page: “We know a lie when we see one said: “Since the cloud-burst and aerolite struck the and the article on our first page entitled ‘A Celestial range, riders are becoming suspicious of the high, Visitor’ is a stem-winder. It reads too much like a mountainous peaks of the Blackwood [Creek].”30 chapter from Jules Verne.” Perhaps in an effort to The Daily Boomerang, published at Laramie, soften his words, he added that farm readers could Wyoming Territory, reprinted both articles on June still gain something useful from the stories: “Don’t 12, but on June 14 recognized the political joke im- leave your implements exposed to the weather.”35 plied by the incident: Several newspapers reprinted or paraphrased the articles under new, attention-grabbing head- The Lincoln Journal says “it is believed the lines that suggest the writers took the aerolite aerial visitor that recently descended from the stories less than seriously. The Independent, sky in Dundy county, Nebraska, was the demo- published at Wahoo by J. B. Davis, headed its June cratic candidate for president the bourbons 12 rendition: “‘TIS PASSING STRANGE! The Wise have been looking for. Its dissolution by contact Men of Benklemen [sic] Marvel Greatly! That Red with water would appear to support the theory.” Hot Machine From Etherial [sic] Space. Melts Away This is a cruel stab at the old party of “time- Like Dew Before the Morning Sun. Phenomena honored principles.”31 That Make Knotted Locks Stand.”36 The Boomerang may have been more disposed The Nebraska Nugget, edited and published at than other newspapers to print the tales. It was Holdrege by Thomas M. Hopwood, was equally established in 1881 by Bill Nye, the author of many colorful. E. S. Sutton, author of Sutton’s Southwest humorous yarns of frontier life that first appeared Nebraska, published in 1983, recalled seeing in the in the Boomerang.32 After he left the Boomerang, 1920s an early copy of the Nugget that included the Nye went on the lecture circuit. Calhoun met him story under the headlines: “STRANGE PHENOME- in 1888 in Lincoln at a February 23 reception given NA—Has Auld Nick’s Aerial Bicycle Made a Lunge? Nye by local newspapermen after his evening lec- And Escaping His Hands Fallen to Earth, This Mun- ture at the Funke Opera House. Calhoun described dane Sphere? A Red Hot Machine From the Nether Nye as “celebrated . . . . a great success” but con- Element? The Startling Find of Some Dundy County sidered Walt Mason, then employed on the State Ranchers.” Sutton remembered the newspaper’s Journal, to have more talent.33 date as sometime in May 1884, but a review of the Thomas H. Hyde’s Daily Evening News, pub- weekly Nugget’s files for May and June, on micro- lished in Lincoln, was openly dismissive of the 1884 film at the Nebraska State Historical Society, yields aerolite’s fall to earth. After paraphrasing the first no mention of the incident, which was almost article from the State Journal, Hyde wrote on June certainly published in the one issue missing during 9: “This wonderful affair smacks something like the these months—that of June 11. Editor Hopwood, old moon story that set the world agog some years like others, probably put the relevant issue aside ago,” comparing it to a famous newspaper hoax as a souvenir—or perhaps deliberately removed it perpetrated by the New York Sun in 1835 in which from his backfiles to avoid future embarrassment. a series of six articles announced the supposed The Phonograph at St. Paul, Nebraska, used identi- discovery of life on the moon. Hyde went on to cal headlines, probably lifted from the Nugget, in speculate whimsically that the machinery scattered its June 13 reprint of the now familiar story.37 at the Nebraska crash site might have come from Hebbard, in his 1927 admission that “Calhoun’s a comet that caught its tail on a horn of the new Meteor” was a hoax, noted that fiction writing moon or that the craft may have been sent to earth when news was scarce was not uncommon among by the man in the moon on an exploring expedi- newspapermen in the early days when newspapers tion. A bulletin appended to Hyde’s main article provided entertainment as well as information and announced that the “wonderful piece of mecha- were always looking for whatever made good copy. nism” was in reality a portion of the McCormick It was best, said Hebbard, that when a startling sto- Twine Binder, “no improvement on the kind sold by ry appeared as news, “to take it with several grains Hovey & Peck at 285 and 287 North 10th St.”34 of salt, altho this was not always done.”38 Calhoun

96 • nebraska history himself some six months after the 1884 aerolite machine, and amusing others, who appreciated stories explained to State Journal readers in “Topics them only as entertaining stories. of the Times” his concept of an artistic lie as “one Reader interest lagged when no further stories which presents an absurd impossibility so plausibly immediately appeared to explain the celestial visi- that people are betrayed into believing it, when a tor or its subsequent disappearance. But the tales careful examination would be sufficient to cause its remained in the backfiles of theNebraska State rejection as absurd.” Any other kind of lie, he said, Journal, waiting to be rediscovered and spread “does not show the touch of genius.”39 by a new generation of readers with access to Calhoun’s touch of that genius as a storyteller historical newspapers on microfilm and the Inter- lives on in his two fantastic tales of a mystery net. Curiously, their exposure in print as a hoax object that fell to earth in Nebraska in 1884. They in 1927 by the same newspaper in which they first briefly seized the imagination of newspaper appeared, never achieved the circulation of the readers, beguiling some of them with detailed original 1884 “news” stories, which continue to descriptions of the remains of a wondrous flying intrigue modern readers.

Thomas M. Hopwood was editor of the Nebraska Nugget at Holdrege in 1884, with newspaper offices in the Arlington Hotel (left), which he owned. NSHS RG2389-5-19

summer 2013 • 97 Patricia C. Gaster is assistant editor of Nebraska History.

The James D. Calhoun house in Lincoln, a two-and-one-half-story frame house built about 1889-90, is now on the National Register of Historic Places. LC13: C06-304

98 • nebraska history Notes 21 “Nothing But Lies,” Lincoln Weekly Herald, Sept. 12, 1891, 5. 1 “A Celestial Visitor,” Daily Nebraska State Journal 22 Ibid., Dec. 19, 1991, 5. (hereafter DNSJ), June 8, 1884, 5. 23 Patricia C. Gaster, “‘Straight Politics Pays After All,’ 2 Ibid. Political Patronage and the Lincoln Post Office Fight, 1893- 1894,” Nebraska History 84 (Winter 2003): 204. 3 Ibid. 24 “Nothing But Lies,” Lincoln Weekly Herald, Apr. 12, 1890, 4 “Topics of the Times,” DNSJ, June 8, 1884, 3. 5; “The Observer,” The Courier (Lincoln), Mar. 31, 1894, 13. 5 “The Magical Meteor,” DNSJ, June 10, 1884, 4. Calhoun’s dark novelette, Tom Gollahorn. A Story of the South During the War, was serialized in the Lincoln Weekly 6 “Topics of the Times,” DNSJ, June 11, 1884, 3. Herald between March 14 and June 13, 1891. 7 The most pertinent of many references: “Out of Old 25 John E. Carter, afterword to “The National Game Nebraska,” Nebraska State Historical Society newspaper at Cody,” Nebraska History 90 (Lincoln: Nebraska State columns, Nov. 13, 1985, Mar. 5, 1986; Alan J. Bartels, Historical Society, 2009): 80. “Nebraska UFOS: Is There Anybody Out There?” Nebraska Life 14 (July/August 2010): 99-100; “UFO incident has a life 26 Louise Pound, “The John G. Maher Hoaxes,” Nebraska of its own,” McCook Daily Gazette, Aug. 27, 2007, accessed History 33 (1952): 203-19. Jan. 7, 2013, www.mccookgazette.com/story/1249428.html; 27 “Topics of the Times,” DNSJ, May 2, 1885, 5; Leona “Fact or Fiction? Dundy County UFO: 1884 Story Reprinted,” McAllister, “History of Dundy County,” Benkelman Post History of Dundy County, Nebraska, 1880-1987 (Dallas, Tex.: and News-Chronicle, Feb. 12, 1937, 6; A. T. Andreas, comp., Curtis Media Corp., 1988), 207. For information on the later History of the State of Nebraska (Chicago: The Western airship sightings in Nebraska, see Roger Welsch’s “‘This Historical Co., 1882), 848. Mysterious Light Called an Airship,’ Nebraska ‘Saucer’ Sightings, 1897,” Nebraska History 60 (Spring 1979): 92-113. 28 “General News,” Schuyler Sun, June 12, 1884, 1; “The State Capital,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 9, 1884, 5; “State 8 “Lime Jello with cottage cheese–from the sky?” McCook Jottings,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 13, 1884, 4. Daily Gazette, July 13, 2009, accessed Jan. 7, 2013, www. mccookgazette.com/story/1554245.html. 29 “A Monster Lie,” Omaha Daily Bee, April 19, 1883, 3. 9 Horace W. Hebbard, “Horace W. Hebbard Recalls 30 McCook Weekly Tribune, June 5, 1884, 5, June 12, 1884, Journal in its Twelfth Year,” Sunday State Journal, July 24, 1, June 26, 1884, 4; Plaindealer-Telegraph (Sidney), June 14, 1927, C15; “Nebraska Newspaper Men Fondly Recall the 1884, 3. Reprints of the waterspout story include: “Ruined Memory of J. D. Calhoun,” Sunday State Journal, July 18, by Water,” Logan Valley Herald (Wayne), June 13, 1884, 3; 1915, B9-10; “Horace Hebbard Dies After Short Illness,” “Destructive Waterspouts,” Weekly Burtonian (Tekamah), Nebraska State Journal, Aug. 21, 1933, 1. June 12, 1884, 2; “Ruined by Water,” Pawnee Republican, June 12, 1884, 2. 10 Patricia C. Gaster, “From Brownville to Bryan: Journalist James D. Calhoun in Nebraska, 1869-1894,” Nebraska History 31 “A Celestial Visitor,” Daily Boomerang (Laramie), June 18 (Fall 2000): 116-18; “Nebraska Newspaper Men Fondly 12, 1884, 3, June 14, 1884, 2. Recall the Memory of J. D. Calhoun”; “Nothing But Lies,” 32 Lincoln Weekly Herald, Mar. 6, 1892, 5. T. A. Larson, ed., Bill Nye’s Western Humor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), viii; “About Us,” Laramie 11 “Topics of the Times,” DNSJ, July 27, 1881, 2; Hugh G. Boomerang, accessed Jan. 7, 2013, laramieboomerang.com. McVicker, “Evolution of Forty Years in the Journal Office,” 33 Sunday State Journal, July 24, 1927, D2. “Dots and Dashes,” Daily State Democrat, Feb. 24, 1888, 2; “Rapid Transit Troubles, City Items,” Omaha Daily Bee, 12 “Topics of the Times,” DNSJ, August 20, 1881, 2. Feb. 20, 1888, 5. 13 Ibid., July 30, 1882, 2. 34 “The Celestial Visitor,” Daily Evening News (Lincoln), June 9, 1884, 4. “The Great Moon Hoax,” perpetrated by the 14 Ibid., Nov. 28, 1883, 3, Jan. 11, 1884, 3. New York Sun, began on August 25, 1835. Many readers were 15 Ibid., Oct. 18, 1881, 2, Oct. 29, 1881, 2, April 5, 1882, 2, completely taken in by the stories until the Sun admitted on Dec. 17, 1882, 3, Dec. 3, 1885, 4, Aug. 1, 1886, 6. September 16 that the articles had been a hoax. See Robert Silverberg, Scientists and Scoundrels: A Book of Hoaxes 16 Ibid., Aug. 27, 1881, 2. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 34-50. 17 “Our Prairie Post-Hole,” Columbus Journal, Apr. 15, 35 “A Celestial Visitor,” Guide Rock Signal, June 14, 1884, 1, 1885, 2. “We know a lie, . . .,” 4. 18 “Dots and Dashes,” Daily State Democrat, Aug. 3, 1886, 2; 36 The Independent (Wahoo), June 12, 1884, 1. “Brief Items,” Omaha Daily Bee, July 31, 1887, 5; Walt Mason, “Speaking of Myself,” Sunday State Journal, July 22, 1923, 7B. 37 E. S. Sutton, Sutton’s Southwest Nebraska and Republican River Valley Tributaries (Benkelman, 1983), 341-42; “Strange 19 Patricia C Gaster, “Bix in Nebraska: A. L. Bixby and the Phenomena,” The Phonograph (St. Paul), June 13, 1884, 1. ‘Daily Drift,’” Nebraska History 78 (1997): 75-83; “Nothing But Lies,” Lincoln Weekly Herald, Jan. 13, 1894, 5. 38 “Horace W. Hebbard Recalls Journal in its Twelfth Year.” 20 Gaster, “From Brownville to Bryan,” 120-22; “Nothing But 39 “Topics of the Times,” DNSJ, Dec. 10, 1884, 5. Lies,” Lincoln Weekly Herald, Mar 15, 1890, 4, Mar. 17, 1894, 2.

summer 2013 • 99