away from
the sun there were luminous, moving images. For two days bodies passed
in a continuous stream, varying in size and velocity.

The Lieutenant tries to explain, as we shall see, but he says:

"As it was, the continuous flight, for two whole days, in such numbers,
in the upper regions of the air, of beasts that left no stragglers, is a
wonder of natural history, if not of astronomy."

He tried different focusing--he saw wings--perhaps he saw planes. He
says that he saw upon the objects either wings or phantom-like
appendages.

Then he saw something that was so bizarre that, in the fullness of his
nineteenth-centuriness, he writes:

"There was no longer doubt: they were locusts or flies of some sort."

One of them had paused.

It had hovered.

Then it had whisked off.

The Editor says that at that time "countless locusts had descended upon
certain parts of India."

We now have an instance that is extraordinary in several
respects--super-voyagers or super-ravagers; angels, ragamuffins,
crusaders, emigrants, aeronauts, or aerial elephants, or bison or
dinosaurs--except that I think the thing had planes or wings--one of
them has been photographed. It may be that in the history of photography
no more extraordinary picture than this has ever been taken.

_L'Astronomie_, 1885-347:

That, at the Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico, Aug. 12, 1883, about
2,500 meters above sea level, were seen a large number of small luminous
bodies, entering upon the disk of the sun. M. Bonilla telegraphed to the
Observatories of the City of Mexico and of Puebla. Word came back that
the bodies were not visible there. Because of this parallax, M. Bonilla
placed the bodies "relatively near the earth." But when we find out what
he called "relatively near the earth"--birds or bugs or hosts of a
Super-Tamerlane or army of a celestial Richard Coeur de Lion--our
heresies rejoice anyway. His estimate is "less distance than the moon."

One of them was photographed. See _L'Astronomie_, 1885-349. The
photograph shows a long body surrounded by indefinite structures, or by
the haze of wings or planes in motion.

_L'Astronomie_, 1887-66;

Signer Ricco, of the Observatory of Palermo, writes that, Nov. 30, 1880,
at 8:30 o'clock in the morning, he was watching the sun, when he saw,
slowly traversing its disk, bodies in two long, parallel lines, and a
shorter, parallel line. The bodies looked winged to him. But so large
were they that he h