New Lands | Page 3

well served, comfort looked after so carefully--or some day
board the thing that was seen over the city of Marseilles, Aug. 19, 1887,
and ride on that, bearing down upon the moon, giving up for lost,

escaping collision by the swirl of a current that was never heard of
before.
There are, or there are not, nearby cities of foreign existences. They
have, or they have not, been seen, by reflection, in the skies of Sweden
and Alaska. As one will. Whether acceptable, or too preposterous to be
thought of, our data are of rabbles of living things that have been seen
in the sky; also of processions of military beings--monsters that live in
the sky and die in the sky, and spatter this earth with their red
life-fluids--ships from other worlds that have been seen by millions of
inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of
France, England, New England, and Canada--signals from the moon,
which, according to notable indications, may not be so far from this
earth as New York is from London--definitely reported and, in some
instances, multitudinously witnessed, events that have been disregarded
by our opposition--
A scientific priestcraft--
"Thou shalt not!" is crystallized in its frozen textbooks.
I have data upon data upon data of new lands that are not far away. I
hold out expectations and the materials of new hopes and new despairs
and new triumphs and new tragedies. I hold out my hands and point to
the sky--there is a hierarchy that utters me manacles, I think--there is a
dominant force that pronounces prisons that have dogmas for walls for
such thoughts. It binds its formulas around all attempting extensions.
But sounds have been heard in the sky. They have been heard, and it is
not possible to destroy the records of them. They have been heard. In
their repetitions and regularities of series and intervals, we shall
recognize perhaps interpretable language. Columns of clouds,
different-colored by sunset, have vibrated to the artillery of other
worlds like the strings of a cosmic harp, and I conceive of no buzzing
of insects that can forever divert attention from such dramatic
reverberations. Language has shone upon the dark parts of the moon:
luminous exclamations that have fluttered in the lunar crater
Copernicus; the eloquence of the starlike light in Aristarchus; hymns

that have been chanted in lights and shades upon LinnŽ; the wilder,
luminous music in Plato--
But not a sound that has been heard in the sky, not a thing that has
fallen from the sky, not a thing that "should not be," but that has
nevertheless been seen in the sky can we, with any sense of freedom,
investigate, until first we find out about the incubus that in the past has
suffocated even speculation. I shall find out for myself: anybody who
cares to may find out with me. A ship from a foreign world does, or
does not, sail in the sky of this earth. It is in accordance with
observations by hundreds of thousands of witnesses that this event has
taken place, and, if the time be when aeronautics upon this earth is of
small development, that is an important circumstance to consider--but
there is suffocation upon the whole occurrence and every one of its
circumstances. Nobody can give good attention to the data, if diverting
his mind is consciousness, altogether respectful, of the scientists who
say that there are no other physical worlds except planets, millions of
miles away, distances that conceivable vessels could not traverse. I
should like to let loose, in an opening bombardment, the data of the
little black stones of Birmingham, which, time to time, in a period of
eleven years, fell obviously from a fixed point in the sky, but such a
release now, would be wasted. It will have to be prepared for. Now
each one would say to himself that there are no such fixed points in the
sky. Why not? Because astronomers say that there are not.
But there is something else that is implied. Implied is the general
supposition that the science of astronomy represents all that is most
accurate, most exacting, painstaking, semi-religious in human thought,
and is therefore authoritative.
Anybody who has not been through what I've been through, in
investigating this subject, would ask what are the bases and what is the
consistency of the science of astronomy. The miserable, though at
times amusing, confusions of thought that I find in this field of
supposed research word my inquiry differently--what of dignity, or
even of decency, is in it?
Phantom dogmas, with their tails clutching at vacancies, are coiled

around our data.
Serpents of pseudo-thought are stifling history.
They are squeezing "Thou shalt not!" upon Development.
New Lands--and the horrors and lights, explosions and music