Vote for a Real American Candidate! Or, lacking that, vote for LOVE22!
There are some interesting encounters with winged beings from the year 1922.
Jacques Vallee (Anatomy of a Phenomenon) found a letter from a William C. Lamb in the files of the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center in Dayton, Ohio. Lamb gives some specific details: "on February 22, 1922, at 5:00 A.M. in Hubbell, Nebraska" Lamb was out hunting and "following mysterious traces when he heard a crackling noise followed by a high-pitched sound and realized that a circular object was flying above his head, masking the stars." Lamb ducked behind a tree and watched the object sink behind a depression, presumably landing. A "magnificent flying creature" then appeared, which landed like an airplane. [p. 32]
The creature stood at least eight feet tall (so presumably walked upright). It passed the tree where Lamb was hiding and vanished into the woods. Lamb followed it for five miles before giving up. One wonders what the "mysterious traces" were that Lamb followed before the flying being appeared.
In Strange Creatures from Time and Space, there is that curious story collected by Gray Barker from the Lincoln, Nebraska, Daily Star, 1922. The anonymous witness reported a spherical object landing near his house. An eight-foot-high creature emerged, which the witness assumed to be the Devil himself:
Remembering his Bible teachings, he mumbled, "Get thee behind me, Satan," and turned his back on the creature. As he turned he noticed another disk coming down from the sky, and it hovered above him as if to protect him from the landed creature.
Next, the witness heard voices emanating from the airborne saucer, appropriately quoting Biblical texts. [pp. 204]
The creature ran off, leaving hooflike marks behind. It passed through a barbed wire fence, melting the wires in its path.
Another (supposed) event of 1922 is mentioned in Fairies at Work and at Play (1925), by Theosophist writer Geoffrey Hodson. Hodson claimed to have psychic visions of nature spirits he called Devas. I doubt I would have mentioned this were it not for the year of this observation. One of his entries of June 1922 describes his vision of a "Deva" on a hill in the Lake District of England.
My first impression was of a huge, brilliant crimson, bat-like thing, which fixed a pair of burning eyes upon me. The form was not concentrated into the true human shape, but was somehow spread out like a bat with a human face and eyes, and with wings outstretched over the mountainside. As soon as it felt itself to be observed it flashed into its proper shape, as if to confront us, fixed its piercing eyes upon us, and then sank into the hillside and disappeared. [p. 97]
I find the year of these events interesting, and in particular the date of the Lamb sighting -- 2/22/22. It puts me in mind of "The Lord of 22" and "Bobo the Clown," who haunted Bob Tarte and William Holm for a year and a half in the early eighties. Tarte and Holm, inhabitants of Grand Rapids, Michigan, began seeing clowns everywhere -- in newspapers, on TV, hitchhiking, driving -- and accompanying this was a wave of addresses, license tags, phone numbers, dates, and other phenomena with the number "22" in it. Tarte contacted Loren Coleman, who was researching "phantom clowns" for his book Mysterious America:
After that night it was as if something had burst, bringing an incessant rain of clowns and 22s. The atmosphere at Holm's office at Grand Rapids Magazine grew especially turbulent. Co-worker Bonnie Hanger got a porcelain clown music box from her mother on her 22nd birthday. Holm's boss John Brosky was downtown in Kalamazoo when a golf cart carrying two clowns drove slowly by. They wore name tags. HI, I'M BOBO, said the driver's; HI, I'M JOHNO the passenger's. Then, the following poem from New York was inexplicably submitted for publication: "A raving beauty/Got into a stew,/She finished a contest/Raving 'Oh, 22!'" [p. 47]
Bob Tarte re-wrote his article on Bobo and 22 for Yellow Silk Magazine in 1991: see Bob Tarte's "Technobeat" Archives.
The 22s still pop up. In the movie Mothman Prophecies, Richard Gere's character John Kline holes up in a Point Pleasant hotel -- in room 22.
There's an amusing typo in "Welcome to Mothman County" by Loren Coleman (Fortean Times no. 156, April 2002). He mentions that the documentary Search for the Mothman aired "On 22 January 22" on the F/X network. [p. 51]
And that was in the year 2002 -- just take out the zeros.
It seems the 22s and clowns just won't go away. NBC started off 2005 with the sitcom Committed, which has, as a supporting character, a dying clown who lives in a walk-in closet. I started reading Marvel's third She-Hulk series; in the first issue I picked up, She-Hulk's alter-ego, attorney Jennifer Walters, is in consultation with "Mr. Bobo," a chimpanzee mutated into human form.
I finally read The Diary of Jack the Ripper, and I was disconcerted to find that Ripper suspect James Maybrick's son was known affectionately as "Bobo".
I recently re-watched the second Kolchak tele-film, The Night Strangler, only to hear Darren McGavin exclaim, "I've been a reporter for twenty-two years!" Last Sunday I bought and watched a cheap video of the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, wherein the comedians are stowaways aboard an oceanliner.
"I've been captain of this ship for twenty-two years!" blusters the captain at one point.
"Twenty-two years, eh?" returns Groucho. "Why don't you get in the back and let your wife drive for a while?"
And in the recent movie National Treasure, an important clue on the treasure hunt is the time the clock in Liberty Hall displays on the back of a hundred-dollar bill: Two-twenty-two, of course.
Coleman, Loren. "Welcome to Mothman County." Fortean Times No. 156 (April 2002), pp. 48-51.
Hodson, Geoffrey. Fairies at Work and Play (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1987 [1925]).
Keel, John A. Strange Creatures from Time and Space (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970).
Tarte, Robert, and William Holm, "A Circle of Clowns," in Fortean Times No. 38 (Autumn 1982), pp. 46-48.
Vallee, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1987 [1965]).
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