"An Aerial Mystery": The Winged Man over Coney Island

Sunday, 12 September 1880. Page 6 of The New York Times carried a short unsigned item headlined "AN AERIAL MYSTERY." It named no witnesses. No other newspaper has yet been found that backs it up.

"One day last week a marvelous apparition was seen near Coney Island." No day or hour was given. At the height of at least a thousand feet, a strange object was flying toward the New Jersey coast. "It was apparently a man with bat's wings and improved frog's legs." It was of a deep black color.

Its movements "closely resembled those of a frog in the act of swimming with his hind legs." The wings beat. The legs kicked. And then the face. "The face of the man could be distinctly seen, and it wore a cruel and determined expression."

Below, a locomotive whistled. "This monster waved his wings in answer." The object, the paper said, was seen by many reputable persons. Not one was named.

"About a month ago an object of precisely the same nature was seen in the air over St. Louis by a number of citizens." A little later it was seen by "various Kentucky persons as it flew across the State." No St. Louis report has turned up.

A real Kentucky item may lie behind that line. On 29 July 1880 the Louisville Courier-Journal ran "A Flying Machine." Two Louisville men at a window near the Ohio River bridge saw a distant object that seemed to have machinery worked by hands and feet, and wings that flapped. The same item mentions a toy balloon.

The Times had its own theory. "Some one has solved the problem of aerial navigation by inventing wings." But hiding "is directly at variance with the known habits and customs of aeronauts," so this must be "an aerial criminal." The suspect was the Rev. Thomas De Witt Talmage, Brooklyn's theatrical crusader against vice. "Mr. Talmage has equipped himself with wings in order to study interesting types of immorality," the paper said, and was "flying to and fro over Coney Island" ahead of "a scathing sermon on the wickedness and indecencies of our bathing resorts."

In 2013 Alex Wallach of Untapped Cities looked for corroboration and found none. Every account traced back to the same Times item. He argued parts were clearly fabricated, since no face could be recognised at a thousand feet, and suggested the piece mocked Talmage, a preacher known for "gymnastic" pulpit antics and often ridiculed in the press. Wallach called it a guess.

Others suspect a hoax, or satire of the earlier flying-man stories. Hannah Frishberg of Brownstoner left the question open. Believers read the jokes as additions to a genuine report.

Loren Coleman discussed the 1880 sightings in Mothman and Other Curious Encounters. Lon Strickler of Phantoms & Monsters has asked whether witnesses were reporting Mothman in the 19th century. A reader once told Untapped Cities that Charles Fort wrote about the case, though that remains unconfirmed. The question stays where the flier left it. A thousand feet up, heading for New Jersey.