The Galisteo Junction "Aerial Monster" and the Collector of Curiosities, 1880

Early 1880. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad was pushing across New Mexico Territory. At Galisteo Junction, a spur branched north to Santa Fe while the main line ran on toward Albuquerque. The first train reached Santa Fe on 9 February 1880. The settlement was later renamed Lamy, because its old name was too easily confused with the village of Galisteo.

Friday, 26 March 1880. After dark. The station agent and a few friends were strolling near the depot before retiring for the night. They were startled by voices coming from above them. A balloon, or air ship, was sailing in rapidly on the western wind. It was monstrous and shaped like a fish. A fan propelled and directed it, and a car hung beneath. On its outside were elegantly-drawn characters that no one on the ground could read.

It flew low enough for them to make out the details. Eight to ten figures aboard, described as ordinary human beings, were talking and singing in a language the witnesses did not understand. There was laughter and music, as if there was some party. Then the occupants threw things over the side. A beautiful flower. Silk-like paper with characters that reminded the witnesses of designs on Japanese tea chests. A cup, lost in the darkness. Soon after passing the junction, the craft assumed a great height and moved off very rapidly toward the east.

The cup was found the next morning. It was of very peculiar workmanship, entirely different to anything used in this country. The objects went on display at the depot. The following evening a stranger came through on the train, a collector of curiosities. He pronounced the items Asiatic and offered such a large sum of money that the agent could not refuse. He took everything away and was never seen again.

The Santa Fe New Mexican carried the story as "Galisteo's Apparition." On 5 April 1880 its weekly edition ran the sequel, "Solved at Last." In this version a touring party came through that included a wealthy young Chinese man. He could read the characters. The paper was a note in his fiancée's hand. Chinese experiments in flying had succeeded, and the craft had been the maiden flight of a regular line of air-ships from China to America.

That punchline is why many treat the affair as a joke. Patrick Gross's URECAT catalogue rates its reliability low and its strangeness very high, and files it as a journalistic hoax. Papers of the 1880s routinely printed tall tales. Asian goods were easy to find locally, thanks to Chinese railroad labourers and tea-chest packaging. The witnesses themselves never claimed anything extraterrestrial.

No real balloon flight in New Mexico at that date has ever turned up. The territory's first recorded piloted ascent was Park Van Tassel's, in 1882. In 1992 the folklorist Peter White, writing for the Smithsonian, read the story as early UFO lore. In his view it reflected local anxiety over the changes the railroads had brought.

The story resurfaced in Flying Saucer Review in May 1961. Jacques Vallée put it in Passport to Magonia in 1969. Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman revisited it in Fate in 1973. Thomas E. Bullard included it in his 1982 dissertation on airship reports.

Later readers have cast the vanishing collector as an early version of the men in black, and compared the unreadable script to the Japanese Utsuro-bune legend. The Roswell Daily Record called it "The One Before Roswell." None of the original witnesses has ever been named.