James Lumley's Cadotte Pass "meteor with hieroglyphics"

October 1865. An old Rocky Mountain trapper named James Lumley had been stopping for several days at the Everett House hotel in St. Louis. The St. Louis Democrat, also cited as the Missouri Democrat, printed his story on 19 October. It happened, he said, about the middle of the previous September, in the mountains seventy-five or one hundred miles above the Great Falls of the Upper Missouri, near Cadotte Pass in what was then Montana Territory.

Just after sunset one evening, Lumley "beheld a bright luminous body in the heavens, which moved with great rapidity in an easterly direction." It was plainly visible for at least five seconds. Then it suddenly separated into particles, like the bursting of a sky-rocket in the air.

A few minutes later came a heavy explosion. It "jarred the earth very perceptibly." A rushing sound followed, like a tornado sweeping through the forest. A strong wind sprang up and suddenly subsided. The air filled with a peculiar odor of a sulphurous character.

The next day, about two miles from his camp, Lumley found a path cut through the forest, several rods wide. Giant trees were uprooted or broken off near the ground. The tops of hills were shaved off. The earth was plowed up in many places.

At its end, driven into the side of a mountain, was an immense stone. As much of it as was visible "had been divided into compartments," and in various places it was carved with "curious hieroglyphics." Around it lay fragments of a substance resembling glass and dark stains, as though caused by a liquid. Lumley was confident the hieroglyphics were the work of human hands. The stone, he believed, was only a fragment of an immense body, and must have been used for some purpose by "animated beings."

The paper tied the story to a meteor seen that September in Leavenworth, Galena and St. Louis, where Col. Benjamin Bonneville had watched it. "Mr. Lumley relates it with so much sincerity that we are forced to accept it as true," the editors wrote. Then they went further. Meteors, they suggested, might be a means of conveyance for the inhabitants of other planets, and "some future Columbus, from Mercury or Uranus, may land on this planet." Newspapers across the country reprinted the tale through October and November 1865.

The sky-rocket break-up, delayed explosion, rushing sound and reports from several states fit a bright bolide. In that reading, the compartments and carvings were natural features of the rock, the trapper's interpretation, or embellishment. Some writers place the tale in the century's tradition of invented newspaper sensations, beside the 1835 Great Moon Hoax. The Upper Blackfoot Valley Historical Society weighed three options: a meteor, a tall tale, or an alien craft. Nobody has traced Lumley in other records, and no one is known to have gone back for the stone.

Even the year is contested. A correspondent on Patrick Gross's site argued that the journey from remote Montana to St. Louis could not fit the timeline, and proposed September 1864. A Montana reader answered that steamboats ran regularly to Fort Benton during the gold rush.

Today the case sits on lists of crash retrieval stories, decades before Roswell. It is often grouped with the 1897 Aurora airship crash, another newspaper tale of wreckage marked with hieroglyphics. If the stone was ever there, no one has reported finding it since.