John Martin's "Large Saucer" over North Texas, 1878

Friday, January 25, 1878. The front page of the Denison Daily News carried a short item under the headline "A Strange Phenomenon." Its source was a local farmer named John Martin. The paper called him "a gentleman of undoubted veracity." Some say the story first ran in the Dallas Herald.

It was a Tuesday morning. Martin was out hunting. His attention was drawn to "a dark object high up in the southern sky." "The peculiar shape and velocity with which the object seemed to approach riveted his attention." When he first noticed it, it was about the size of an orange.

He watched so long that he "became blind from long looking." He looked away to rest his eyes, then looked back. The object was almost overhead and "appeared to be going through space at wonderful speed." Directly above him, it was "about the size of a large saucer" and "evidently at great height." Martin thought it resembled, as well as he could judge, a balloon.

Then it went as rapidly as it had come. It was soon lost to sight. The paper closed with a challenge. If it was not a balloon, the occurrence "deserves the attention of our scientists."

No scientist answered. According to Mike Cox, the Austin Daily Statesman was silent on the reported goings on in North Texas. Even the basic facts are tangled. Wikipedia and The Black Vault date the sighting to January 2. But the article says "Tuesday morning," and the Tuesday before January 25, 1878 was January 22. Transcriptions also disagree on whether Martin lived six miles south or six miles north of "this city." Six miles north of Denison would have put him across the Red River.

Which city is another question. A 1965 Dallas Morning News piece said the Denison paper had simply reprinted a report from the old Dallas Herald. If so, Martin may have farmed near Dallas. Cox searched the 1880 census. He found no farmers named Martin in Dallas County, three John Martins in Collin County, and a tenant farmer named John E. Martin in Grayson County, home of Denison.

The first explanation came from Martin himself. A balloon. The newspaper left the door open with its careful "if it was not a balloon." No cited source identifies a balloon flight over North Texas that January.

The cited sources do not allege a hoax. The later doubts concern dates and directions, not Martin's honesty. The report itself is thin. It gives no hour, weather, sound or exit direction. One witness, in one short newspaper item.

What made the story famous is a single word. In 1950, Donald E. Keyhoe wrote in The Flying Saucers Are Real that he had first assumed "saucer" began with Kenneth Arnold. Then he named John Martin as the first to compare a flying object to a saucer. Martin used the word for size, not shape. Arnold, in 1947, was describing how his objects moved.

Still, the echo stuck. The case was retold by John A. Keel, by Cox, by Texas Co-op Power and by the Farmers' Almanac. Catalogues of the phantom airship era list it among the reports that came before the great wave of 1896 and 1897. A hunter, a dark speck, a saucer in the sky. Sixty nine years early.