The Big Wheel of Fire on the Grey Stone Road, Isle of Man (published 1902)

Karl Roeder was a German folklorist living in Manchester. From 21 September 1901 to 24 October 1903 he ran a column called "Manx Notes & Queries" in the island's press, most likely the Isle of Man Examiner. He gathered ghosts, spirits and strange encounters. His main informant was Edward Faragher, the Cregneash poet and fisherman known as Ned Beg Hom Ruy. In November 1902, one note told of a light on a country road. Roeder's 1904 book indexes it simply. "Big wheel on fire."

The year of the encounter is lost. The man was young. That is all the story says. He was seeing the girls home, late in the night. At the end of beyr yn clagh glass, the grey stone road, he heard a great noise. Then he saw it. A thing like a big wheel of fire.

A second telling puts a man on the same road at Ballakillowey, in Rushen parish. He met a big wheel of fire, "going around at a fearful rate, but remaining in the same place." Each time he tried another way round, the wheel blocked his path. In the end, he got past. In one version it moved off toward Ballacurry and vanished. The two accounts may be one story.

Later summaries keep the drama. Culture Vannin has the wheel "hovering over a man for a short time before shooting off and then disappearing." Isle of Man Today has him walking from Ballakillowey towards the Sloc, watching a "burning wheel of fire in the sky" that "disappeared at speed into the night sky."

In its own time, this was a story of spirits, not machines. The British Fairies blog reads it as a buggane manifestation. It sets the wheel beside other wheel spirits at Hellsgill and South Unst in Scotland, at Mynyddislwyn in Gwent, and in the Orkney nuggle and shoopiltee, with their wheel-like tails. Manx legend also tells of the sea god Manannan turning into a wheel of fire to frighten off intruders. Roeder's index keeps similar company. A dog going away in a flash of light. Bright lights. A big stack on fire.

The usual candidates are ball lightning, a bright meteor or a will-o'-the-wisp, though no source has applied them to this case. One coincidence has surfaced. On 10 November 1902, Rev. John Mackenzie Bacon and Percival Spencer made the island's first manned balloon ascent from Peveril Square, Douglas, before about 15,000 spectators. It is a weak match. The flight was in daylight, far from Rushen, and the wheel was a memory from the man's youth. Only the month of publication lines up.

Culture Vannin reissued Roeder's notes as Ghosts, Bugganes & Fairy Pigs, transcribed and introduced by Stephen Miller. It presents the wheel as possibly "the Isle of Man's first UFO sighting," and as only the second such sighting in the entirety of the British Isles. That second claim is hard to defend. Many earlier British reports of aerial lights exist.

Still, the picture holds. A dark road. A young man. A wheel of fire that would not let him pass. The island's later cases, from the little red soldiers of 1911 to the Snaefell mast strike of 2001, follow in its wake.