Odds and Ends:
SKY DRAGONS AND SERPENTS
In June 1873, a monstrous sky serpent, in a cloud, glided over Bonham, Texas, terrifying farmers. The Bonham Enterprise carried eyewitness accounts of the snake, which was "as long as a telegraph pole" and had bright yellow stripes. It was seen coiling itself up, twisting, writhing, and then striking out at some unseen target. It was traveling eastward. Shortly after, a "sky serpent" was seen over Fort Scott, Kansas, at sunrise, encircling the sun as it rose above the horizon. The display lasted several minutes and was witnessed by both civilians and the U.S. Calvary stationed there.
Sightings of aerial snakes and dragons date back through antiquity. From AD 774, Huntington (England)'s archdeacon wrote "red signs appeared in the sky after sunset, and horrid serpents were seen in Sudsexe." In 793, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year narrative compiled in British monasteries, records an account of people seeing fiery dragons during an extreme lightning storm in AD 793.
Other documented sightings include:
* In 1388 and 1762, a flying dragon was seen over Britain and a "twisting serpent" illuminated the sky for six minutes over Devonshire.
* In Nebraska in 1857, "a flying serpent... hovered over a Missouri River steamboat slowing for a landing. In the late dusk it was like a great undulating serpent, in and out of the lowering clouds, breathing fire, it seemed, with lighted streaks along the sides."
* In 1883, in Maryland, "R. B." witnessed a "monstrous dragon with glaring eye-balls, and mouth wide open displaying a tongue, which hung like a flame of fire from its jaws, reared and plunged" over Catoctin Mountain at 6:30 a.m.
* In 1888, a hissing sky snake was spotted over South Carolina.
* In 1897, in Michigan, at 4 a.m., John Rosa, a newspaper delivery boy, and the policeman he was with, both saw a hissing, silvery serpent, three blocks long, shooting through the air, 1,000 feet overhead.
* In 1935 a shimmering serpent moved vertically through Scandinavian skies.
* In 1935 and 1937 sky serpents appeared over Cruz Alta, Brazil.
Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009
