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loud noise, and destruction, was no mere rock. It was, according
to Lumley, covered in hieroglyphic-like symbols and seemed to
contain several "compartments."
There was also something that looked like glass strewn about
the site, and odd splotches on the stone where, it seemed to
Lumley, some sort of liquid had splashed and stained it.
We don't know whether the guests at the esteemed Everett
House heard any more of the story; whether Lumley attempted
entry into any of the "compartments," marked the location on
his map, or tried to take some souvenir of his strange adventure
goes unrecorded by the writer of the article. But Lumley told the
reporter two things of which he was confident.
The first was that he was "confident the hieroglyphics were
the work of human hands," though it is tempting to think that
what he really meant was that they could not have been created
naturally, and the second was that "the stone itself, although but
the fragment of an immense body, must have been used for some
purpose by animated beings."
The conclusion reached by the anonymous Missouri report-
er seems remarkably forward-looking, given the twentieth and
twenty-first century's fixations on UFOs and flying saucers:
"Astronomers have long held that it is probable that the heav-
ently bodies are inhabited—even the comets—and it may be
that hereafter some future Columbus, from Mercury or Uranus,
may land on this planet, by means of a meteoric conveyance, and
take full possession thereof —as did the Spanish navigators of
the New World in 1492, and eventually drive what is known as
the 'human race' into a condition of the most abject servitude.
It has always been a favorite theory with many that there must
be a race superior to us, and this may, at some future time, be
demonstrated in the way we have indicated."
The author is correct in that some had speculated about
extraterrestrial life as early as the pre-Socratic Greek philo-
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