Distinctly Montana Magazine

49 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m spher Anaximander, who theorized about plural worlds, each with their own forms of life. One of his successors, Metrodorus of Chi- ros, wrote that "It seems absurd, that in a large field only one stalk should grow, and that in an infinite space only one world exist." Even so, these words having been written almost 80 years before the celebrated Washington state sighting of nine silvery discs by Kenneth Arnold, the event that gave us the term "flying saucer" and kicked off the UFO craze, strikes us as remarkable, if true. For it seems clear, writing from the perspective of 2024, that Lumley experienced what we would now describe as a close en- counter with a downed UFO/UAP. But what must it have seemed like to open your newspaper and read that account in 1865, when discussion of mysterious aircraft was less ubiquitous? It might have seemed like so much bunkum, just another piece of 19th-century journalistic prankery at a time in which, for lack of a better term, "fake news" was rampant. Edgar Allen Poe had engaged in a bit of it in 1844 with a tale of a 72-hour bal- loon trip around the world, as so did Mark Twain when he wrote about the discovery of a prehistoric human perfectly preserved in stone—its hand preserved in the act of thumbing its nose. But perhaps the most relevant might be 1835's Great Moon Hoax, in which The Sun proclaimed, in a six-part special series, that an enormous telescope had been constructed in South America which allowed for unprecedentedly close observation of the moon, resulting in the recent detection of a whole host of living creatures thereon, including winged bat people, unicorn goats, and tiny bison. Does Lumley's wild tale belong to that infamous American pseudo-literary tradition? Or is there something more to it? Could it be that an aging fur trader really found something from another world planted in a mountain located, in the ver- biage of the original newspaper story, "in the neighborhood of the Cadotte Pass?" And if so, could it possibly still be there, un- discovered, the trail left by its century-and-a-half-old skid across the face of western Montana grown over with trees and grass? Who knows, but Vegas oddsmakers would probably put it at about 1,000,000,000 to 1. But those of us who, as the poster behind the desk of an ev- er-popular 90s show character puts it, "want to believe" are already planning our weekend excursions to the Cadotte Pass, cars loaded up with beef jerky, bottled water, and well-thumbed UFO paperbacks. Should any of us find anything up there and take a good pho- to of it, or at least come back with a great story about what we found, it's a sure bet that the newspaper will print it up. Hot Tub Capital of the World Bozeman | Big Sky | Butte Helena | Missoula | Whitefish He found a large rock stuck in the side of the mountain. This, the apparent source of the explosion, loud noise, and destruction, was no mere rock. It was, according to Lumley, covered in hieroglyphic-like symbols and seemed to contain several "compartments."

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