The Man Who Fell to Earth

 

There have been many reports of visitors from elsewhere dropping in on this island Earth from time to time. In 1954, the Japanese authorities detained a man trying to enter the country with a passport that revealed he was from an unheard country named ‘Taured’. A thorough check was made by the customs officials to see if there was such a place anywhere on the Earth, but they drew a blank. The stranger refused to throw light on the whereabouts of the mysterious nation of Taured and quickly left Japan.

A similar incident occurred in 1851 when a man calling himself Joseph Vorin was found wandering in the German village of Frankfurt an der Oder. When the German authorities asked the man where he was from, Vorin told them that he was from Laxaria, a country on the continent of Sakria. This baffled the authorities because neither of the places existed anywhere on their map of the world!

In 1905, a young man who was arrested in Paris for stealing a loaf was found to speak  an unknown language, and after a lengthy interrogation session, the man managed to convey that he was feom a place called Lizbia. Thinking he meant Lisbon, the man was shown a map of Portugal, and a Portuguese interpreter was brought in to talk to the young offender, but it was soon established that the man was not from Lisbon. The language the youth spoke was not an invented babble either; it had all the consistent syntactical rules of a language similar to Esperanto. Eventually, the strange-speaking man was released, never to be seen again.

The great student of the unexplained, Charles Fort once commented on the subject of visitors from other planets: “If there have ever been instances of teleportations of human beings from somewhere else to his Earth, and examination of infirmaries and workhouses, an asylums might lead to some marvelous disclosures. Early in the year 1928, a man did appear in a town in New Jersey, and did tell that he had come from the planet Mars. Wherever he came from, everybody knows where he went after telling that.”

One of the best documented reports of a possible visitant from another world landing on Earth came from the little French town of Aler con, which is situated about thirty miles north of Le Mans. The town is nowadays solely famous because of its fine lace, but over two hundred years ago, Alencon became renowned for something much less mundane that occurred within its vicinity.

At around 5 a.m. on June 12, 1790, peasants watched in awe as a huge metal sphere descended from the sky, moving with a strange undulating motion. The globe crash landed onto a hilltop, and the violent impact threw up soil and vegetation which showered the hillside. The hull of the globe was so hot(possibly from a rocket motor or because of the rapid descent through the atmosphere) that it ignited the surrounding dry flora, and a grass fire quickly broke out. The peasants rushed up the hill carrying pails of water, and within a short time, the fires were extinguished.

A large crowd encircled the crashed globe, and some of the more adventurous people present stepped forward to touch the hull of the unearthly craft to discover that it was quite warm. A physician, two mayors from nearby towns and a number of officials turned up to see what had descended from the morning sky, and these important witnesses arrived just in time to see something sensational.

A hatch of some sort slid open in the lower hemisphere of the globe, and a man in an outlandish, tight fitting costume emerged through the hatchway and surveyed the observers with an apprehensive look. He started mumbling something in a strange language and gestured for the crowd to get away from him and his vehicle. A few people stepped back, and the man ran through the break in the circle or spectators and fled into the local woods. Some of the peasants ran away from the globe, sensing that something dangerous was about to happen. The remainder of the crowd decided to follow suit. And seconds after the last member of the multitude had retreated from the sphere, it exploded with a peculiar muffled sound, creating a miniature mushroom-shaped cloud. The debris from the craft ‘sizzled’ in the grass, and gradually turned to powder.

A police inspector named Liabeuf travelled over a hundred miles from Paris to investigate the crash, and he quizzed many of the witnesses, including the mayors and physician who had been present at the strange spectacle. The inspector organized a thorough search of the woods where the oddly- dressed man had taken refuge, but the hunt resulted in nothing. The stranger seemed to have vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived.

In the report to his superiors, Inspector Liabeuf put forward the suggestion that the man who had landed in the globe could have been ‘a being from another world’, but the high-ups in Paris dismissed the intimation as ‘a ludicrous idea’.