Daring Bird-Man Soars At 10,000 Ft. On Homemade Wings

For three years Clem Sohn, parachute jumper of Lansing, Michigan, dreamed of the time when man might go aloft and soar like a bird. Recently his dream became a reality.

Clad with foot-webbing and home-made wings of airplane canvas, he bailed out of a ship at an altitude of 12,000 feet. During the first 2,000 feet of his fall, he kept his wings folded at his side while he tested his leg-webbing. Slowly, he opened his wings to check his descent, and for more than a minute he banked, looped, climbed and zoomed to right and left. At 6,000 feet he pulled the rip cord of his parachute and floated back to earth.

While aviation authorities who witnessed the stunt failed to see any practical value in man’s new “conquest of the air,” Sohn was already at work designing bigger wings and planning future aerial maneuvers.

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And for those who would draw the conclusion from this that these sightings represent the same entity, how are we to make sense of the great disparities in time and place, not to mention the myriad variations in appearance and behaviour?

To my mind, anyway, that’s the core part of why these particular reports are just so darn interesting. If anyone could actually figure out what they all mean, boy, we’d be certain to learn a lot more about the world around us and how it all works than we know now.

“However, many now consider hysteria to be a ‘legacy diagnosis’ (i.e.: a catch-all junk diagnosis), particularly due to its long list of possible manifestations: one Victorian physician catalogued 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria and called the list incomplete.”

Now, I know we’re talking about mass hysteria here, which is slightly different, and I won’t deny that there have been a few clear instances- The phantom slasher of Taiwan, the ongoing African penis-thefts.

I myself was part of a small, unreported mass hysteria experience at a boy scout camp in Elmer, New Jersey in 1985. A rumour began to spread that there was a pack of wild dogs in the woods nearby, some of them possibly rabid. By nightfall, several different scout troops had banded together in one of the larger camps, huddled around large bonfires. Several of us had made spears, either of sharpened wood, or by affixing knives to the ends of poles, and guards and night watchmen were posted to keep a look out for the savage beasts. To be honest, I’m not sure where our scoutmasters were, as I can’t really recall them being present. In retrospect it was a strange sort of Lord Of The Flies situation. I know I kept my knife close to me that night, and slept little. Of course, by next morning, we were told by the camp directors that there were no wild dogs, and realized that no one we knew had actually SEEN one, only reported that someone, somewhere, had.

Mass hysteria most often exhibits itself within small, isolated, and tight-knit communities, which certainly describes my old boy scout camp. So I understand the mentality of mass hysteria, but here’s where my skepticism comes into play- this bat man sighting has several actual witnesses, all of whom claim to have seen the same thing. Many Jersey Devil, Chupacabras, and other cryptid sightings have been dismissed as mass hysteria at one time or another as well, again even when actual eyewitnesses have come forwards.

Cultural influence no doubt does come into play. It is worth noting that in 1938, many people in and around Grover’s Mill, New Jersey actually claimed to have seen the Martian war machines roaming the countryside. Was this mass hysteria? Well, yes, but they DID actually see something. That night, throughout much of the region, a dense fog had rolled in, which played in perfectly with Orson Welles’s description of choking gas clouds. Many people, under the influence of the radio program, interpreted the obscured, tall forms of water towers for Martian walkers.

Saying that the Houston Bat Man was simple mass hysteria begets the question- who was going around suggesting flying people were visiting Texas, and why didn’t the eyewitnesses mention this influence? Ok, so we’ve got McCarthy and the Red Menace, but why would this take the form of winged men, rather than skulking soldiers with Kalashnikovs, or maybe men in black with Russian accents?