Scarborough, England — 1837
Frightening lights at ground level
- By a clear starlight night Mr. White, chief officer of the preventive service of the Scarborough station (“a most respectable authority”) was proceeding from his house to a cliff where one of his men, named Trotter, had the lookout. According to a letter from his son to a science magazine, “He passed a plantation in his way, in which he heard a loud crash among the trees, as if it had been the fall of an aerolite (…) He saw before him what he thought were balls of fire, about the size of an orange, appearing and disappearing with an undulating motion, about five or six feet from the ground; not accompanied by any noise, nor did they move over the hedges; but he observed other luminous appearances shooting across the road and sky, emitting a hissing noise like a rocket, but not so loud. “The same appearances (particularly the latter) had so frightened the man, that he had actually hid himself for fear of them.”
Source: The Magazine of Natural History (Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1837): 550-551. 422. Case: W375