Alien Airships Over Old America: Plus 18 Other Tantalizing Mysteries

96,000 words. 350-plus pages. Photographs. llustrations. IN THE 19th CENTURY'S DYING YEARS, the skies above 20 American States became a stage for awe-inspiring events. Countless witnesses, including public administrators, physicians, police and community leaders testified that they had watched immense winged and propellered 'airships' hovering above cities, towns, rivers and farms. Some of the intruders - seen by thousands below - had raked the landscape with dazzling spotlights. Others had landed - vanishing, when disturbed, in fiery explosions of speed. The Great American Airship Flap lasted 14 months and was chronicled in hundreds of newspapers, technical publications and scientific journals across the nation. Most reports assumed that the astonishing skyships were exclusive to the United States. But historians have since verified that the futuristice vehicles also spread alarm in Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Australia and New Zealand. What were these seemingly miraculous vehicles? Drawings and descriptions of the time present them as propellered products of clunky Victorian technology - contradictorily endowed with breathtaking maneuverability and velocity. Today, more than a century later, the skyships remain one of the profoundest mysteries to have confronted humankind. Author, journalist and screenwriter JOHN PINKNEY has devoted most of his career to investigating strange and inexplicable occurrences. In this unique book he describes a myriad of the documented enigmas that tantalize him most: * THE GIGANTIC SHADOW ON MARS On March 27 1989, moments before its communication systems failed, the Russian space probe Phobos transmitted two puzzling images to ground control. The first showed a massive cylindrical object; the second a shadow 25 kilometres long which the cylinder was apparently casting on the planet's surface. And that wasn't all. In September, Britain's Channel 4 televised further photographs from the aborted mission: images almost too bizarre to be believed... * THE PRESIDENT REAGAN 'PROPHECY' Three months before the event, a magazine article foretold, in uncanny detail, the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan * PLUS The Glowing Cemetery Cross that Mystified Millions;The Long-Dead Couple whose facial images repeatedly bloomed in mold on an Oxford chapel wall; The Murdered Woman who appeared in a neighbor's dream, to name her killer. And many more mysteries that neither science not logic can explain.