Just when you think things can’t get any weirder, that’s when the aliens arrive.
Or at least that’s what an old settler named Alexander Hamilton claimed happened at his ranch south of Vernon in 1897.
He staked his sacred honor on it.
Apparently the extraterrestrials stole and dismantled his prize heifer, which perhaps explains why even today the cattle at Hamilton’s pasture seemed jumpy.
Everywhere you go in Woodson County, black Angus walk right up to the fence, looking for food. Here they appeared skittish, darting away as soon as I approached the barbed-wire.
The entire herd repeatedly stampeded off as if they’d seen a ghost.
Their owner, too, was wary, and demanded to know why I was parked by his pasture, carefully observing his charges.
ACCORDING to the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate, on the night of the abduction Hamilton claimed he and his family had been awakened by panicked cries.
Assuming it was merely his mischievous bulldog, Hamiliton went to the porch to scold him when he saw it: an enormous “airship descending over [the] cow lot about 50 rods from the house.”
He swore the craft was 300 feet long, dark reddish in color and cigar-shaped.
Hamilton and his son, along with other farm-workers, snatched up axes and sprinted toward the ship with its shining glass panels.
It was then they saw “six of the strangest beings [they’d] ever seen,” communicating in a manner none of them could understand.
As the farmers approached, the aliens shined their lights on the men, then quickly accelerated the craft upward.
As the ship ascended, it trailed a cable of sorts to the ground where it had snared an unsuspecting heifer, who balled and cried furiously as she was pulled from the earth below.
Too late, Hamiliton and his men watched in horror as the craft — with heifer in tow — shot into the night sky, then vanished into the northwestern stars.
SHELTERED in my own craft, I stared long and hard into that same cloudless northern sky.
After the cattle got used to me, they decided it was safe to come and take a look. They nibbled at the field greedily, yellowed fragments flying away in the wind whenever one would raise their head.
