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The Cadotte Pass Saucer: A New Episode of "Distinctly Montana Stories"

UFO

 

In October of 1865, a fur trader named James Lumley walked into the Everett House in St. Louis and started talking. He was old by the standards of his trade, and he had a story worth the price of a drink. The previous September, up in the Cadotte Pass, he had watched a light cross the sky and break into pieces. Then the ground shook, the wind came up out of nowhere, and the air went sharp with the smell of sulfur.

The next morning he found a gouge cut through the woods, six or seven feet across, running farther than he could see. He followed it past torn-out trees and scraped hilltops. At the end of it, lodged in the side of a mountain, was a rock, and the rock was covered in markings Lumley swore had been made by hand.
A newspaperman took it all down. This was more than eighty years before a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw nine silver discs over Washington and handed the country the phrase "flying saucer." Whatever Lumley saw, he saw it first.
Was it a tall tale spun for a warm room and a free meal? The 1860s were thick with that sort of thing, from Edgar Allan Poe's invented balloon voyage to The Sun's winged men on the moon. Or did an aging trapper really stumble onto something that fell out of the sky, something that could still be up there, grown over with a century and a half of trees and grass?
"Fur Traders and Flying Saucers: James Lumley and the Cadotte Pass UFO" was written by Nick Mitchell for Distinctly Montana magazine. It is narrated and produced by Joe Shelton.
 
 

 

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