What happened
On a Tuesday morning in January 1878 a Texas farmer named John Martin was out hunting when a dark object high in the southern sky caught his eye. Its odd shape and speed held his attention. He stared until his eyes ached and had to look away; when he looked back it was almost overhead, much larger, and seemed to be moving through space at a wonderful speed. Directly above him it appeared about the size of a large saucer and was clearly very high. Martin thought it most resembled a balloon, though he wondered if it might be a heavenly body. It sped off as fast as it had come and vanished in the southern sky. The reporter called him a gentleman of undoubted veracity and said that, if it was not a balloon, it deserved the attention of scientists. The Dallas Daily Herald ran the item on 23 January and the Denison Daily News reprinted it on 25 January. Donald Keyhoe revived it in 1950 as an early use of 'saucer' for an aerial object.
The original account
Tuesday morning, while out hunting, his attention was directed to a dark object high up in the southern sky. The peculiar shape, and the velocity with which the object seemed to approach, riveted his attention... On resuming his view the object was almost overhead and had increased considerably in size and appeared to be going through space at a wonderful speed. When directly over him it was about the size of a large saucer, and was evidently at a great height.
Dallas Daily Herald, 23 January 1878, p. 4 (public domain; OCR transcription corrected from the Chronicling America page image)
The official explanation
The reporter and Martin himself both suggested a balloon, and gas balloon ascensions were a known spectacle by the 1870s, though none is recorded over North Texas that morning. A bright daytime fireball or meteor is another candidate given the speed and the arc from south to overhead and back south. The famous word 'saucer' was only a size comparison, not a description of shape; the label 'flying saucer' was attached decades later. Researchers also note uncertainty about where Martin lived: the Dallas paper places him six miles north of Dallas, while the Denison reprint is usually read as six miles from Denison.
The anomalous case
The report is contemporary, appeared within a day of the sighting, and comes from a named witness the paper vouched for. Its details resist the easy answers. A meteor does not approach, grow in size, cross overhead and then recede the way it came, and Martin watched long enough to rest his eyes and resume observing, implying a duration far beyond a fireball's few seconds. A free balloon drifts with the wind; Martin described something crossing at a wonderful speed at great height. The reporter himself thought the case worth scientific attention. Writers since Donald Keyhoe have pointed out that Martin's comparison anticipates by almost seventy years the language that Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting made famous, which some read as evidence of a consistent physical phenomenon across eras.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Dallas Daily Herald, 23 January 1878, page 4 ('A Strange Phenomenon') newspaper, loc.gov
Sources
- Dallas Daily Herald, 23 January 1878, p. 4 Library of Congress, Chronicling America
- The First Flying Saucer Texas Co-op Power
- Denison, Texas, 22 January 1878 (Airship catalogue) Patrick Gross, UFOs at Close Sight
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.