More Kentucky Triangular UFOs

The first Kentucky UFO reported to NUFORC in 2011 comes from Harrodsburg. Unfortunately the entry is appallingly short, but it does fall in line with the ongoing spate of previously reported triangular UFOs statewide and nationwide. (I may have even sighted one myself.)

"Bright Triangular lights seen over Harrodsburg, KY.

We were pulling onto our road and looked up and saw a bright triangular shaped light move very fast across the sky. At first, we thought it was in the rear view mirror, but then, we realized that it was well below the rear view mirror (In reference to the windshield). Then it went out of sight."

Meanwhile, the widespread sightings of these triple-pointed enigmas continue. In November 2010, a triangular UFO "the size of a football field" allegedly was seen in California. The image above, included here to simply illustrate the phenomena, was posted to discussion about the California incident but apparently is not of that UFO either.

And over at MUFON's casefiles, we find no less than ten new UFO reports filed in January. And sure enough, there's a triangular one:

"While standing out back smoking I notice two bright lights off in the distance heading my direction. It took a few minutes to get close enough to make out what it was. After a couples more minutes I decided to run in and yell for my girlfriend to come look at it. Stupid me never told her to grab the camcorder! She was so excited and kept talking asking what it was. I asked her shush and listen. I'm hard of hearing and could not hear any sound it was making. I asked her if she could hear anything and she stated " I hear a low humming sound. " at that point we walk to our side gate to see if we could get the neighbors to come out and look. They had a house full of people and couldn't hear me yell. The triangle was right over top of us. It was so big and bright and very low. I could have threw a rock and hit it. My girlfriend tried to get her cell phone camera to work and couldn't. She ran to the other side of the house to see if she could get the other neighbor to see it but she was leaving. We watched this thing for a good 15 minutes as it floated across the sky very slow from South East to North West. It was headed right toward the love's truck stop out to interstate 75. What I would say was the front of the thing had two lights like head lights. The under side had three lights in each corner. Around those three lights were smaller lights. The smaller lights were in a circle around those three. Across what I say was the back had two flashing lights. I'm sure someone else had to see this thing because it was to big and bright. I'm positive it was bigger than the lot our house is on."

The report doesn't give a specific location, but I know Love's Truckstop well - it's at the Boonesboro exit off I-75.

Though I remain open-minded about the report, I have to assume this person is being somewhat hyperbolic when he says it was close enough to him to have hit it with a rock.

The Beriah Magoffin Monument

Beriah Magoffin was Kentucky's 21st Governor, serving during the Civil War.

Magoffin, who attended Centre College in Danville and Transylvania University in Lexington, believed strongly in the right of states to secede from the Union. Though he was sympathetic to the Confederate cause, he supported Kentucky's position of neutrality in the war.

As far as Civil War-era Governors go, Magoffin really wasn't terribly notable and his actions in office did little to sway the conflict one way or the other. Historically, he is probably best known for his telegram to President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln called for deployment of Kentucky troops on April 15, 1861, and Magoffin defiantly responded: "I will send not a man, nor a dollar, for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister Southern States."

After the Civil War ended, however, Magoffin became a civil rights advocate and urged passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

His main legacy today is that he left behind an interesting tombstone: the Beriah Magoffin Monument is located in Spring Hill Cemetery in his hometown of Harrodsburg. The grave peculiarly renders Magoffin's bust in Neo-classical style, wearing a Roman toga.

Editha Salomon

Editha Salomon, aka Ann O'Delia Dis Debar, Laura Horos, Ellora, Madame Helana, Swami Viva Ananda, Della Ann O'Sullivan, Angel Anna, Claudia D'Arvie, Editha Gilbert Montez, Vera Ava and Blanche Solomons, was an occultist and scam artist whose exploits were once legendary around the globe, yet this Kentuckian's story is all but forgotten today.

Harry Houdini referred to her as "one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known". Despite this, she was apparently sincere about the paranormal on some level, and was genuinely influenced by more legitimate occult practices such as Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy. Blavatsky (pictured below) believed that all religions were true at the core of their innermost teachings. Her writings, combining esoteric spiritual philosophy with modern science is considered by many to be the progenitor of "New Age" thought.



In 1870, under the name Editha Gilbert Montez, she swindled a lot of money by passing herself off as the daughter of famous dancer/actress Lola Montez. By the 1880s she was in a fraudulent Spiritualism racket and claiming to be related to West Virginia lawmaker Joseph H. Diss Debar. In truth, she was born Editha Salomon in Harrodsburg, KY and raised in Louisville.

In 1888 she was sentenced to six months in prison on charges of fraud. After getting out of jail, she went right back to her phony-medium cons (as Vera P. Ava), and her fake-royalty pose (as Princess Editha Lolita). In 1898 she was living in New Orleans and it was there that she married her partner in crime, Frank Dutton Jackson.

After a brief jail stay in Louisiana, the pair next popped up in Paris, where they met occultist S. L. MacGregor Mathers. By claiming to be Anna Sprengel, Editha managed to gain access to top-secret texts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which the pair subsequently absconded with. The incident is mentioned in a footnote about Mathers in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats:


Interestingly, as it turns out, historians now believe there was no real Anna Sprengel, having been a hoax concocted by William Wynn Westcott. But Westcott's backstory of this mythical Anna Sprengel includes her being the daughter of Lola Montez, which begs the question: was it actually Editha who created the character? Was Westcott a co-conspirator, or he was duped by her into believing this persona? Yet, one must ask, why would she need to return to steal the secrets of the Golden Dawn, if she was in fact its co-creator? What a mess.

They spent time at the Koreshan Unity religious commune in Florida, learning about Hollow Earth theories of its bizarre founder, Cyrus Teed. (At some point in her exploits, Editha also operated a fruitarian colony in Florida, which may or may not have been related to the Koreshan Unity organization.) After leaving Florida, Editha and her husband gallivanted across Europe claiming to be high-ranking representatives of Teed's organization, which they most certainly were not.


In 1890 they were in South Africa, opening a "College of Occult Sciences" in Cape Town. As "Laura Horos", she lectured on the stolen teachings of the Golden Dawn and gave clairvoyant readings under various pseudonyms. Their college had moved to England by 1900, and their curriculum had expanded to include magnetic healing, parapsychology, clairvoyance, divination, materialization of ectoplasm, thaumaturgy, and channeling divine entities.

Some twisted sex magick was apparently also a big part of their system: in 1901 they were arrested for rape and buggery of a sixteen-year-old girl, jewelry theft and false pretenses. Jackson (who was by now calling himself "Theodore Horos") got 15 years, Editha got 7. She was released early, on July 1906, for good behavior.


The New York Times was seemingly fond of covering her sensationalist antics, as can be seen by combing through their archives. In them, you'll find a whole treasure trove of odd gossip about her adventures in addition to those mentioned here.

One of the many notches on Editha's arrest record was an incident in which she was caught stealing money from an elderly woman who had hired her to try to contact the ghost of her deceased husband in a private seance. Hearing of this, I have to wonder if The Rainbird Pattern, the 1972 novel which became Alfred Hitchcock's 1976 film Family Plot, was inspired in part by Editha and her husband. The book and film are about a husband-and-wife con duo whose scams revolve around her phony-psychic routine.

Late in 1909, Editha was living alone in Cincinnati, Ohio, once again using the name Vera Ava. And then she just disappeared. We don't know where or when she died, and we don't know where she is buried. The proximity to Kentucky in her last known appearance nudges the imagination into supposing that she might have come back to her Kentucky.

400 Mile Yard Sale Across Kentucky

I live for yard sales, flea markets, junk stores, auctions, trading posts, antique malls, and such. And in this economy, "secondary market" stuff is quickly becoming primary.

So it should come as no surprise that you'll find me somewhere in all the hubbub of the 400 Mile Yard Sale across Kentucky.

The sale follows Highway 68 (though there's always plenty more yard sales going on in the periphery each year) from Maysville to Paducah and hitting all points in between - including Paris, Lexington, Nicholasville, Wilmore, Harrodsburg, Danville, Gravel Switch, Lebanon, Campbellsville, Glasgow, Bowling Green, Cadiz, Hopkinsville, and Benton. Yee-haw!


(By the way, Catclaw Theatre is having a yard sale this weekend at 2107 Lakeland Road in the Anchorage area of Louisville. Come on down and say howdy! And if you can't make it, make a donation!)

Kentucky Pioneers

The other night while scouring archive.org pillaging Lale Andersen mp3s for my Voraxica blog, I somehow happened upon a campy 1941 classroom instruction film about Kentucky pioneers.

Although some aspects of the film are unrealistic, other details are actually really well-executed. The scenes at James Harrod's fort don't always have a ring of authenticity, but all in all it has a very creepy vibe to it, and I'd still rather watch this grainy old enigma than some zillion dollar budget bloated historical film of today.

I can't find any mention of who did the narration, but as an old William Holden aficionado, I'd swear that's him talking even though it's not mentioned on any list of his works.


Click here to see the film.

The Mystery of James Harrod

Nick Tosches spent years researching the 1920s musician Emmett Miller, who had been quite famous in his day yet left almost no trace of his existence just a half century later. His quest to know more about the man became an obsession that spanned decades, and finally bore fruit, as detailed in his book "Where Dead Voices Gather".

Perhaps one day scholars will plumb the depths of the mysteries of Kentucky's James Harrod as well - but I wouldn't bet on it. Harrod is a key part of Kentucky history, yet one whose record is smudged in places and completely blank in others.

We dont know when he was born and we don't know when he died. We have no photographs or paintings of his likeness. We know almost nothing about his early life. We do know he served in the French and Indian War, and was probably underage when he did so. We also know he was an important early settler of Kentucky, in every way a peer of Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, yet his name is not a household word. (Well, then again, in a way it is for some: Harrod founded the first permanent settlement in Kentucky in 1774 and we know it today as the city pictured above.... Harrodsburg.)

In February 1792, Harrod left on a hunting trip in the wilderness of Kentucky and was never seen again.

There are as many theories and explanations for his vanishing as there are JFK conspiracy theories, and we'll probably never know the truth.

Some say he was a bigamist and had another wife and family, to whom he returned to under another name, and was likely buried under this pseudonym. Others tell of a pair of woodsmen held captive by Indians in Michigan meeting a fellow prisoner referred to as "Colonel Harrod." And yet another account has it that Harrod had been killed by one of his fellow hunters, a man named Bridges, and that the secret purpose of their hunting expedition was to search for Jonathan Swift's fabled silver mine. Supposedly this Bridges guy was caught selling silver buttons from Harrod's coat, conveniently engraved with the letter "H", at a Lexington shop.

Then there's the bizarre tale that some of Harrod's friends found his skeleton in a cave, wrapped in grass. However, some say the skeleton was wearing Harrod's shirt and some say it wasn't. Supposedly, Harrod's family believed the skeleton to be his, so the question then becomes, why didn't they bury the skeleton and give him a proper gravestone? And why then, when Ann applied for Harrod's pension, did she swear he had died in a hunting accident and that his clothes had been found in a nearby river but his body never found?

The most logical explanation, to me, would be that he simply died in the woods and no one ever found his body, which probably was torn apart by wild animals. But according to the James Harrod Trust, "In the 1880s a rumor circulated that Bridges, who had returned to Virginia, confessed on his deathbed to the Harrod murder and revealed the place of his burial in what is now Estill County, Kentucky".

Or maybe he encountered the Devil Deer.

I'm not exactly weeping copious tears for Harrod, though - he actively opposed Daniel Boone and Richard Henderson's Transylvania purchase, and added and abetted the crooked land grab from Virginia. He went on to represent Virginia's "Kentucky County" in the Virginia House of Delegates. Many people, your humble author included, believe that most of the area should still be known as Transylvania because it was improperly wrested from Boone and Henderson's hands by the state of Virginia before regaining its independence.