Authors: W. H. Mumfrey
Tags: #ebook, #epub
The Alien Invasion Survival Handbook: A Defense Manual for the Coming Extraterrestrial Apocalypse (24 page)
Josiah Johnson was known as the “gentleman trapper,” having left his native England for the wilds of the American frontier to work with Hudson's Bay Company in the early 1800s. It was not uncommon for Johnson to spend two or three seasons in the wilderness before bringing his furs into Fort Vancouver for sale. After one profitable year, he met a newspaper reporter in a local bordello. He recounted the following story, which was subsequently published in the
Boston Courier
later that year.
THE ALIEN INVASION SURVIVAL HANDBOOK
After having set his final trap for the day, Johnson had not gone more than fifty paces when he heard it snap shut, followed by a high-pitched squealing. Thinking he had caught an animal, he went to investigate. Arriving at the trap site, he was surprised to find what looked like a small, naked, malnourished child.
The newspaper quoted Johnson's account: “Its skin was the color of a three-day-old corpse, with spindly limbs. Its head was deformed through some defect of birth, with eyes as large and as black as a newborn calf. Oh, how the creature did wail. In a fashion that made me grit my teeth and cover my ears.”
He immediately approached the creature with the intent of freeing its leg, which had been almost severed beneath the knee. As he neared, he was overcome by a “fainting spell” and collapsed. When he revived, both the creature and the trap had disappeared. Although a skilled tracker, he was unable to find any trace of the creature. He did, however, notice curious scorch marks on the tree trunks high above his head.
Johnson could not be further questioned about the incident, as he returned to his camp the following day. He died of suspected food poisoning two months later.
In late August 2003, an oil company reconnaissance team recovered a metal canister buried under a rock cairn on King William Island in northern Canada. It contained a number of poorly preserved documents and some weathered European and Inuit artifacts. After extensive preservation work by a private antiquities company in Ontario, it was discovered that the document was a journal extract by the self-professed last surviving member of the ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition of 1845, led by a former lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land, Sir John Franklin. The unnamed author recounts many of the previously known facts of the mission, including their ship's entrapment in sea ice in Victoria Strait for more than a year, and half the expedition's team dying from disease and starvation. He also recounts how the remaining survivors, thirty-five men in total, had embarked on a perilous overland journey in an attempt to reach the nearest Western outpost, on the Great Slave Lake, several hundred miles to the south. What was unexpected was the author's account of the disappearance of the surviving members of the party after the appearance of strange lights in the pre-dawn sky.
Most curious they were. At first we thought them a manifestation of the aurora borealis. Moving hither and yon at a startling pace. Those of us who were awake watched the spectacle in silent awe. The natives who had camped beside us were most alarmed at the sight and proceeded to decamp immediately, urging us to do the same. Being our best hope yet of survival, I beseeched them to tarry, but to no avail. They set off towards the southeast and were soon swallowed by the dark. I hastened in pursuit, hoping to appease their fear. I had not struggled more than a mile headlong into a stout breeze, when I glanced up to see a figure in front of me. I fell to ground, unable to move and barely able to breathe. Watching the figure approach out of the night, I could see that it was unclothed and wasted. It was almost upon me when I heard a dull thud and a horrible shriek that rose above the shrill wind. The figure fell to its knees and then onto its face, whereupon I could see a harpoon embedded in its back. The natives had returned for me, hastening past the body at a distance, and carried me with them towards the south. I believe I owe my life to their rescue and shall forever remain indebted to them. We returned to our camp in the light of day, but it was deserted. There were signs of a skirmish, but there were no tracks leading away from the encampment apart from ours. The natives all the while watched the sky with a genuine fear. With a great sense of urgency, they implored me to collect what I could of my belongings so we could depart. I remonstrated that we should search for the crew but they …
The rest of the page is missing. What can be read of the last entry of the journal tells of the author's journey with the Inuit and their preparation to make a hazardous open-water crossing. Although the details of the writer's fate remain a mystery, we do know that he never reached the Great Slave Lake settlement.
Confederate captain Uriah Smith, working under orders from Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, lead a small company of Confederate soldiers on a nocturnal reconnaissance mission behind Union lines during the two-day Battle of Seven Pines. Three hours before dawn, they spotted what they thought was one of the Union's aerostats, or manned surveillance balloons, positioned over a nearby hillside. Smith's story is as follows:
We saw it through the trees, at first. Shaped more like an upturned bowl than a balloon. Larger and more graceful than the balloons we saw yesterday. It hung there for some time and then started drifting toward us. Thinking it had broken free of its moorings, we waited to see where it would go. It stopped over a small clearing not more than two chains away and alighted as gentle as a feather. It was a solid structure, the color of polished iron in the moonlight. Hiding in a thicket, we watched as a door opened and its occupants came out. Children, by what we could see; four of them. Thinking that we might capture them, I gave the command for the men to ready their weapons, whereupon the Union Balloon Corps men, hearing us, instantly turned and ran toward us with a speed and agility that was frightening. We opened fire, seeming to hit one before they all disappeared into the undergrowth. Shortly after, the balloon rose into the air and flew off toward the east so quickly that it was out of sight within moments.
Both Captain Smith and his men returned unscathed to their camp. Captain Smith survived the war and worked as a postmaster in Raleigh, North Carolina, for the next twenty years.
Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh-born explorer and journalist. He is most remembered for his 1867 expedition, commissioned by the
New York Herald
, to search for the missing Scottish explorer David Livingstone in central Africa.
After a journey plagued by disease, desertions, and insurrection, Stanley found Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in present-day Tanzania, were he uttered the immortal greeting “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
After a number of subsequent, well-publicized expeditions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Stanley returned again in 1887 to lead the ill-fated mission to “rescue” the governor of Equatoria, in present-day Sudan. In a previously unpublished journal entry, Stanley records:
May 27, 1888
Being yet again short on fresh provisions, I resolved to lead a hunting party to shoot some game. Sporting my Starr Carbine, with two porters carrying my 12 bore ‘bone crusher’ and a further supply of ammunition, I headed northwest from our camp towards a narrow, marshy ravine at the base of a conical hill, on whose slopes flourished a dense thicket. I had seen three fine, plump antelope there the previous day and hoped to bag one for our evening meal. We crept cautiously along, looking keenly into every dark opening for the glint of an eye, but, alas, we saw nothing.
After an hour's search, we came to a mire, overgrown with dense reeds and papyrus. Crossing this quagmire, we sunk up to our waists in foul-smelling ooze. Here we were again plagued by the ubiquitous sword fly and tsetse that had made so much of this journey a misery.
There was a sudden movement in the vegetation lining the shore. Suspecting an ambush by hostile natives or a crocodile, I opened fire. Although I could see no target, luck was with me and I hit my mark. There was a wild thrashing in the rushes, a hideous wail, and then silence.
We dragged ourselves out of the black mud and, still covered in slime, came around our quarry from behind. Taking my double-barreled gun from Mabruki, we entering a small clearing in the rushes. A frightful sight lay before us, which still haunts me to this day. A small, albino native child, frightfully disfigured, with a swollen head and large, protruding eyes, lay naked in front of us. Its arms were disproportionately long and it was missing a finger from each hand. A vicious head wound seeped a dark, viscous fluid, not blood, onto the reeds around its head. My porters were aghast at the sight. They both stepped back, wide eyed, in abject horror. “Utami. Utami,” they murmured, then looked up warily at the sky.
My attention was instead averted to a thick clump of undergrowth to my right. Two more of these God-forsaken creatures, for one could hardly call them human, emerged with a startling ferocity. My porters shrieked and ran for cover, leaving me alone, not more than ten yards from the two swiftly approaching demonic forms. I instinctively sprang back, almost tripping on the ammunition dropped by the hastily retreating porters.
Although unarmed, the creatures' intentions were unmistakably hostile. Throwing the barrel of the gun into my left hand, I fired, hitting one in the shoulder. With its arm hanging by nothing more than a thread, it dropped to the ground with a blood-curdling scream. The other stopped momentarily, assessing the situation, then advanced towards me in a stealthy, sidelong manner. Its villainous eyes locked on mine like a spider courting its prey. With one round left, I aimed the muzzle of my gun at its face and ordered it to stop. It paid no heed, suddenly launching itself towards me at a frightful speed. I discharged my weapon, and the shot, true to its aim, ripped through the creature's head, throwing its lifeless form to the ground.
I approached the vile creature with the shoulder wound, which had now slipped into unconsciousness, and, in an act of mercy, hastily drew my keen, sharp-edged knife across its throat.
That evening, around the campfire, I learned that Utami is the native word for “sky man,” a mythical being that stole their children and took them into the clouds. I went back at dawn for a second look, but the bodies had gone, taken by lions during the night, no doubt.
Vladimir Razumovsky, a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker from the industrial city of Kremenchuk, Ukraine, walked home late one night after celebrating a colleague's birthday. He lived just out of town in a small cottage his grandmother had left to him after her death. He had just bought a new Walkman at the party from a friend's black market contact and fell inebriated on his bed listening to the only tape he had,
The Essential Jimi Hendrix, Volume One
. At just after three in the morning, with the pounding beat of “Voodoo Child” playing through his headphones, he awoke to find several dark figures leaning over him. He screamed in fright, thinking he had disturbed thieves and would be killed and found dead floating in the local channel the next morning. The intruders, startled by the scream, stumbled away from the bed, tripping over assorted boxes and piles of dirty laundry on the floor.
