I went to the Houston Chronicle homepage and went through the laborious
registration process, found the following;
====================
This excerpt is all that is mentioned of Dellschau in the file URL that
is included at the bottom;
CHARLES A.A. DELLSCHAU
Charles A.A. Dellschau , an immigrant from Germany and a veteran of the
American Civil War, devoted the last quarter of his life to inventing
magnificent flying machines he called "aeros."
They were visions resembling sailing boats, submarines and dirigibles,
delightful hybrids of Jules Verne and the Wright Brothers.
He used inks and watercolors to carefully describe his airborne machines
and complemented them with texts about aeronautics and related
scientific material clipped from magazines and newspapers, among them
the New York Times and the Houston Chronicle.
He designed more than 100 different aircraft. In his writings, Dellschau
said he belonged to a secret organization called the Sonora Aero Club,
formed in Sonora, Calif., in 1850, and claimed some of the machines he
depicted had actually been built and flown. However, the club's members
"worked in secrecy and were not permitted to talk about their activities
or to use the aircraft for their own purposes."
Born in Germany in 1830, Dellschau settled in Galveston at age 20 and
eventually moved to Houston, where he worked for his son-in law, Anton
Stelzig, at the now-famous saddlery. He was 70 years old when he retired
at the turn of the century and began his investigations three years
later.
According to Anton's daughter Helena, the drawings were a hobby - a
statement contradicted by the meticulous care Dellschau lavished on
their execution and the care he took to preserve them in scrapbooks.
Still, like the work of so many others whose creations were done for
personal amusement or gratification, Dellschau's enigmatic little
paintings on paper were forgotten after his death in 1923. They were
discovered in the trash 40 years later by a junk dealer and eventually
sold to a private buyer and to the Menil Collection.
http://www.chron.com/content/archive/search.hts?operation=getdoc&database=1999;1998;1997;1996;1995;1994;1993;1992;1991;1990;1989;1988;1987;1986;1985;&databases=1998;1998;1998;1996;1991;&docid=50420&docids=50420;41365;34006;42274;18016;&query=dellschau+NOT+3:RSEC&pos=1&numhits=25&start=&type=&user=houston&sview=1&hview=2&dview=1
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It is interesting that he is remembered only as an eccentric though
highly inventive artist and that his claims of belonging to a secret
society with advanced knowledge go unchallenged or investigated.
Does it make any sense that such a secret group would allow all of their
knowledge and skill to die with the original members? That even today
they might exist and have gone much further in their discoveries, sworn
to secrecy to not reveal the technology? I know your book addresses
many possible links to such groups and activities as at;
http://www.illuminet.com/keelytxt.html
If this is so, then its their own business to keep it secret and we must
resolve ourselves to trying to find links and descriptions that might
lead us to discovering for ourselves how they could build flying
machines or that men could fly during that time or even through the
centuries as reports of such aerial phenomena abound in the literature.
Personally, I have always been enthralled by the reports of flying men,
sometimes reported as 'bat men', seen with wings flapping as they fly
through the air.
To my way of thinking, the idea isn't far fetched at all if you can
reduce your body weight, either by some strange gas with unusual lifting
ability or some electronic/mechanical technique that reduces gravity.
Its hard to believe that a gas exists with that kind of lifting ability,
but the comments clearly state that the gas has to be heated to produce
the additional lift. Perhaps with the presence of heat, the gas somehow
interacts with gravity in some unknown way.
Maybe the 50/50 mix that Terry brought up in his interesting post;
.....by passing steam through a bed of glowing coal a mixture of
50-50 carbon monoxide and hydrogen will result, both of which are
lighter than air, and both of will burn as a fuel source. Also the
lifting forces of these gases will increase when they are heated.
I could see some kind of suit with tubes running all over the surface
and filled with this heated gas, to provide weight reduction or maybe
even lift, to the wearer. Then wings or fins would be appropriate to
provide propulsion as a fish would swim in water.
The earlier comment from the witnesses who described the man riding on
the mechanical contraption (sans airbags), said as long as he paddled,
the device stayed at an even height and moved forward, when he stopped
paddling, the device slowly sank in the air....isn't that fascinating???
That is pure weight reduction using what I like to think of as the 'slow
fall'. If you only weighed a couple of pounds, you could easily jump
over a building or swim through the air.
I did a search looking for the direct quotes on the Lung-Gom-Pa in Tibet
which was a group of monks who followed a discipline that lets them
control their body weight, as recounted in the book 'Magic and Mystery
in Tibet' by Alexandra David Neel around 1900.
The story goes that she wangled her way deep into the mysteries of the
Tibetan lamaseries and was riding from one temple to another when she
and her guide came across a monk jumping through the air in 30-50 foot
leaping bounds. (remember the myth of the 7 league boots???)
She was fascinated and wanted to stop the monk so she could question him
how he did this. Her guide stopped her, saying it was taboo to wake
them as they were in trance which allowed them to reduce their body
weight for the purpose of making rapid journeys through the Himalayas.
They were called 'Lung-Gom-Pa'...she was also told that long-time
practitioners of this meditative state, must wear heavy chains on their
bodies as they got older because the reduced gravity state became
incorporated in their bodies, no longer requiring the meditation to
produce the phenomena.
Now this has always intriuged me because of the work of Harold Saxton
Burr and Rupert Sheldrake, where Burr claimed the protein of the body is
completely replaced in about 6 months. That means any tissue that grows
under a specific influence will incorporate that influence as part of
its characteristic. In this case, a reduced weight.
Another correlation to this is that of the infamous Billy Meier case
where grass in an aledged landing zone of a UFO, continued to grow in a
swirling pattern for up to a year after the landing.
When Meier asked his 'contact' why the grass continued to grow in the
swirling pattern, he was told the field strength of the ship, which was
that a south pole CCW field overrode the natural earth field as the
grass grew under its influence and the grass had 'recorded' that field.
After about a year, the earths' field would resume with a stronger
signal and the grass would once again grow straight.
At any rate, lots of hints indicate we will one day recover this
information to a point that we can produce lift/flight at will...wont'
that be fun, flying around like the rocketeer, I dream about flying at
least twice a week, so can't wait to experience it while conscious.
-- Jerry Wayne Decker / jdecker@keelynet.com http://keelynet.com / "From an Art to a Science" Voice : (214) 324-8741 / FAX : (214) 324-3501 KeelyNet - PO BOX 870716 - Mesquite - Republic of Texas - 75187