Our founders were alien obsessed. Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a “chorus of worlds” just like ours. Ethan Allen, the self-taught leader of the Green Mountain Boys, insisted that the inhabitants of these other earths included intelligent beings just like us. David Rittenhouse, the famous Philadelphia inventor and astronomer, made it official in a 1775 lecture that was reprinted for the benefit of the Second Continental Congress. “The doctrine of the plurality of worlds,” he said, “is inseparable from the principles of astronomy.”
Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in “worlds” just like our own. His real agenda was to undermine the “preposterous” belief that the universe exists to serve the petty purposes of one noisy species in one particular earth. The Roman poet Lucretius committed Epicurus’ cosmic vision to verse in his ancient bestseller, "On the Nature of Things," which then slipped through the Middle Ages in hiding. Aliens came roaring back to life in the 16th century, when the inimitable Giordano Bruno opened up Lucretius’ book and, combining it with the Copernican theory, dreamed of an unending universe alive with fertile solar systems..
For Bruno and his successors, space aliens were a source of wonder and joy. For defenders of the established religion, on the other hand, the extraterrestrial agenda was a source of fear and loathing. Epicurus was condemned. Lucretius’ poem was suppressed. Bruno was burned at the stake.
Even so, the Puritans were the first to record strange shining lights in American skies. On March 1, 1639, John Winthrop, Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, opened his diary and began to recount a most unusual event.
Winthrop wrote that James Everell, “a sober, discreet man,” and two others had been rowing a boat in the Muddy River, which flowed through swampland and emptied into a tidal basin in the Charles River, when they saw a great light in the night sky. “When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square,” the governor reported. Over the course of two to three hours, the boatmen said that the mysterious light “ran as swift as an arrow” darting back and forth between them and the village of Charlestown, a distance of approximately two miles.
The governor wrote that when the strange apparition finally faded away, the three Puritans in the boat were stunned to find themselves one mile upstream—as if the light had transported them there. The men had no memory of their rowing against the tide, although it’s possible they could have been carried by the wind or a reverse tidal flow. The mysterious repositioning of the boat could suggest that they were unaware of part of their experience.
A week later, Winthrop wrote, another unexplained celestial event occurred over Boston Harbor: “A light like the moon but not the moon arose from the water, sometimes shooting flames and sometimes sparkles. This was seen by many."
These entries are the springboard for our story.
