>>4807211(start of part 3) He disappears, along with his plane, to a fate unknown. Doyle can only speculate that he "had been overtaken and devoured by these horrible creatures at some spot in the outer atmosphere".
Doyle was writing simply to entertain us and it would be reasonable to suppose that his fantasy possesses even less substance than the story by the anonymous contributor to The Occult Review. However, not for the first time, it seems a science fiction writer was ahead of the scientists themselves.
In July 1993, two NASA observers flying above a thunderstorm made a major contribution to meteorology when they scientifically established a fact that had long been reported by flyers. Not all lightning flashes are from the clouds to the Earth: they occur also above the clouds, rising rather than descending.
The NASA observers logged 19 flashes, but it was the term they used to describe them which interests me. They likened them to -of all things- jellyfish:
They appear brightest where they top out, typically about 65 kilometres (40 miles) high, so you have the jellyfish body at the top with tentacles trailing down.
Was this what the World War I aviator saw and what Doyle was describing in his fictional story? But if so, how could he possibly know that the mysterious "aerial dragons" would resemble jellyfish? For at that time, no aircraft had been constructed capable of reaching an altitude where an aviator could have seen this phenomenon first-hand.
The ground upon which we tread is known to be teeming with life. Similarly, the interior of our Earth's crust as well as our oceans are also both known to be teeming with life (and it is scientifically PROVEN to indeed be true). Does it not then seem coherent to think that our skies are also teeming with life? Our governments should find out if atmospheric beasts exist. (end)
