Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1901 — HEART OF THE STORM [ARTICLE]

HEART OF THE STORM

STRANGE ADVENTURE OF AN EN- - GUSH AERNAUT. Balloon Floats Through the Very Core of a Thunder ClouJi with Lightning Flashing and Thunder Hearing All About, and Is Not Injured. To be in the very heart of a thunder cloud and escape unharmed is an unusual, If not a unique, experience. That is what happened to the Rev. John M. Bacon and some of his companions in one of his balloon ascensions from Newbury, England. Mr. Bacon, in telling of his experience, according to the New Orleans Times-Democrat, says: "In scarcely more than twenty minutes from tfie start a sudden and surprising change took place in our circumstances. Our environment, which had appeared absolutely calm and clear, began changing with the rapidity of a transforms tion scene. Below us the few hundred feet which separated us from earth began tilling in with a blue haze quite transparent, but growing palpably filmier, while ahead, as also right and left, the horizon at the level of our eye and higher opposed a deuse fog barrier of an ashen hue. Overhead, of course, the sky view was entirely hidden by the huge silken globe. At this,time we were being swept along on our course, which remained sensibly unaltered in direction, at, a speed which we subsequently were able to fix at approximately forty mfies an hour. ■ “To ourselves the full significance of these circumstances was not immediately apparent, but the onlookers at our point of departure—the town gas : works, now some five miles in our

Wake —clearly detected the approach of a heavy thunderpack and, as they reasonably asserted, coming against the wind. It towered above the balloon, now seen projected plainly against its face. It came on rapidly and assumed formidable proportions. The balloon was flying due west at high speed, and at apparently no great distance overhead; the thunder cloud was progressing at a moderate velocity not accurately determined, but due east or directly opposed to the surface current. “And now with a whistle a blinding sheet of hail attacked the aeronauts, stinging their faces so sharply as to give the idea that the stones were falling from a great height, and immediately' afterward from all sides and close around flashes of lightning shot out with remarkable frequency and vividness. We were, in fact, fairly embosomed in the thunder cloud. Other and near observers narrowly watched the phases of phenomena now in progress. These were the countrymen who became interested, spectators, and who presently come to our assistance. They seemed to have imagined that the b?.loon must be infallibly struck, inasmuch as it appeared to them completely encircled with lightning. It was, Indeed ,the worst storm the countryside had known for many years. At Devizes, only a few miles ahead, it lasted for five hours continuously. A little way on our right a house was struck and burned to the ground, and on our left a couple of soldiers were killed on Salisbury plain. “Though the storm progressed, it also appeared to lag behind the wind that bore it along. It did not seem to advance against us as a whole, but rather about us. forming Itself out of what a few moments before had appeared mere empty and transparent air.

“The lightning as seen by the people In the balloon seeaned to leap from cloud to cloud, and not from the clouds to the earth, and the noise of the thunder consisted of short, sharp reports like the explosions of guncotton without any of the rolling reverberations heard on the earth. The aeronauts passed through the thunderstorm uninjured, but it was trying to the nerves. The question is, With the lightning playing all around it, and the houses and men being struck on the earth below. why was not the balloon demolished by a thunderbolt?”