I like to think I have an open mind. Some things cannot be easily explained.
I have to say the illustrations are somewhat astonishing in their detail and artistic merit.They are certainly worth a look.
I haven't seen this story on Ancient Aliens as yet, but that is not to say I take all their shows at face value, even though I always watch and enjoy it:)
I'll leave it to you.
From You Tube:
Clip now deleted.
"Charles A.A. Dellschau is one of art history's most mysterious and puzzling characters. Unknown, literally hidden away in a Texas attic the last 20 years of his life, he produced a massive volume of wildly imaginative illustrations only discovered in 1923, nearly 50 years after his death. The product of a tortured mind perhaps, or a visionary, his art predates the invention of the airplane by 50 years, but depicts flying machines propelled by anti-gravity gas. Was this merely art, or true documentation? Can UFO sightings of the 19th Century be attributed to these aircraft, the ones Dellschau drew?"
But now another You Tube clip:
In the fall of 1899, Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830-1923), a retired butcher from Houston, embarked on a project that would occupy him for more than 20 years.
What began as an illustrated manuscript recounting his experiences in the California Gold Rush became an obsessive project resulting in 12 large, hand-bound books with more than 2,500 drawings related to airships and the development of flight.
Dellschau's designs resemble traditional hot air balloons augmented with fantastic visual details, collage and text. The hand-drawn "Aeros" were interspersed with collaged pages called "Press Blooms," featuring thousands of newspaper clippings related to the political events and technological advances of the period.
After the artist's death in 1923, the books were stored in the attic of the family home in Houston. In the aftermath of a fire in the 1960s, they were dumped on the sidewalk and salvaged by a junk dealer.
Eight made their way into the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Witte Museum and the Menil Collection; the remainder were sold to a private collector. Dellschau's works have since been collected by numerous other museums including the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Like the eccentric outpourings of Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger and Achilles Rizzoli, these private works were not created for the art world, but to satisfy a driving internal creative force. Dreamer, optimist and visionary, Charles Dellschau is one of the earliest documented outsider artists known in America. Http://www.romanoart.com
His story is one shrouded in mystery,
almost lost forever, intertwined with secret societies, hidden codes,
otherworldly theories and seemingly impossible inventions before his time.
Unseen for decades and salvaged by a junk dealer in the 1960s from a trash heap
outside a house in Texas, his entire body of work would later go on to marvel
the intellectual world. But during his lifetime, Charles Dellschau had only been
known as the grouchy local butcher.
In 1969, used furniture dealer Fred Washington
bought 12 large discarded notebooks from a garbage collector, where they found
a new home in his warehouse under a pile of dusty carpets. In 1969, art history
student, Mary Jane Victor, was scouring through his bazaar of castaways when she
came upon the mysterious works of a certain Charles Dellschau. Inside the
scrapbooks she discovered a remarkable collection of strange watercolours and
collage pieces. More than 2,500 intricate drawings of flying machines alongside
cryptic newspaper clippings filled the pages, crudely sewn together with
shoelaces and thread.
Victor immediately notified the Art Director
of Rice University, Dominique de Menil, Houston’s leading fine art patron, who
snapped up four of the books for $1,500 and promptly put on an exhibition at the
university entitled, “Flight”. Charles Dellschau, a Prussian immigrant had
finally been discovered, nearly 50 years after his death in
1923.
He had arrived in the United States at 25
years old from Hamburg in 1853 and documents show he lived in both California
and Texas with his family, working as a butcher. After his retirement in 1899,
he took to filling his days by filling notebooks with a visual journal of his
youth. He called the first three books, Recollections and recounts a
secret society of flight enthusiasts which met in California in the mid-19th
century called the ‘Sonora Aero Club’.
The Wright Brothers wouldn’t even make their
famous first flight until 1903, but Dellschau draws dapperly-dressed men
piloting brightly-coloured airships and helicopters with revolving generators
and retractable landing gear. No records have ever been found of the Sonora Aero
Club but Dellschau’s artworks hide a secret coded story. Whatever it was that he
had to say was apparently too private even for his own notebooks and even today,
much of the mystery has yet to be revealed.
A Mr. Pete Navarro, graphic artist and UFO researcher, heard about the “Flight” exhibition in 1969 and became enthralled. He believed there was a connection between Dellschau’s drawings and mysterious mass of “airship” sightings at the turn of the century across 18 states from California to Indiana. In 1972, he discovered that 8 remaining books of Dellschau were still sitting at the junk shop, unwanted and unclaimed. He bought the lot for $565 and spent the next 15 years obsessively decoding Dellschau’s work.
Dellschau never
draws himself aboard the fantastical aero inventions and represent himself as
the club’s scribe/ record-keeper, rather than as one of its inventors or pilots.
There are as many as 100 designs for airships with names like the Aero
Mary, the Aero Trump and even an “Aero Jourdan”. The
club’s secret mission? To design and build the first navigable aircrafts using a
secret formula he coded as “NB Gas” which could negate gravity and drive the
ships wheels, side panels and compressor motors … all in a day’s work during an
era when air travel was still viewed as a mystical impossibility.
Some of his
drawings tell of fatal crashes of the society’s airships, sabotage of other club
members and the banning of members who talked about the secret organisation to
outsiders. According to Dellschau, the club’s aero prototypes would travel the
open roads disguised as gypsy wagons to avoid detection.
In the notebooks’
strange code of germanic lettering, Pete Navarro found a phrase that translated
as “NYMZA”. Dellschau reveals this to be an even larger secret society that
allegedly controlled the Sonora Aero Club branch. Based on Navarro’s findings,
UFO theorists have come up with some far-fetched speculation that the NYMZA was
in fact an extra terrestrial entity. (When talking about secret societies, I
think it comes with the territory).
While Navarro rubbished those claims, he did manage to find press clippings in Texas archives linking one of the names of Dellschau’s secret society members to an article published in 1897 about a local airship sighting. The San Antonio Daily Express article identified one of the airship’s mysterious occupants as Hiram Wilson, who according to witnesses, revealed that his airship design came from his uncle named Tosh Wilson, the very name Navarro had found mentioned in Dellschau’s watercolours as a Sonora club inventor.
But even Navarro,
despite his exhaustive research, had his doubts about Charles Dellschau’s story
and how much of it was fiction. Were they tall tales to keep an old man
entertained? Or were they true accounts of his youth, perhaps innocently
exaggerated here and there?
Fiction or not, a
single page from Dellschau’s notebooks could fetch as much as $15,000 in the
late 1990s. Today, Navarro is no longer in possession of his books; he sold them
off in need of some cash to museums, galleries and private collectors in Texas,
New York and Paris.
As for how
they ended up in a trash heap in the 1960s? The books had been hiding in Charles
Dellschau’s attic where he worked for many years before his death. In the 1960s,
the husband of Dellschau’s step-daughter, Anton Stelzig was living in the home
during the 1960s with his two ageing sisters and a nurse hired to care for them,
when the fire department assessed that the house was a hazard and ordered that
it be cleared of debris. The nurse was given the task of “cleaning-up”. Her way
of doing things resulted in many of the family’s treasures being thrown out onto
the street, including Dellschau’s books.
Anton’s
grandson Leo, painfully recalls the nurse saying,
“I took care of that mess and cleaned it all up.” Some of Dellschau’s work is
still believed to be missing, possibly lost forever.
In 2009, Pete
Navarro finally published his co-written The
Secrets of Dellschau, revealing a lot of the script he had decoded
from the books. Four books still remain in the Menil Collection, locked in a
humidity-controlled room. Researchers continue to unearth new pieces of
information through surviving relatives.
A Dellschau
enthusiast, William Steen, obtained the aviation enthusiast’s journals in the
late 1990s which included details of a secret club boarding house, with a bar
and dining room where the society would have meets, dream up their newest flying
machines (and probably just have a bit of guy time)!
Sources: The Houston Press, The Observatory via Kateoplis
Article and pictures thanks to Messy Nessy Chic.
More on Charles Dellschau here, posted with caution as Wiki is not definitive and relies on editable texts.
Many thanks to Tom for sending me this.
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