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Iowa's Roswell: The Wreck of 1277
submitted by Jeff Hodson

Marion: With all the national hoopla over events that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico half a century ago, people have quite forgotten a similar event over 115 years ago just twelve miles outside of Ely in Marion County. Here, a beautiful meadow beckons amidst a stretch of old abandoned railroad line.	Site where an aledged UFO crashed into a passenger train 115 years ago leaving this crater, a missing military report,---and possibly buried wreckage.
Nearby are the brick remains of the small Ely Station. The area has a pristine, unspoilt feel to it, yet it is only 45 years ago that trees and other plants began to return to what was once the most devastated 60 acres in the state. Alan Lanier, the current property owner, stands on the abandoned Keokuk & Des Moines Valley Railroad bed behind a wooden rail fence.
Before him is the slumped-in remanants of what was once a huge crater measuring over 30 feet deep, between 60 and 70 feet wide and over 170 feet long. According to Lanier, this is the site where a UFO crashed, vaporizing K& D.M.V. engine 1277, its two passenger cars, and all 36 passengers and crew back in 1882.	The grim remains of Ely Station.
"It was my Grampy Eric Bloom," explains Lanier, a ruddy-faced good ol' boy in his late forties. "He was just a boy then---about 12 at the time. He used to tell me and all his other grandchildren about the day 'a rocketship blew the hell out of the back hayfield.' The more I heard him tell it, the more I believed it. I used to go pokin' back in there all the time; never found anything unusual, though---it's all washed-in. Anyway, back about 1966, I bought a reel-to reel tape machine. I got him to tell the story so I could record it. He was more than 90 at the time." "My name is Eric Bloom. I am 96 years old and am the last surviving witness to what something truly amazing that happened right here in Iowa!" The old man's voice rasps across time on the tape, lending the impression of a thin, wrinkled face with a strong, set jaw and large blue staring eyes; the features of a stern Marion County man that brooks no foolishness. "On the morning of July 23, 1882, Ma and Dad had gone into Ely that morning to buy canning things so I was out picking plums for my Ma to make jam. I was reaching up for one just as this flash of light caught my eye so's I look up at it an' see a ball of fire 'bout as big as my fist flying through the sky dragging a long tail of white smoke. It was headin' north in a real steep dive, almost vertical, then all of of a sudden, it pulled straight up. After a second or so, I saw it was headin' straight at me! Now, I jumped out of at that tree and ran for the house. I hadn't gone more 'an four or five steps when all of a sudden, WHOOM!, that thing zoomed right over me, the barn, and the house. The noise from it knocked me to the ground and painicked the horses in the barn. It looked like one of them indian arrowheads I used to find in the field after it rained. But I only got a glimpse of it because I lost it in the mist followin' after it. So I ran around the house followin' it and that's when I saw the morning local train from Des Moines break the tree line down the hill, pulling into Ely Station. That was 'most a mile away 'cross the hayfield. That's where the thing screamed right smack into it. Well, I know it don't make a lick of sense, but it was perfectly quiet. Not a sound; just this, you know, dazzling white light---so bright, I couldn't see. Then this great fearsome wind picked up; rushing towards the tracks! Like a tornado! I wound up clutching onto the ground for fear of being sucked in. Lost the cupola on top of the barn then; I saw it go flying off in bits and pieces, along with a couple of the stringier chickens. One of the windows on the house tore itself loose and broke on my head. That's when the ground started shakin'. That's when I heard the biggest boom in my life. Hell, I thought the world was ending! When I opened my eyes, I looked down to the tracks; there wasn't nothing. Just this big swirling cloud of dust. The train was gone, the station, and the arrowhead ship---or what ever it was. By the time I walked down there, everybody from Ely was there---including my Ma and Dad. Everyone just stood around gawkin' at the great big hole. All the trees, grass, bushes---every damn thing was all charred within a 60 acre circle and that was most of the hayfield back then. Some of the men tried pokin' in the dirt lookin' for parts of the folks from the train, but they never found anything. It was just like that thing out of the sky blew ol' 1277 straight to Hell." Grampy Bloom's incredible story would likely remain just that if it weren't for Albert Bouchard of the Stalk Forest Research Group, a paranormal investigative agency based in New York City. "I remember my greatgrandfather Joseph Bouchard talkin' about an Army-led investigation he was part of in Iowa back in the 1880's. He worked for the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia at the time collecting meteors and meteorites when he got a telegram from a University aquaintance of his in Washington, DC. It turned out to be Robert Lincoln, the Secretary of War. The Army was going to investigate an strange explosion from a meteor at the request of the govenor; would he handle the scientific examination of the meteor when it was found? He agreed only if he got to go to the site. He got to Iowa and met up with a Major in command of the investigation. He said they went to Ely and dug around in the crater and even found a few things but that he couldn't remember---he was over 90 at the time I last heard the story from him---but he knew it wasn't a meteor that hit the train. The strange thing was that he never received a complete copy of the official report. He wound up having to ask Robert Lincoln directly for a copy. Lincoln never responded and after a month or two, the matter slipped my great grandpa's mind. But in the mid-1930's he was writing a book on meteors and he remembered the report. When he requested a complete copy of the report, he was told no report had ever been filed with the War Department. He kept tryng, though, and called in a lot of favors but he always got the same response: the report never existed even though he had a portion of the official report himself. No one ever tried to explain it to him. He died in 1959. Well, I was recently researching a project at the National Archives in DC when I recalled the my great grandpa's story. So, I started checking it out. After a few days, a complete report turned up among President Chester Alan Arthur's papers---the president who Robert Lincoln served as Secretary of War."
The Official Report On The Meteor Impact In Ely, Marion County, Iowa was written by Major Donald Roeser, 12th US Engineers and dated October 15, 1884. The report lists "Examining Scientific Advisor" as Dr. Joseph Bouchard of the Franklin Institute, Philadelpia, Pennsylvannia. According to Major Roeser's report, the crater site offered several unusual features and tantilizingly suggests more may yet lie buried deep inside.	Major Donald Roeser, 12th U.S. Engineers, c. 1883
The report first cites that the sureying team could not use their theodilite's compass; stating "it spun wildly around and around counterclockwise in the center of the instrument, never ceasing or slowing until it was removed to a point some half mile distant from the crater." Another section mentions " four light gray metallic irregularly shaped items of unknown purpose were collected for further military examination." And perhaps the most suggestive of all is a portion which reads: "At my discretion, a line of four square shafts were dug into the floor of the crater, spaced at a regular interval of some fifteen feet and designated A through D. All shafts encountered the same loosely-compacted, disturbed earth to a depth of about 20 feet with the exception of Shaft D which continued through similar soil until encountering a hard, vitreous crusting of the soil at some 26 feet below the crater's floor. The men digging in this shaft said they distinctly heard reverberation coming from below them every time their shovels struck the ground. At this point, fearing they were coming down upon a buried chamber and that the ground should give way and present a danger to their safety, I halted their excavation." Does this "buried chamber" exist and does it hold the buried debris of an alien spacecraft? Albert Bouchard believes so. In fact, he has contacted Alan Lanier and seeks his permission for the Stalk Forest Research Group to dig it up with heavy earthmoving equipement. Lanier, while curious about what may lie buried deep beneath his land, is terrified, nevertheless. "I dunno," he says, scratching his head as he looks over the fence at the crater. "The land's only just recovered from whatever it is my Grampy saw here a hundred years ago. I like to think he was right, that something from another world did crash here, but I'm not so sure it's not a good thing to let it stay buried, either."
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Iowa's Roswell: The Wreck of 1277