The Penobscot Incursion

In the predawn darkness of June 8, 1898, the telegraph line from Lincoln Station, Maine, transmitted a fractured message before falling silent forever: "strange lights to the north horizon... rapid vertical shafts... bright, continuous for several minutes..." The operator's final, garbled transmissions spoke of something descending from the sky-something that would transform a remote military outpost into the epicenter of the most extraordinary event of the nineteenth century.