GREAT ARTISTIC
FIND IN JUNK SHOP
G'day folks,
This post might inspire you junk shop visitors.
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.
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?
Clancy's comment: Amazing, eh? Keep your eyes open next time you visit a junk shop.
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