We’ve all dreamt of it, that moment in a charity shop or a second hand shop, a car boot or a jumble sale; lifting up a tatty old children’s book and finding a gem, seeing a corner of something, picking it up and looking at it with your breath stilled.
Sigh, I’m still to find anything truly special and believe me I look, I spend hours trawling old shops and jumble sales hoping for my very own special find, hopefully, one day, I’ll find something like this.
The year is 1969, the place Texas USA and a used furniture dealer spots 12 notebooks in a pile of rubbish picked up from outside a house by a rubbish collector earlier that year.
Fred Washington put them in his warehouse, under a pile of carpets and promptly forgot about them. There they sat until art history student Mary Jane Victor came upon them whilst searching through his Aladdin’s Cave of weird and wonderful bric-a-brac.
Just what was it that Mary Jane had found?
The scrapbooks she had discovered contained 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 which had been crudely sewn together with shoelaces and thread.
These books were immediately snapped up by the Art Director of Rice University, Dominique de Menil, Houston’s leading fine art patron, who bought four of the books for $1,500 and promptly put on an exhibition at the university entitled, “Flight”.
News of the exhibition reached Mr. Pete Navarro, graphic artist and UFO researcher, heard about the “Flight” exhibition in 1969 and he became enthralled going immediately to see the exhibition for himself and deciding to research their author.
Charles was a Prussian immigrant who had died in 1923, he had arrived in the United States at 25 years old from Hamburg in 1853 and after spending his working life as a butcher he retired in 1899. Rather than sitting idle he began filling notebooks with a visual memoir of his early years. He called the first three books which recount the life and times of a secret society of flight enthusiasts ‘Recollections’.
These wonderful drawings of brightly coloured airships hail from a time before the Wright Brothers had even begun to attempt powered flight and there is speculation that this very secretive club, known as the Sonora Aero Club may have been behind a number of airship flights seen at the turn of the century across 18 states from California to Indiana.
It is also believed that the books aren’t merely drawings and diagrams but that they contain a code. One that had everyone baffled.
In 1972, Pete Navarrohe went back to the old junk shop and discovered that 8 remaining books of Dellschau were still there covered in dust and rotting carpets. He of course immediately bought them all for the princely sum of $565 and spent the next 15 years in an obsessive mission to decode Dellschau’s work.
This amazing set of books has Dellschau representing himself as the club’s scribe/ record-keeper, rather than as one of its inventors or pilots it includes over a 100 designs for airships named the Aero Mary, the Aero Trump and “Aero Jourdan”.
It appears that the purpose of the club and the books was to design and build navigable aircrafts which would be powered by a secret formula Dellschau coded as “NB Gas” which could negate gravity and drive the ships wheels, side panels and compressor motors and all this when flight was still in the realms of science fiction, yet it appears that these ships were anything but mere fantasy.
Dellschau included images and coded scripts telling of fatal crashed, sabotage and banning members of the organisation who committed the cardinal sin of talking to outsiders about the club and its raison d’etre.
However there is such a wealth of detail in the coded books that even now huge tracts of it remain undeciphered.
In 2009, Pete Navarro published The Secrets of Dellschau, revealing a lot of the script he had decoded from the books.
To read more about Dellschau’s works and just what Navarro has managed to find out click here.
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