There has been a lot of talk lately about unidentified flying objects, but that isn’t new. In the book, Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, author Lee Sandlin recounts many fascinating stories of life on and around the Mississippi River before the river and its valley was tamed. One such fascinating story is that of the time a UFO caused a massive squirrel migration and the river is said to have flowed backwards
The year is 1811, and you’re a crew member on a barge making runs down the Mississippi River. At night you are propelled through total darkness with a sea of stars overhead. In such conditions you couldn’t help but notice if anything strange appeared in the night sky, even something as small as a new star. In September of that year, you see one such new star burning brightly.
You see the new star again the next night and the next, and then you notice something else – it’s getting brighter. Like the light of a freight train approaching from some far-off place, the star is getting bigger and brighter every night as if it was fast approaching. Not long after you’ve decided that the star is not a star but some sort of unidentified flying object getting closer and closer to Earth, the tail appears. It’s small at first but soon it grows into a giant two-pronged fork and continues to grow until it seems to fill half of the night sky behind the bright glowing orb.
As it would today, that UFO dominated conversation in the fall of the year 1811. Even for boat crews who were accustomed seeing strange things, like giant paintings on cliff walls that were said to have been there before the local tribes arrived, the UFO was bizarre. Everyone was swapping theories about what it was, where it came from, and what it meant. The newspapers, letters, and personal diaries of the folks living in the time are full of discussion of the strange, forked star that was filling the night’s sky.
It’s one such journal that recorded the even more bizarre event that happened next. the squirrels began a great Southward migration. As recorded by British travel writer Charles Joseph Latrobe (him being British makes him seem more trustworthy somehow):
As the splendid comet of that year continued to shed its twilight over the forests, a countless multitude of squirrels, obeying some great and universal impulse . . . were seen pressing forward by tens of thousands in a deep and sober phalanx to the South.”
I’m picturing a solid stream of squirrels in somber march with their meager belongings on their backs and stuffed in their cheeks. A father squirrel turns to bark at a pup that is going to make them late if it doesn’t keep up, and the mother squirrel barks back that the pup has never marched in his young life and simply cannot keep up. If only that were the end of the bizarre goings-on.
Not long after the UFO disappeared and the squirrel army completed its march to wherever they were headed, the area was hit with a multitude of small earthquakes and tremors that culminated with an earthquake so large that the Mississippi River (or at least part of it) flowed backwards and is claimed to have filled a chasm created by the shifting fault line – creating Realfoot Lake in Tennessee.
As Sandlin points out in his book, the UFO is simply a comet and parts of this story may have been embellished by those who recorded it, but who’s to say? As one crewman theorized at the time, maybe the Earth got stuck in the split tails of the comet and the earthquakes were just the Earth trying to get itself unstuck. Again, who’s to say? As for me, a favorite story on the topic of natural phenomena will always be the time a UFO caused a massive squirrel migration.