The Bonham Serpent

Soldiers at Fort Scott in Kansas fled the parade ground as "a huge serpent, apparently perfect in form" passed overhead. So ran a paragraph in the New York Times in early July 1873. Alongside it the paper carried a note from Texas. A farmer living five or six miles from Bonham and men working in the fields said something long and serpent-like had circled the area twice. The archive's telling remembers it as a huge fast object that caused panic in the town.

What is on the record

Two claimants are resolved: the Bonham townspeople and the Fort Scott soldiers. Both are groups rather than people, so the count describes two reports and not two witnesses. No one in either report is named.

The surviving evidence is thin and late. The only contemporary text is a pair of short New York Times notes from 6 and 7 July 1873 quoting local papers. The Bonham original, said to have run in the Bonham Enterprise, has not been located. One catalogue of early reports rates the reliability of the Bonham item as none.

The archive's telling departs from those notes in two ways. It describes a huge fast object, while the 1873 paragraphs describe a serpent. It also has the second sighting at Fort Scott twenty-four hours later. That neat connection between Texas and Kansas does not come from the newspapers. It was made decades afterwards in books by Fort and Keyhoe.

Ordinary explanations were offered early. A writer at the time dismissed the Bonham story as a case of delirium tremens. The Fort Scott report has since been suggested to be a meteor.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 because the archive counts two claimants. Those claimants are anonymous groups known from two short reprinted paragraphs, and the link between them is a later author's. The record holds that a serpent in the sky was printed as news in 1873. What the farm hands and soldiers saw is not resolved here.