Moon People: Real or Myth?

Going back to the 13th century you can find statues, two feet wide and three feet tall made of stone with large eyes called Moon People.  Back 200 years before Columbus set foot on American soil in the Bahamas, the Cherokee migrated from the Great Lakes to Southern Appalachia looking for something better. Better land, good weather, and good soil.  They built permanent wooden buildings around the area.

Soon they encountered strange beings in the area, unlike anything the Cherokee have seen before.  They had white skin and unusually large pale eyes.  They seemed to be from another planet.   They lived in a stone settlement on mounds surrounded by walls. As time went by the relationship between the two people became hostile and the two went into battle against each other with the Cherokee winning and the Moon People moving out.  To warn future generations about these bad people, the Cherokee carved rock creatures to remind them what they looked like.  As the centuries passed they came to be regarded as a myth.  They became something you tell the children to frighten them. Be good or the Moon People will get you.  But on a dark night, some people claimed they could still see them.

In the 1980s, in Indiana, historian Dana Olsen is interested in ancient stories and folklore.  He spends his time trying to understand where the stories come from--what the origins of the stories are.   One day while hiking he comes across a stone fort built on a mound with walls that looks like structures built in the 12th century in Wales. 

There is an old Welsh legend around 1170 of a Prince Madoc who sailed west with ten ships and hoped to find new territory to explore.  He never returned to Wales and it was believed that his ships wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean.  Olsen becomes convinced that the Welsh are the Moon People the Cherokee described so long ago.  The Welsh had round pale eyes and white skin and were very hairy causing them to look like something the Cherokee had never seen before.  You can find these forts across the South from North Carolina to Alabama which is where the Cherokee lived.  So are the Moon People figments of the Cherokee imagination or were they Welsh people who lived there from long ago and discovered America before Columbus.  You decide.   

The Brave Florence Betty Smith

On December 8, 1941, the Japanese navy invaded the U.S. Territory, the Philippines.  Military bases that had been there since the 1880s were overrun and taken over.  In Manila, a woman, Florence Betty Smith, whose husband was killed during the attack decides to avenge her husband.  She joins a group of Filipino and American resistance fighters.  This band of civilians hopes to launch a guerilla-style campaign of attacks on the Japanese installations and drive them from the island.

But first, they must overcome an obstacle.  They need fuel to make the trucks go to drive all over the island and bring in supplies by boat.  The Japanese have blocked access to it.   Without the fuel, the resistance was over before it began.  Smith gets a job as a typist for the Japanese writing gas vouchers.  She secretly writes extra ones and gives them to the resistance who would sabotage supply lines and smuggle goods to prisoners of war.

She is able to do this job for a while, but one day she is caught and the Japanese throw her into a 2 X 4-foot cell and give her gruel once a day to eat.  They tortured her endlessly to get information on the resistance.  The rebels drain the Japanese military resources so that when the Americans come back to retake the island in February of 1945 they have an easier job of it.

Smith is found still in her cell, emaciated but still alive.  She moves to the United States and in 1947 is awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given.  She married again and had children with her new husband and went on to live a peaceful life.  This brave woman really stood up to the Japanese not only by helping the resistance but also by not saying anything under torture.  We owe her a debt of gratitude. 

The Miracle of Flight 9

230 feet long with a wingspan of 195 feet and white with a red stripe, the Boeing 747 was one hell of a plane.  On June 24, 1982, a British Airways Flight 9, the City of Edinburgh, on the route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Perth, Australia had on board 263 souls.  Captain Eric Moody had been flying for years and had loads of experience, which he would need.

For the first ninety minutes of the flight, everything was fine.  They were 2,000 miles from their destination.  But once they began to cross the Indian Ocean things started to go wrong. Smoke started to leak into the cockpit.  The Captain begins to check the instruments to figure out what was going on but soon he is having trouble reading them in the smoke.

A warning light flashes indicating that an engine is down, but the Captain isn't too worried because he has three other engines.  But soon, one by one, each engine goes down.  There's no way they can make it to Perth and the nearest airport is in Jakarta, Indonesia 150 miles away.  The only way to get there is by gliding and coasting nine miles for a drop of 3,000 miles of altitude loss.

But this will only get them 104 miles before they'll have to land.  As they drop below 34,000 feet their only hope is to get one engine going.  As they reached 12,000 feet one of the engines comes alive and begins working.  Minutes later Moody lands in Indonesia.

It turns out that Mount Galunggung had erupted and the ash rose 40,000 feet in the air from the eruption had gotten into the engines.  It was dark out since it was a night flight so the Captain didn't see any of this.  The City of  Edinburgh was renamed the City of Elgin and was cleaned and refitted to fly again.  Captain Moody received an award for his heroics.  And one of the passengers, Betty Tootell married fellow passenger James Ferguson who was in the seat in front of her.  Tootell wrote a book about their experiences called All Four Engines Have Failed.  This flight was a miracle of a Captain who flew the plane through a disaster safely onto the ground.     

Jeanette Rankin: A Hero For Women

Jeanette Rankin was interested in architecture and furniture design.  But those careers weren't open to women then, so when she left the University of Montana with a degree in biology she did work as a teacher, seamstress, and social worker.  Having raised six younger siblings left her with marriage, not on the mind, never mind the many proposals.

At age thirty she fought to get women the right to vote in Montana. Four years later in 1914, they did.  Then she decided to try for a seat for herself--in Congress.   No one thought she had a chance. A woman in Congress?  But her sisters helped with the campaign and her well connected and wealthy brother Wellington was her manager and trusted advisor.  She beat seven men, by 6,000 votes or more to win her seat as a Republican representing Montana.

In Washington, she couldn't let petty problems such as a lack of women's restrooms or a man hitting on her get in her way. So she sat next to the oldest men there to avoid any improper behavior.  She became one of fifty-one unpopular Congressmen who voted against World War I. On her sixth day in office she had found her passion. Pacifism.

She didn't believe she could win her seat back in a Democratically controlled section of the state that had been drawn up and told she now represented so she ran for Senate.  She narrowly came in second place for the Republican Primary but was accused of taking bribes by them.  So she got good and pissed off enough to run for Senate in the national election as a third-party ticket just to prove her honesty.  She came in third but made her point.

She decided to continue her fight for World Peace.  Then at the ripe old age of sixty, she won a seat in Congress again.  When Franklin went to Congress a second time she beat three men to do it and demanded they declare war on Japan they voted 388-1. The one was Rankin who said, "As a woman I can't go to war and I refuse to send someone else."  She was the only person to vote "No" against both World Wars.  It cost her her career in politics.

She spent the rest of her life traveling around lecturing on world peace and visiting India where she fell in love with Gandhi.  She lived cheaply in rural Georgia and made friends of the children of the neighborhood with whom she shared the stories of her life.  In 1968 she led a march on Washington of five thousand women dressed in black against the Vietnam War.  She died peacefully at age ninety-two still thinking of a third term.  She is best known for being the woman who introduced the Nineteenth Amendment in Congress and battled hard for it to be passed and then ratified and put into law on August 18, 1920.