The Illustrated Police News, 18 марта 1882 г.
«Ужасное нападение на поезд Southern Pacific Railroad около Дос-Палмс, Калифорния. На экспресс напала летающая змея, и пассажиры стреляли в чудовище из револьверов» (https://t.me/ARCHIVARIUS_story/2420).
Текст публикации: "According to the Los Angeles Times, this is exactly what happened to a Southern Pacific train on Jan. 17, 1882, relayed by the engineer and fireman and corroborated by passengers when the train arrived in Los Angeles that night. They said that when the flying snake reached the track, the swiftly moving train clipped off a portion of its tail. This painful offense enraged the enormous serpent and it flew after its steel attacker "two miles faster than chain lightning." The angry animal overtook the locomotive in moments and, striking from a position of safety above, "gave the train a lively thrashing, roaring like a cow in distress all the time." As women and children screamed, the beast shattered several windows in its onslaught. The serpent then pulled back and sailed off. Given a moment to recover, several passengers unholstered their pistols and unleased a shower of lead after the beast as wind whistled past the damaged window frames. The bullets, if they hit their target at all, had no effect as the monster winged its way back across the desert sands. "This is vouched for by everyone who was on the train, and is given for what it is worth," stated the Times.
This flying serpent isn't a rare and isolated tale. Rather, it's an early example of a rich tradition of winged reptilian monsters that supposedly terrorized America's western territories and wild environs during the back half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These "American Dragons," as Strange Magazine editor Mark Chorvinsky dubbed them in a 2000 article, generated numerous headlines across the United States during this period. Chorvinsky didn't give much credence to the editors of Western newspapers when it came to such monster stories or their assertion that the witnesses to such tales were reliable. Indeed, it was an era of American journalism when even major newspapers ran stories of sea serpents, apelike wild men and haunted houses alongside more sober reporting on politics, crime and daily life. It can be hard to discern which articles documenting strange events were spun purely from imagination and which might have been built around a core of truth, possibly sourced from honest yet befuddled eyewitnesses".