2- Another sighting was reported in the London Times as having occurred on July 28, 1846, at 3:30 A.M., near Stralsund (then part of Pomerania and now Germany). During a short walk from the city on the Baltic shore, witnesses saw in a pale blue light the image of Stralsund looming over the Isle of Rugen on the opposite shore for a period of 15 minutes. The image was clear enough that details of the facade of the Gothic church of St. Mary could be "distinguished with ease."
3- An American prospector, Mr. Willoughby, claimed he heard an Indian legend of a city appearing in the sky each summer near Mount Fairweather, on the Alaska-Yukon border. Mr. Willoughby said he first saw the mirage in 1887 and offered a photograph as proof that the phenomenon was real. In 1889, the New York Times reported that the city in Willoughby's photograph had been identified as Bristol, England. This story and the photograph were included in a later edition of Miner Bruce's Alaska.
4- Two other cities were said to have been seen over the Muir Glacier in Alexander Badlam's Wonders of Alaska. Badlam reprinted Willoughby's photograph, which depicts a view of a city from a hillside with house fronts and church steeples clearly visible; and, if not claimed to be photographed in Alaska, it could readily be accepted as a photograph of Bristol. However, a second photograph is presented with an African or Asian city superimposed upon another of a glacier. Badlam writes that the photographer had captured the mirage's image by aiming his camera into a pan of quicksilver and that the city seen in the sky was believed to be sunken in the waters of the bay in front of the glacier. The third city was supposedly sketched from a photograph, but the fanciful spires and towers of the artist more closely resemble the looming mirages of Arctic icefields or the Fata Morgana of the Straits of Messina than anything else.
5- One of the members of the Duke
d'Abruzzi's expedition to Mount St. Elias, C.W. Thornton, told Miner Bruce he
saw what looked like a city in the summer of 1897; L.B. French was quoted by
the New York Times in 1889 as seeing houses, streets, and large buildings,
either mosques or cathedrals, near Mount Fairweather; and, a correspondent of
London's Weekly Times and Echo returning from the "Yukon Goldfields,"
saw a city in the sky in June of 1897 and wrote: "...whether this city
exists in some unknown world on the other side of the North Pole, or not, it is
a fact that this wonderful mirage occurs from time to time yearly, and we were
not the only ones who witnessed the spectacle."
7- At Rathlin, in 1817, a green island was believed to arise out of the sea every seventh year upon which could be distinctly seen people "engaged in various other occupations common to a fair."
8- At Youghal, a walled town was seen distinctly in October of 1797. By June of 1801, the mirage had grown into an unknown city with mansions and forests behind.
9-Such marvels were recounted by Dr. Thomson in his Introduction to Meteorology and before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1852 by Mr. M'Farland (who had witnessed a fairy island arise from the ocean off Portbalintrea in June of 1833). Sir Charles Lyell, the distinguished geologist, wrote of seeing a mirage of Toronto in the sky over Lake Ontario during his second visit to North America.
10- In the British science journal Nature, accounts of mirages in Scandinavia, such as the one here in May of 1882, may have helped prompt an earlier acceptance of tales from a sourdough in Alaska and the legends of the Irish:
11- The frequent observations of the mirage in the south of Sweden is very remarkable. From time to time we are told that whole landscapes, cities, and castles, with moving objects, have been observed reflected on the sky for hours, and we again learn that a similar display of the forces of Nature was seen one afternoon last month over the lake of Orsa, in a remote part of Dalcarlia, lat. 61 degrees, which is stated to have reflected a number of large and small steamers, as if plying on the lake, and from whose funnels even the smoke could be observed to rise. Later on the scene changed to a landscape, the vessels now taking the form of islands in the lake, covered with more or less vegetation, and at last the mirage dissolved itself in a haze. The phenomenon, which lasted from 4 to 7 o'clock, is said to have furnished a most magnificent spectacle.