Colonel Shaw's encounter near Lodi

The Stockton Evening Mail of 27 November 1896 printed Colonel H. G. Shaw's first-person account of meeting three tall, slender beings on a road near Lodi, California. Guinness World Records says writers broadly regard it as the first published account of its kind.

A Stockton newspaper, the Evening Mail, ran Colonel H. G. Shaw's story on its front page on 27 November 1896. Shaw told it in the first person. He said that he and a companion were in a buggy when the horse refused to move, and that ahead of them stood three beings who looked like humans yet resembled nothing he had seen. He put them at about seven feet tall and very slender. Both men got out, and Shaw spoke to the beings and asked where they came from.

In a later passage that CalVet Connect quotes, Shaw said he reached out and raised one of them off the earth with little effort, and judged its weight to be less than an ounce. He wrote that the being clutched at the soil with its toes to stay down. CalVet gives his name as Henry Glenville Shaw, who fought for an Ohio volunteer infantry unit in the Civil War and then had a long newspaper career, in Stockton and later San Francisco.

Wikipedia's retelling places the meeting in the countryside of Lodi, near Stockton, and gives Shaw's estimate of the craft as 25 feet across and 150 feet long. It says the beings tried to take him with them to their airship, gave up, and left in the craft, which sped out of sight. Wikipedia adds that Shaw believed they were Martians.