Fort discusses an occurrence from Oct. 3, 1843, detailed in a pamphlet by Curtis Eli entitled Wonderful Phenomena, in which a man named Charles Cooper, at Warwick, C.W., heard “a rumbling sound in the sky.” Accompanying this sound, under a cloud, were three perfectly white human forms, sailing no higher than the treetops through the air. Cooper said they were “male angels.” They “seemed to have belts around their bodies” and made a “loud and mournful noise,” according to a boy who also saw the phenomenon. Others saw the cloud and heard the sound, but did not see the “angels.”
Fort comments, “The gloriousness of it is an inverse function of the dolefulness of it: Sunday Schools will not take kindly to the doctrine–be good and you will moan forever.”
–Charles Fort, New Lands, p419 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).