Frankly, I’ve never mentioned Bickel’s UFO detector on these pages because I thought this was one of those things best left unsaid. Living in the wilderness with all those cats caused many people to judge the old miner as a few gold flakes short of an ounce, and I didn’t want to add to that myth.Aslin, however, explained the UFO detector in serious detail, and even drew a schematic. He showed that a sowing needle suspended from thin copper wire would naturally orient itself to magnetic north. A buzzer connected to an open circuit and battery would sound if the needle moved off north, hit a nail and closed the circuit. The assumption was, I suppose, that UFOs or Aslin’s cosmic vibrations could move the needle.Aslin told of one night when he and John Bullock visited Bickel for a Yahtzee game. Mark would often set off the detector as a joke, so when the buzzer sounded everyone looked to him as the culprit. Across the room, Mark raised his hands in protest. The three men went outside and beheld an awesome sight. In the eastern sky hovering over the nearest hill was an enormous dark object.”It was shaped more or less like an inflated life raft,” Aslin recalled. “The sky was crystal clear and it was a brilliant, star-studded night.” Aslin pointed out that desert living had made them accustomed to ambient stillness, but the silence they encountered that night was like being deaf.”Then the shape moved over the cabin slowly,” he said. Everything became unearthly hushed. “You couldn’t hear animals, insects or even the wind. It became frighteningly quiet in a desert known for silence.” The object moved on slowly and disappeared in the west. The men went back inside to finish the Yahtzee game.
via Mojo Mark.