More Early August UFO flap

UFO SIGHTING - Pittsfield, MA 8/10/11

[I received this report from a reliable Pittsfield resident a couple of days. While not reported to me until a week or so after it occured, this incident took place in the wake of several noted unexplained aerial sightings over Berkshire County in early August, which were reported on WAMC on 8/10/11: http://bit.ly/ngcWR1 ]



"I've been kind of embarrassed to admit this. VERY late at night on August 10 / early AM of August 11, I went out to have a cigarette. In the sky above my neighbor's house across the street, I saw what looked like a very big and bright star. I wondered about it being a planet or something and watched it for a while. I became aware that it moved in a peculiar pattern - if you put your index finger in the air and draw a U and then have your finger revers direction and do this several times, then that's something like how it moved.

I got my camera and opted to forgo the tripod because it's in the bottom of my closet (buried!) and didn't want to miss it altogether.

The attached picture isn't a great representation of it - it really looked kind of circular like a star but bigger and brighter. To get a picture, I had to use a slow shutter speed and I think the m otion of the object and perhaps my makeshift "tripod" (the wooden handrails of my front steps) might have conspired to make it blurry.

Do you have any software of means of getting a better look at what this really is? I wondered about a helicopter, but really think it's a stretch.

I took a puff of my cigarette, looked up and it was gone altogether so I have no idea where it went or how it went or anything.

Again, I am really embarrassed about this but I think curiosity is trumping the embarrassment."

General Lutz’s Palace of Dreams

There has always been a sort of unique duality in the theory and practice of vice in so-called Puritan Massachusetts.

Let’s have that suffice as the opinion based portion of this report; however tempting it might be, this is not to become a sardonic editorial on public policy. This is simply a charming story about how a nefarious evangelist brought the Berkshires the most opulent Opium den it ever had.

The year is 1889, the place, downtown Pittsfield. In a private house “not a thousand feet from North Street,” and “right under the shadow of one of our great churches,” men would gather to while away the hours with the “dream stick,” taking in their “hop,” or “Chinese tobacco.” This was not a place to purchase opium, its genteel proprietor was quick to warn the curious, but a place for its consumers to come and relax in a plush environment of the most lavish furnishings and refreshment; a place to pass the time chatting aimlessly with other poppy enthusiasts while enjoying the occasional glass of fine wine or Havanna cigar.

Said proprietor was a man calling himself General William Martin Lutz, who, when interviewed by a reporter from Pittsfield’s Sunday Morning Call, appeared in ornate silk robes, Turkish slippers, and rings set with giant gemstones upon every finger.

A bit of research into the background of this “General Lutz” revealed a very colorful character.

In Philadelphia he was known as “Doc Lutz,” or “Elder Lutz,” where he owned another even more lucrative opium-smoking club, opened in 1884. Farther abroad, in the Midwest, he had operated under the name “Professor Williams,” and was rumored to have another dozen names and aliases under which he had assumed numerous occupations in other parts of the country. By his own admission, he had served several stints in Sing Sing and other prisons, for crimes as a confidence man, abortionist, and trafficker in various kinds of contraband.

During the summers, he would occupy himself as a preacher and evangelist, traveling and ministering in tent revivals around the east coast. When the season ended, he would focus on other business, such as his well-appointed opium parlors.

Perhaps his greatest notoriety came as an influential officer within the early American branches of the Salvation Army. When that rambunctious organization first began proselytizing in the U.S., it began its operations in Philadelphia, which is where Lutz became involved. From participation in this that he gained, or assumed, the title of General. Traveling from town to town with other Salvationists, he would preach sermons based on his past as a hardened criminal, telling impassioned tales of his conversion and redemption.
Soon, however, his questionable personal habits became apparent, and the evangelist Army cut their ties to him. For some time after, other SA organizers made a specific point to dissociate themselves from General Lutz, though records suggest Lutz continued for several years to pose with others as Salvation Army organizers in towns from New Hampshire to Texas.

It was during his travels as a Salvationist that Lutz arrived in Pittsfield, where he is said to have met and married a wealthy widow, who is never specifically named.

As for his Pittsfield “opium palace,” its exterior was plain enough, barely betraying its semi-secret whereabouts… but within, every square foot of space had been layered in extravagance. Expensive imported tapestries hung everywhere, surrounded by sprawling furniture covered liberally in velvet, upon which the establishment’s drowsy patrons lounged. This was luxury with an eye toward maximum comfort and sensuality, décor chosen not to please the society pages but the wandering eye of businessmen and day-laborers escaping the harsher realities in a soft narcotic haze.

As it turned out, the Morning Call’s expose on the General’s operation was the first many had heard of the place, and Chief Nicholson of the Pittsfield Police was having none of it. A warrant was issued and Lutz was arrested in a raid, along with the only customer present at the time, a young dentist named Hammond Mallory.

According to a later item in the New Haven Register, Lutz fled Pittsfield in mid February prior to the date his trial was to begin. After this, I can find no more mention of the colorful General William Marvin Lutz in print, and it may be that he dropped the name permanently following his forced flight from Pittsfield, becoming lost to authorities as well as to history. Though his scandalous involvement with the SA made frequent headlines at the time, all mention of him has been omitted from all the major histories of the organization.

As for the opium parlor itself, its exact location is a bit of a mystery today, though the small hints recorded such as its proximity to North Street and “one of our greater churches” suggests possible locales in the vicinity of Melville and North Pearl Street, or perhaps around Fenn and its nearby side streets. A cursory check of the Registry of Deeds turned up nothing in Lutz’s name, though it may have been rented, or owned under the name of the unknown wealthy widow he took up with. Further research is needed, and suggestions or clues are welcome.

***
If you have any information that might lead to establishing the whereabouts of General Lutz’s opium den, feel free to email mysterioushills@gmail.com

The Prophet from Pittsfield

In a previous column installment, I discussed the curious Hebrew phylactery found in Pittsfield in 1815, and its role as a possible influence on Joseph Smith and the origins of the Book of Mormon. It is perhaps doubly curious then, that Pittsfield also has a major tie to the murky origins of the other major homegrown American religious movement of the 19th Century: Adventism

It used to be remarked that one couldn’t walk far in Pittsfield without seeing a Revolutionary War vet or a clergyman’s daughter (dead cat swinging was not yet a common practice, so there’s no real way of gauging the proportion). Suitably, William Miller was born in Pittsfield, in 1782, to a retired Continental Army captain of the same name and the former Paulina Phelps (daughter of Elnathan Smith, who was instrumental in forming the First Congregational and First Baptist church of Pittsfield, along with a number of other churches in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York).

His mother’s upbringing was a major influence on William, and his childhood diaries are full of references to Biblical passages and theological writings. While serving as an officer in the War of 1812, William became even more devout in his study of the Bible, becoming particularly absorbed with the Old Testament prophets, especially Daniel, and the book of Revelation. Over the following years, Miller came to the conclusion that coded references in the Bible foretold the timing of Christ’s Second Coming. Using his own interpretive system, he believed he could even narrow it down to an exact year: 1843.

Millers logic rested on the assumption that the 2300 days before the cleansing of the sanctuary, referred to in Daniel 8:14, could be taken to mean the world would end in 2300 years. A vague passage in Ezekiel [Chapter 4, verse 6] shored up his belief that in prophecy, one day was equal to one year. Of course, there’s also the equation of a day to a thousand years in Gods time [2 Peter 3:8], but I suppose the Seeker finds what the Seeker is aiming to find. In any case, if one begins counting, as Miller did, from 457 B.C., the ostensible date of Artaxerxes’ decree to rebuild Jerusalem, one gets 1843.

Beginning in 1831, Miller took to the road, traveling from pulpit to pulpit and tent to tent to spread the word of Jesus impending Advent, gaining large numbers of converts throughout the country, primarily in highly rural areas. Every storm, mishap and tragedy was said to be a sign of the impending end of the world. Millerites, as they became called, began going up on hilltops and buildings in white ascension robes to look for signs in the sky. One large faction of Millerites caused a stir when they were believed lost on West Stockbridge Mountain during a bad storm.

With their heretical beliefs and peculiar white robes, Millerites quickly became not only objects of derision, but also suspicion. Rumors of sex orgies, insanity, murder and suicide among the white-robed Millerites became prevalent. On top of this hysteria, there existed the very real problems arising from many followers quitting their jobs, removing their children from school, and generally removing themselves from worldly functioning, in preparation for the imminent apocalypse. In Shaftsbury, a Millerite meeting was raided on suspicion that the group was subsisting on vegetables stolen from nearby farms.

As 1843 neared a close, with no sign of the predicted parousia, Miller announced that he had made a small error in his calculations, and set the new date for October 22, 1844.

When this new anticipated day arrived, Millerites everywhere donned their white robes, clustering in homes and churches to pray and wait. Many climbed hilltops or trees to be closer to Heaven when it opened to them. In Rutland, one man constructed wings and attempted to fly up it from the top of his barn, and in another Vermont town the smiling corpse of Mrs. Young, a devout Millerite who had died on the 15th, was left in her bed assuming she would be raised from death.

When night fell on October 22, 1844, and the dawn followed, thousands of lives were destroyed.

A large number of followers -how many is unclear- committed suicide. Miller retired to Low Hampton, NY, where he went blind, senile, and died five years later, still genuinely believing that there was merely some small error in the historical dating and the End was still near. The remaining Millerites went on to form various other Adventist sects, of which the Seventh Day Adventist Church, formed in 1863, is the largest today,with more than 15 million members in 203 countries.

Most modern Adventist movements decline to set any specific dates for the end of the world.

-------
Joe Durwin is a Pittsfield native who sometimes suspects the world did end already, and the apparently real world is just syndicated television. Send strange stories and eschatological forecasts to mysterioushills@gmail.com, or write to him care of the Advocate.