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dellschauIt’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here. It’s the fourth in our “Artists and Anomalies” titles (with Art, Life & UFOs, Love in An Alien Purgatory, and The Secret Art), our third “September Secrets” release (with The Secret Art and Science Fiction Secrets) and probably the most anticipated Anomalist Book to date. It’s the The Secrets Of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club & the Airships of the 1800s, A True Story by Dennis Crenshaw in collaboration with P.G. Navarro. Who is Charles Dellschau? He was born in 1830, in Brandenburg, Prussia, and immigrated to the United States in 1853, first settling in Texas. The historical record falls silent until 1860, when he is again shown living in Texas. The so-called “lost years” of the secretive Dellschau’s life became a matter of controversy when his voluminous, illustrated notebooks surfaced nearly a half-century after his death in 1923. Dellschau’s work – consisting of ink and watercolor illustrations of fanciful flying machines to which he frequently pasted newspaper clippings – appears to tell a coherent story of the Sonora (California) Aero Club. Using an anti-gravity gas purportedly invented by one of its members, The Club allegedly turned out a series of experimental aircraft some 50 years before the Wright Brothers first took wing. Today Dellschau is recognized as one of America’s leading visionary artists, a single page of one of his notebooks now fetches thousands of dollars. Did Charles Dellschau actually spend his lost years documenting wildly improbable inventions? Were the Aero Club’s airships also responsible for many UFO sightings in America? Or is it all a mere flight of artistic fancy?