Date and Time: April 3rd 1865, RIchmond Virginia, 12th and Main St.
In the spring of 1865, as the Union Army entered a burning Richmond, *Harper’s Weekly* published an engraving titled *“The Union Army Entering Richmond, April 3rd, 1865.”* The image, like many from that era, was meant to celebrate a national victory. But when I looked closely—over a century and a half later—I noticed something that, to my knowledge, no one had publicly acknowledged before.
High above the smoke and ruins, rendered with intention and shading, floats a distinct, disc-like form.
I'm more of an artist than an historian. My eye is trained less toward the factual than toward the perceptual—the way things *feel* and *reveal themselves* when you look long enough. Still, what I saw was clear: this was no stray mark or careless smudge. It was a *thing*, placed deliberately in the sky.
The engraving came from my family’s own collection. My ancestor, Joseph Mayo, was the Mayor of Richmond during the city’s fall, and my 4th great grandfather, Capt. William Mayo, surveyed and drew the plans for the city of Richmond, as well as the line which demarcates the separation of North Carolina and Virginia through The Dismal Swamp. This copy of the newspaper bearing this striking lithograph was preserved among my family's possessions for some reason, and handed down quietly through generations until it reached me, 160 years later.
That in itself might be coincidence. But it’s an odd one. Because if, as Immanuel Kant suggested, “we do not see things as they are, but as we are,” then maybe it isn’t coincidence that I was the first to notice it. Maybe the act of seeing—of *noticing*—is what brings something into being.
Kant believed that perception isn’t a passive act. The mind doesn’t simply receive the world—it *constructs* it, organizes it, and gives it shape. Time, space, causality—these are frameworks of the mind, not necessarily features of the universe.
If that’s true, then what happens when something sits unnoticed for 160 years until a pair of eyes, carrying the blood and memory of someone who lived that moment, finally sees it?
Could perception move through time? Could recognition be inherited? The more I think about it, the more it feels as if this engraving—this *thing*—was waiting to be seen, waiting for the right observer, the right moment, to reassert itself into awareness.
The engraving is believed to have been drawn by William Waud, one of *Harper’s Weekly’s* “Special Artists.” Waud was an English-born illustrator who sketched the Civil War from the front lines. In this particular image, amid the chaos of Richmond’s burning streets, there’s a small, almost hidden detail: a man in the lower right corner—thought to be Waud himself—stares directly out of the frame, meeting the viewer’s eyes. It’s the only face that looks at us.
And that gaze falls directly beneath the strange object in the sky, and directly across from another man reaching for a companion, pointing to the rooftop observers; forming an uncanny alignment—artist, phenomenon, observer; a triangle across time.
Was Waud inviting us to notice? To look up?
There is only one record from the civil war which describes or depicts anything we may describe in our common parlance as a UFO, or UAP. Under a year earlier from the fall of Richmond, in May of 1864, a Confederate soldier named William Pitt Chambers, while near Cave Spring, Georgia recorded; “Prior to our arrival at cave springs, quite early in the forenoon in fact, a white object was observed in the sky to the southeast, apparently about a half mile high and moving rapidly south. We decided that it was a balloon, and that the enemy was endeavoring by these means to ascertain the strength of the reinforcements that were coming to Gen. Johnston.”
The editor of this journal, Richard Baumgartner, left a notation in the appendix for this entry; “…Sherman’s Federals did not have balloons with them on the Atlanta Campaign. It is not known what was observed on May 16th.”
William Waud was covering Sherman’s campaign for *Harper’s Weekly* at the time this entry was written, making the proximity of Chamber's’ report and the object in the Richmond engraving just months later remarkable to say the least. It may be coincidence, or it may be a fragment of a pattern—one that slipped unnoticed into the historical record.
What interests me is how this *seeing* happens at all. How something dormant in the image for over a century suddenly announces itself now, in a moment when the U.S. military, NASA, and members of Congress openly discuss Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
Maybe art, like history, has a way of resurfacing when the collective imagination is ready for it.
I’ve come to believe that artists are the channels through which perception evolves. Artists like Waud notice what others don’t, and by noticing, they make it real—at least for a moment.
Perhaps William Waud, standing in the ruins of Richmond, saw something inexplicable that day. Or perhaps he only *felt* it—a disturbance in the air, a shimmer of meaning too strange for words but too important to omit.
And perhaps, exactly 160 years later, another artist was meant to see it again, and share it. Not as proof, but as reminder: that perception is alive, that time is porous, and that art is one of the few places where the seen and unseen can meet.
The engraving still hangs framed on my wall. Every so often, I catch myself staring at that tiny shape above the smoke, at Waud’s eyes looking back from the corner. It’s as if he’s still asking something of us—something quiet and impossible:
*Will you notice?*
*Will you see what’s been there all along?*
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