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charles a.a. dellschau

︎Artist, Painting   
︎ Ventral Is Golden


“All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, beyond conception, filling all space, the akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never-ending cycles, all things and phenomena.” - Nikola Tesla. 



In 1899, Charles August Dellschau began his first visual diary of expressive watercolour imagery and newspaper clippings (or Press Blooms as he called them) of then-current news articles about aeronautical advancements and disasters.
Over a period of twenty one years, he would collate his esoteric interests into around twelve handmade journals, documenting the strange technologies that dominated his own thoughts and of the alleged secret association of German-American engineers with whom he was supposedly connected.

It was beleived that this group were occupied by the idea of navigable 'Aeros' or aircraft, in a time where the most advanced aerial technology was the balloon. Dellschau, a member of the Sonora Aero Club, through his own records, depicted a codified schema highlighting that during the years of 1850 - 1858, several of the Aeros were designed and tested around the area which is now an airfield outside the town of Columbia.
One of the members of this group had also purportedly discovered the formula for an anti-gravity fuel, which was named 'NB Gas'.
Their mission was to design and build the first navigable aircraft using the NB Gas for lift and propulsion. Dellschau did not claim to be a pilot of any of the airships; he did however, identify himself as a draftsman for the Sonora Aero Club.









“The Sonora Aero Club was a branch of a larger secret society known only as NYMZA.”


"Despite exhaustive research, including searches of census records, voting rosters, and death records, nothing has been found to substantiate the existence of this group except for a few gravestones in the Columbia Cemetery where several of the surnames are found. It is speculated that, like the voluminous "Realms of the Unreal" notebooks by outsider artist Henry Darger (1882-1973), the Sonora Aero Club is a fiction by Dellschau. However, according to UFO writer Pete Navarro, a coded story is hidden throughout the drawings, which he interprets to mean that the Sonora Aero Club was a branch of a larger secret society known only as NYMZA."

Peter Navarro, a UFO investigator and extensive researcher of Dellschau, offered many hypotheses as to the meaning of NYMZA based on the watercolours of Dellschau that contained the encryptions and the coded equation DM = XØ. They have postulated that it could be a reference to Peter Mennis, 'the man with the technology', who is said to have invented the first aeroplane, 'Aero Goosey' (1857) - a record often attributed to the Wright brothers’ “first sustained flight” in 1903.
Another possible meaning of the acronym NYMZA, through Egyptian, Greek, Latin and German appropriation, points to the meaning of 'Those Who Are Not Named'. This is derived from the Egyptian NYM, meaning 'name' and ZA 'to take' or ZAHN 'tooth' in German, relating to the action of chewing and ‘consuming information’.

More substantial claims about the history of Dellschau and his affiliation with the secret group of aeronautical engineers reveals a potentially more unsettling picutre about american socio-political history. It has been suggested that the assertion of colonial dominance by Spainish, German, Portuguese and British financiers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, funded the rise of European fascism in the build up to World War II, enabling the formation of a ‘break-away civilisation’, who’s main interest was to transfer political power into the socio-psychological domains of a Military-Industrial complex.
This was founded upon the desire to use advanced technology for supression, mass surveillance and to reinforce nationalist ideologies by essentially turning Nazi Germany into a colony of Wall Street.




Dellschau, a former butcher, originally born in Brandenberg, Germany, is regarded as one of America's earliest visionary artists. His work has been interpreted as a testimony to the sense of optimism that new technologies inspire as they change the way people think about the world. Flight, up until that time in recorded history, had been a metaphor for man's pathos - or his inability to accomplish what he was not meant to. But despite these positive accolades and however mundane Dellschau’s professional life as a Butcher may have been, his detailed schematics show a technical knowledge very different to the hot air of his zeppelin era.
Along with his Prussian background and ties to a covert group of areonautical engineers, this makes his story a catalyst for earlier colonial conspiracy within the Americas.

Additionally, the Sonora Aero Club were supposedly funded by J.P Morgan, the Wall Street investment banker, infamous for preventing the completion of Nikola Tesla’s vision of free, global, wireless enegry at his Wardenclyffe Tower during the ‘War of the Currents’ with Edison and Marconi. The project was terminated and Tesla’s Tower burnt in suspicious circumstances, presumably due to Tesla’s unwillingness to monetise his own inventions.



"The world will never learn true science until it is ready to learn from nature's open books. Everything in the material universe is constructed upon a system of triads. In other words, there are always three phases or conditions of the same thing. An apple falls to the ground from the tree, and science announces that a subtle force called gravity brought the apple down. But as to the second or its third phase science knows nothing, and, in fact, is apparently too conceited to desire to learn.” - Nikola Tesla.




Whether you have a taste for conspiracy theories, or just a healthy distrust of spiritual and technological blends in relation to politics, they are nevertheless indications of the human desire to break away from the boundaries of what is considered possible within the carefully orchestrated context of public understanding. The recent Pentagon UFO report of aircrafts with unknown ‘advanced technology’ is testament to this.


Dellschau’s journals and watercolours were stored in the attic of a relative's home, where he made most of his documentation. They were kept there until as late as 1960, afterwhich the house burned down, destroying almost everything except large segments of his works.  The majority of the body of work was eventually found in a landfill site in Houston, Texas, where it is unknown who salvaged them. The drawings then miraculously found their way into the hands of a furniture dealer, who took them to his warehouse where they ended up being preserved under a pile of discarded carpets and were then found by an art student. The journey of the watercolours is somehow harder to believe than the conspiracy theory associated with their original context. 
These connections with Dellschau’s work and the ties with American financial interests leading to the rise of European nationlaism, as well as the reality of a new kind of physics that runs counter to public understanding of material science, have been explored in detail by philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani in his Thinking Allowed interview with Jeffrey Mishlove.

In the next 100 years, what kinds of journals elucidating the potentialities of new models of physics will find their way into the social conscience from inbetween pieces of discarded carpet? How many technological advancements have emerged from the fringes of socieity’s liminal realms already, only to fade into publicly sanctioned incredulity? 
Why are aspects of history relating to esoteric symbolism and alternate models of physics so wrapped up in nationalist agendas that make their research so difficult and sensitive?
Is the pathos of our own society to resurface in the mind of another curious illustrator / butcher, who looks backwards through to the origins of the military-industrial complex in an attempt to rediscover the future of flight?





Further Reading ︎
Artist website
NYMZA AEROS, The Airships of the 1850's, Article
NB Gas, Article
Break-away Civilisation, Jason Reza Jorjani, Video
Houston Press, Article
German-American Immigrants and J.P Morgan Syndicate links, Article.
Apergy, Gravity’s Second Phase, Article
In depth book on the work of Dellschau, PDF


Mark