Asheville Daily Citizen

THE CLOUD WAS ALIVE.
Vast Swarm of Winged Ants Moving Swiftly in the Sky.

"While driving home from Oneida the other day," said a farmer who lives in the extreme western part of the county to a Utica Observer man, "I saw a big cloud moving due north over the fields and woods. There wasn't any wind blowing; the air was still and I was unable to account for the presence of a big dark cloud speeding away across the heavens on such a still, bright day.

"At first I thought it was a cloud of smoke from the railroads, but then when I first saw it the cloud was in such a position that it could not possibly have come from the West Shore railroad, and even if it had there never was a cloud of smoke that hung so closely together and so long as that did. As I sat in my wagon it appeared to me to be a mile long and perhaps half a mile wide, but of course that part of it was all speculation, for no one can make a very accurate guess of the size of a cloud. The body in the sky was as dark as the smoke from a locomotive and looked to be quite dense. It traveled quicker than any cloud ever scudded before a thunder shower in this section. When it first attracted attention it was high up in the heavens, but it rose and fell several times, like the soaring of a bird. Once it was but a few feet above the top of some woods. Again it took an upward course and continued onward in an unswerving north course. It was about five o'clock that the cloud passed.

"That evening I noticed a number of reddish-winged wood ants about on the grass and in the roads. It occurred to me that the strange cloud in motion might have been a cloud of these flying ants. The more I pondered over the phenomenon the more I became convinced that it was a cloud of ants that passed over the country. Such a story was too big for me to tell, although there was proof enough of the fact for my mind, so I held my peace and simply spoke to my family of the strange cloud. Others had seen it, too, yet none suspected what it was and we finally dismissed it.
"A day or two afterward I was in Constableville and there the farmers told me they had seen the same thing. There was no doubt about it, either, for a number of them watched the cloud and at that place it passed so low that they caught the insects in their hands. They were the same flying ants. We compared notes and found that it required just an hour for the swarm to move from the place where they were first seen to Constableville. The distance in a straight line is thirty-one miles. They were in Oneida county at five o'clock and at just six o'clock they were seen in the north. The ants continued northward and nobody has told me where they stopped."