Flynn’s Weekly. Vol. 22, No. 3, March 5, 1927

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The most significant factor in the Hall-Mills mystery was permitted to die, almost without a thought.

Back in May, 1910, I took a balloon trip for the New York World in company with Professor Todd, the astronomer of Amherst College, and Leo Stevens, an expert aeronaut.

We went up to make sky-high observations of Halley’s comet. When I arrived at North Adams, Massachusetts, the jumping-off place, our balloon, the Cleveland, was already half filled to its capacity of eighty thousand cubic feet of gas.

Thus, half filled, it looked big enough, but when finally it was fully inflated, the thing was enormous, a ball as big as a four-storied house. We dangled on it for twelve hours in a small basket and were steadily borne along by a fifty-mile an hour gale, landing in Hyacinth, Canada — about thirty-five miles north of Montreal — next morning.

Of course, I was as nervous as a witch all the time, yet managed not to show it to any great extent. But it was when we made our landing that I got the big shock of the trip.

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