On August 9, 1762, M. de Rostan of Basle, France, as recorded in the Annual Register, 9-120, observed a “vast, spindle-shaped body” while taking altitudes of the sun. It advanced slowly across the disk of the sun, and was “about three of the sun’s digits in breadth and nine in length.” The object did not disappear until September 7, when it “reached the sun’s limb.” M. Croste, at Sole, a distance of “forty-five German leagues northward from Lausanne,” also described the object.
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p199 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).