Mystery airships of 1896-97

Mystery airships of 1896–97

Type	Case (sighting wave)
Also known as	Phantom airship; the "airship wave"
Date	17 November 1896 – May 1897 (a few reports into June)
Place	California and the western states (1896); Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Texas and other states (1897)
Scale	Thousands of reports; possibly more than 100,000 witnesses
Famous tales	Lodi abduction attempt (1896); Aurora crash and Le Roy "calfnapping" (1897)
Explanations	Stars and planets; balloons and lanterns; newspaper hoaxes; secret inventors; Martians

The mystery airships of 1896–97 were a wave of reports, mainly from the United States, of lights and craft resembling airships or dirigibles moving through the night sky between November 1896 and mid-1897. Most witnesses saw only a light or group of lights, but more detailed accounts described airborne craft and sometimes their crews, who usually appeared human but occasionally claimed to be from Mars. Thousands of sightings were reported, and newspaper coverage suggests the witnesses may have numbered more than 100,000.^[1][2]

At the time it was widely believed that the airships were the work of a secretive inventor not yet ready to reveal his creation, although no documented aircraft of the period could have done what witnesses described. The wave was soon forgotten, until UFO researchers rediscovered the newspaper reports in the 1960s and presented them as a cultural forerunner of the flying saucer sightings that began in 1947.^[1]

Background

The late 19th century was a period of rapid technological change, with the telephone and the automobile newly invented, and widespread writing about lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air flight led many people to expect a working airship at any moment. Steerable airships had flown in the United States since Solomon Andrews's Aereon in 1863, Frederick Marriott demonstrated a small airship, the Avitor Hermes Jr., in California in 1869, and the French officers Arthur Krebs and Charles Renard flew the electric airship La France in 1884. But nothing then built could perform as the 1896–97 airships reportedly did, and it would have been impossible, as one writer put it, "not to mention irrational", to keep such a craft secret.^[1]

Popular fiction fed the idea. The Frank Reade dime novels by Luis Senarens, which began in 1882 and ran to 191 stories, often centred on airships, and Senarens's acquaintance Jules Verne borrowed the idea of a secretive inventor with a powerful flying machine for Robur the Conqueror, published in the US in 1887. The airship stories of Robert Duncan Milne were serialised in San Francisco newspapers in the 1890s. This was also the height of "yellow journalism", when newspapers readily printed invented stories that editors expected readers to recognise as false. Odd aerial reports had appeared before, including a "gigantic bird" with "brilliant scales" over Copiapó, Chile, in 1868, and a winged man "surrounded by machinery" seen over Louisville, Kentucky, in 1880.^[1]

California, 1896

On 17 November 1896 the Sacramento Bee printed what claimed to be a telegram from a New York inventor saying he would fly his airship from New York to California within two days. That evening several hundred people in Sacramento saw a light moving slowly from east to west across the overcast sky at an estimated 1,000 feet. Most saw only the light, but a few said they could make out a dark body behind it. One witness, R. L. Lowery, claimed to hear a voice ordering the craft higher to avoid a church steeple — adding, apparently as a joke, that he thought the captain meant a brewery tower — and described two men pedalling bicycle-like gear beneath a passenger compartment, with a bright headlamp in front. Some witnesses heard talking or singing as the light passed. The next day's papers carried headlines such as "A Wandering Apparition" and "Strange Craft of the Sky", and the story spread nationally within a week.^[1][2]

On 21 November the light reappeared over Sacramento, watched by the deputy sheriff and district attorney among others, and described as twice as bright as an arc light. Later that night thousands saw it over Folsom, San Francisco, Oakland, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Sebastopol and other towns, including the household staff of San Francisco's mayor, Adolph Sutro; over Cliff House and Seal Rocks it reportedly frightened the seals into the sea. On 22 November two Methodist ministers near Knights Ferry said a "fiery object" resting on the ground took off as they approached; on Thanksgiving, Professor H. B. Worcester of the Garden City Business College and his guests watched a light he estimated at 60 to 100 mph; and on 29 November more than a hundred people in Tulare saw red, white and blue lights in succession. Sightings came from dozens of Californian towns, from Redding to Los Angeles, and a few from Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.^[1]

The Lodi encounter

The Stockton Evening Mail of 27 November 1896 printed one of the earliest accounts of an alien craft. Colonel H. G. Shaw said that while driving his buggy near Lodi he came upon a landed craft with a featureless metallic surface, pointed ends and a rudder, about 25 feet across and 150 feet long. Three slender beings about seven feet tall approached, "emitting a strange warbling noise", examined his buggy and tried to force him aboard, giving up when they found they were not strong enough, and the craft lifted off. Shaw believed they were Martians sent to kidnap an earthling. It is possibly the first published account of explicitly extraterrestrial beings trying to abduct a human.^[1]

"Airship" Collins and W. H. H. Hart

A young San Francisco attorney, George D. Collins, told newspapers that a client had consulted him about "the world's first practical airship", nearly finished at a secret site near Oroville, about sixty miles from Sacramento. Papers across the country quoted him: the inventor, a wealthy man from Maine, had spent $100,000 over years of work; the metal craft was about 150 feet long, carried fifteen people, had two canvas wings eighteen feet wide and a bird-like tail; and it had flown from Oroville over Sacramento before landing on the Oakland side of the bay, though its wave-like motion made its inventor seasick. Collins hinted that the inventor was a dentist, Dr. E. H. Benjamin, who admitted being an inventor and Collins's client but denied any connection with the airship.^[1][2]

Collins became the target of ridicule. Cartoons showed him drunk and smoking opium, the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed him "Airship" Collins, and after being hounded by reporters and cranks he retracted most of his claims and went into hiding; Benjamin too fled town. William Henry Harrison Hart, a former Attorney General of California, then claimed to represent the inventor, telling the San Francisco Call that Collins had been fired for talking too much, that there were two airships — one built in California, one in New Jersey — and that a third, improved ship would bomb Havana with dynamite; he named the inventors as a Dr. Catlin and Dr. Benjamin. Hart, too, later changed his story and fell silent. In late November The Sunday Oregonian denounced the airship as a fake, and on 5 December the San Francisco Examiner published an editorial by William Randolph Hearst calling the story "pure myth" spread by "fake journalism". The California wave ended in December, with a few reports in January 1897.^[1][2]

1897: the airship moves east

On 2 February 1897 the Omaha Bee reported an airship over Hastings, Nebraska, and three days later near Inavale, forty miles south — the start of a larger wave that spread across the Midwest through May, with a few reports in June. On 28 March several hundred people in Topeka, Kansas, among them Governor John W. Leedy, watched a "blood red light" move slowly across the sky, some hiding in storm cellars "fearing that a great calamity was impending". Hundreds saw a bright light over Omaha on 29 March. At Everest, Kansas, on 1 April witnesses described an object shaped like an Indian canoe, up to thirty feet long, with a multicoloured searchlight, and on 2 April thousands in Kansas City saw "a mysterious black object casting before it a penetrating light", which the Omaha Bee likened to an elongated balloon with a boat-shaped gondola.^[1][2]

On 9 April "five hundred reputable citizens" of Evanston, Illinois, watched a light "the brightness of fifty ordinary electric street lights", some through opera glasses. Michigan's first report came from Alma on 10 April, followed by Benton Harbor, Holland, Niles, Mendon, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo; on 12 April an airborne explosion was reported at Pavilion, with supposed debris found there and at Comstock, and a farmer north of Battle Creek said a wheel fell off the airship and stuck in his field. Witnesses in Keokuk, Iowa, who had not spoken to one another described the same moving light. In Texas, a Denton witness described for The Dallas Morning News on 15 April a cigar-shaped craft about fifty feet long with a powerful searchlight, a row of lit windows, side wings, a tail and a beak-like prow, which hovered and then shot away "at a terrific rate"; on 17 April a night watchman in Paris, Texas, described a "monster airship" with sails and rotating fans. Around Austin, boys camped on Bull Creek watched an airship throwing searchlights for fifteen minutes. In April the directors of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha reported a letter from a man offering to reveal his airship if given space at the fair.^[1][2]

Tall tales

Many reports in this phase were obvious jokes. A man said to be a former Arkansas state senator named Harris claimed an airship pilot told him the craft was bound for Cuba to "kill Spaniards" with a Hotchkiss gun. Three Texans reported "five peculiarly dressed men" who said they descended from the lost tribes of Israel and had learned English from Hugh Willoughby's 1553 polar expedition. The Albion Weekly News in Nebraska told of a pilot who could shrink his airship to fit in his pocket, and a rival paper claimed its editor heard him say "Weiver eht rof ebircsbus" — "subscribe for the Review" backwards. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that W. H. Hopkins met a nude woman and bearded man beside a grounded airship near Springfield, Missouri, who pointed to the sky and said something like "Mars". Other stories told of a woman held prisoner aboard an airship, and of a Rice Lake doctor kidnapped to treat the captain's influenza, who escaped by leaping into a lake — though the local paper said he had simply fallen through the ice.^[1]

Aurora, Texas

On 19 April 1897 The Dallas Morning News reported that a couple of days earlier an airship had hit a windmill belonging to a Judge Proctor at Aurora, Texas, and crashed. Its dead pilot was said to be "not an inhabitant of this world", the wreckage, bearing "hieroglyphic" figures, looked like a mixture of aluminium and silver, and the pilot was given a "Christian burial" in the town cemetery. The story attracted little attention at the time and no other paper reported a funeral. Rediscovered by UFO enthusiasts in the 1960s, it was considered a probable hoax by almost all authorities by the early 1970s. In 1973 Bill Case of the Dallas Times-Herald found a rough stone he said was the grave marker, scratched with an image of the airship, and a treasure hunter reported strange metal-detector readings, but a few months later a MUFON investigator reported the stone was gone.^[1]

Le Roy, Kansas

The Yates Center Farmer's Advocate of 23 April 1897 published Alexander Hamilton's account of an airship hovering over his cattle pen at Le Roy, Kansas, around 19 April. He, his son and a hired hand saw that a red "cable" from the ship had lassoed a heifer and tangled in the fence; Hamilton cut the fence and watched the ship, "cow and all", sail away. Some have called it the earliest report of cattle mutilation, but in 1977 the UFO researcher Jerome Clark established, through interviews and Hamilton's own affidavit, that the story had been written to win a local liars' club contest for the most outlandish tall tale.^[1]

Explanations

Stars, balloons and hoaxes

Contemporary explanations included misidentified stars and planets, meteors, hoaxes, publicity stunts, hallucinations and even swarms of lightning beetles. Professor G. W. Hough, director of the Dearborn Observatory, was certain people were looking at the star Betelgeuse, while other astronomers blamed Jupiter, Venus and Mars. Some reports were proven pranks: balloons or kites carrying lanterns or candles. The historian David Michael Jacobs believed many airship tales were "journalistic hoaxes" by enterprising reporters, easy to recognise by their tongue-in-cheek tone or by a last line saying the author was writing from an insane asylum; the Call and the Examiner accused each other of inventing airship stories. The historian Mike Dash summed up later investigators' conclusions: many of the simpler sightings were planets and stars, many of the more complex ones hoaxes and jokes, and "a small residuum remains perplexing".^[1]

Genuine airships

Some writers have argued that real man-made airships were flying. Thomas Edison was so widely suspected of being behind them that in 1897 he had to issue a strongly worded denial. In November 1897 David Schwarz's aluminium-skinned airship flew over Tempelhof Field in Germany. In Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery (2004), Michael Busby analysed reported flight paths and speeds and argued that three airships flew over Texas, built in Iowa by a group including Solomon Andrews, Willard Wilson and Charles Smith, and that they crashed at Aurora, in the Gulf and at sea off New York. In The Great Airship of 1897 (2009), J. Allan Danelek proposed that a single secret prototype, perhaps funded by a San Francisco investor, made a series of test flights from west to east along the railways before meeting with disaster in mid-April 1897.^[1]

Martians

Some newspapers of the time suggested an extraterrestrial origin: the Washington Times speculated that the airships were "a reconnoitering party from Mars", and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that they might be "visitors from Mars, fearful, at the last, of invading the planet they have been seeking".^[1]

Later airship waves

The historians Brett Holman and Thomas Bullard have collected press reports showing that similar sightings continued at lower levels, with occasional large waves. In April 1909, as airship technology advanced and Germany built zeppelins, a brief airship scare struck Britain, followed by waves in New Zealand from May 1909 — where a newspaper letter blamed Martian "atomic-powered spaceships" — and in Australia from August. From November 1909 a series of sightings in New England followed a hoax by Wallace Tillinghast, who falsely claimed to have flown a heavier-than-air craft from Worcester to New York. Further scares struck Britain in 1912–13 and New Zealand and Australia in 1918. Jerome Clark noted that each of these waves failed to stick in historical memory: accounts in 1909 did not even mention the huge 1896–97 wave of barely a decade before.^[1]

Rediscovery

After the 1896–97 wave ended, the airship story quickly faded from public memory and was all but forgotten for nearly seventy years. In the mid-1960s UFO investigators rediscovered the reports in old newspaper archives and suggested they were early precursors of the modern UFO era that began in the late 1940s.^[1]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Mystery airship”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.