The mystery airship or phantom airship was a phenomenon that thousands of people across the United States claimed to have observed from late 1896 to mid 1897. Typical airship reports involved night time sightings of unidentified lights, but more detailed accounts reported flying objects comparable to an airship or dirigible.[1] Mystery airship reports are seen as a cultural predecessor to modern claims of extraterrestrial-piloted flying saucer-style UFOs.[2]
Reports of the alleged crewmen and pilots usually described them as human-looking, although sometimes the crew claimed to be from Mars.[3] It was popularly believed that the mystery airships were the product of some inventor or genius who was not ready to make knowledge of his creation public.[4]
It has been frequently argued that mystery airships are unlikely to represent test flights of real human-manufactured dirigibles as no record of successful sustained or long-range airship flights are known from the period and "it would have been impossible, not to mention irrational, to keep such a thing secret."[2] To the contrary, however, there were in fact several functional airships manufactured before the 1896–97 reports (e.g., Solomon Andrews made successful test flights of his "Aereon" in 1863), but their capabilities were far more limited than the mystery airships. Reece[2] and others[5] note that contemporary American newspapers of the "yellow journalism" era were more likely to print manufactured stories and hoaxes than are modern news sources, and editors of the late 19th century often would have expected the reader to understand that such stories were false.[6]
Most journalists of the period did not seem to take the airship reports very seriously, as after the major 1896–97 wave concluded, the subject quickly fell from public consciousness.[6] The airship stories received further attention only after the 1896-97 newspaper reports were largely rediscovered in the mid 1960s and UFO investigators suggested the airships might represent earlier precursors to post-World War II UFO sightings.[6]
A number of popular novels dealing with airships and their secretive inventors were published in the years before the airship sightings. Especially popular among American audiences were the Frank Reade stories by Luis Senarens, which began in 1882 and frequently centered on airships. The wildly successful Frank Reade Library ran to 191 stories.[7] Senarens' acquaintance Jules Verne borrowed the conceit of a secretive inventor who had developed a powerful airship for his 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror, which was published in the US in 1887.[8] The airship stories of the prolific science fiction author Robert Duncan Milne were also serialized in San Francisco newspapers in the 1890s.[9]
The late 19th century was a period of intense technological innovation, including the invention of the telephone and automobile. Widespread publications about heavier-than-air flight in the late 19th century gave rise to a common belief that such an invention was imminent.[10]
On November 17, 1896, the day before it carried the first report of an airship sighting, the Sacramento Bee printed what claimed to be a telegram from a New York inventor stating that he was flying from New York to California and would be there within two days.[11]
In July 1868, The Zoologist carried a report from a local newspaper in Copiapó, Chile, regarding a "gigantic bird" with "brilliant scales" that made a metallic sound had been seen flying over the town.[12] In his 1931 book Lo!, Charles Fort discussed this report along with various other reports of aerial apparitions from the 19th and 20th centuries.[13] Fort observed that "inhabitants of the backwoods of China" might "similarly describe one of this earth's airships floating over their farms".[14] (Fort seldom mentioned any of the airship reports of 1896–97 in his works, although he had spent that time writing for some of the same newspapers that published the airship reports.[15]) Discussing the Copiapó report in 2001, Loren Coleman called it an example of "reports of weird aerial constructions" on the boundary between machines and animals that "just do not make sense".[16]
On July 29, 1880, two witnesses in Louisville, Kentucky saw a flying object described as "a man surrounded by machinery which he seemed to be working with his hands" with wings protruding from his back.[16] Merely a month later, a similar sighting happened in New Jersey. It was written at the New York Times that "it was apparently a man with bat's wings and improved frog's legs... the monster waved his wings in answer to the whistle of a locomotive."[16]
According to researcher Jerome Clark, airship sightings were reported in New Mexico in 1880 and along the German-Polish border in 1892.[17]
The best-known of the mystery airship waves began in California in 1896.[4] Afterwards, reports and accounts of similar airships came from other areas, generally moving eastward across the country.[4] Some accounts during this wave of airship reports claim that occupants were visible on some airships, and encounters with the pilots were reported as well.[4] These occupants often appeared to be human, though their behavior, mannerisms and clothing were sometimes reported to be unusual.[3] Sometimes the apparent humans claimed to be from the planet Mars.[3]
Historian Mike Dash described and summarized the 1896–1897 series of airship sightings, writing:
The general conclusion of investigators was that a considerable number of the simpler sightings were misidentification of planets and stars, and a large number of the more complex the result of hoaxes and practical jokes. A small residuum remains perplexing.[18]
The 1896-1897 wave of sightings came in two separate phases, one largely in California in late 1896 and one in the central and eastern US in spring 1897.[19] The total number of reported sightings was in the thousands; based on newspaper reports, the total number of witnesses may have exceeded 100,000.[20]
The first wave of airship sightings took place primarily in California and along the west coast of the United States, from November 17 to mid-December 1896, with a few isolated sightings in California during January. There were also sightings reported in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.[19] Many newspaper accounts depicted the sightings as part of a transcontinental flight by the inventor.[21]
On November 18, 1896, the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Call reported the first sighting, which had taken place the night before.[22] Witnesses reported a bright light moving slowly over Sacramento on the evening of November 17 at an estimated elevation of 1,000 feet.[22] Some witnesses said they could discern a dark shape behind the light.[22] A witness named R.L. Lowery reported that he heard a voice from the craft issuing commands to increase elevation in order to avoid hitting a church steeple.[22] Lowery added "in what was no doubt meant as a wink to the reader" that he believed the apparent captain to be referring to the tower of a local brewery, as there were no churches nearby.[22]
Lowery further described the craft as being powered by two men exerting themselves on bicycle pedals. Above the pedaling men seemed to be a passenger compartment, which lay under the main body of the craft. A light was mounted on the front end.[22] Some witnesses reported the sound of talking or singing as the craft passed overhead.[22]
California Cities reporting sightings after November 23 included Red Bluff, Chico, San Jose, Acampo, Lodi, Crows Landing, Tulare, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles and Anderson.
In a December 1896 editorial, William Randolph Hearst lashed out at the "fake journalism" that had led to the airship story:
"Fake journalism" has a good deal to answer for, but we do not recall a more discernible exploit in that line than the persistent attempt to make the public believe that the air in this vicinity is populated with airships. It has been manifest for weeks that the whole airship story is pure myth.[19]
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The second wave of airship sightings, largely in the central and eastern US, took place from January 22 to late May 1897, with a few isolated sightings reported in June.[19]
There was a series of mystery airship sightings in 1909 in New England, which were triggered by a hoax by Wallace Tillinghast, who falsely claimed to have invented and flown an airship from Worcester to New York City.[45] Airship sightings were also reported from New Zealand,[46][47] Australia,[48] and various European locations,[49] including the United Kingdom, where a hoax by M.B. Boyd similarly triggered the wave of claimed sightings.[48] There had been 47 powered flights in 1909 and hundreds of news articles about aeronautics, so the airship claims likely appeared plausible to the public.[50]
Later reports came from the United Kingdom in 1912 and 1913.[51]
Jerome Clark wrote that "One curious feature of the post-1897 airship waves was the failure of each to stick in historical memory. Although 1909, for example, brought a flood of sightings worldwide and attendant discussion and speculation, contemporary accounts do not allude to the hugely publicized events of little more than a decade earlier."[46]
During the 1896–97 wave, there were many attempts to explain the airship sightings, including suggestions of hoaxes, pranks, publicity stunts and hallucinations. One man suggested the airships were swarms of lightning beetles misidentified by observers.[52]
David Michael Jacobs observed that "Most arguments against the airship idea came from individuals who assumed that the witnesses did not see what they claimed to see."[53] However, Jacobs believes that many airship tales originated with "enterprising reporters perpetrating journalistic hoaxes."[5] He notes that many of these accounts "are easy to identify because of their tongue-in-cheek tone, and accent on the sensational."[5] Furthermore, in many such newspaper hoaxes, the author makes his intent obvious "by saying – in the last line – that he was writing from an insane asylum (or something to that effect)."[54]
Some authors have argued that the airship reports were genuine accounts of a human-invented airship. Steerable airships had been publicly flown in the U.S. since the Aereon in 1863, and numerous inventors were working on airship and aircraft designs. Thomas Edison was so widely speculated to be the mind behind the alleged airships that in 1897 he "was forced to issue a strongly worded statement" denying his responsibility.[55]
Two French Army officers and engineers, Arthur Krebs and Charles Renard, had successfully flown in an electric-powered airship called La France as early as 1884.[56] In November 1897, an aluminum-skinned airship designed by David Schwarz was built in Germany and successfully flew over Tempelhof Field.[57]
In his 2004 book Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery,[58] American writer Michael Busby analysed observed flight paths and airspeeds from old newspaper accounts and found the evidence consistent with three separate airships flying in the Texas skies.[59] Research led him to conclude they were built in Iowa by a group of people originally from California:
Three individuals investigated in this chapter may be the connecting threads between the various airship mysteries we have examined(1840s to 1897). Dr. Solomon Andrews, Willard Wilson, and Dr. Charles Smith, peers extraordinaire, may have been designing, building and flying airships from the 1840s.[60]
He concludes one airship crashed at Aurora on April 17, 1897, another crashed off the Gulf coast a few days later, and the third perhaps flew North to New York where it also crashed at sea on May 13. Two other airships the group built in Iowa met their demise in Michigan and Washington state, respectively, and the aviators presumably died.[61]
In The Great Airship of 1897 (2009),[62] American writer J. Allan Danelek makes a similar case. He concludes the airship was built by an unknown individual, possibly funded by an investor from San Francisco, as a prototype for planned commercial passenger airships. Danelek demonstrates how the craft might have been built using materials and technologies available in 1896 (including speculative line drawings and technical details). The ship, he proposes, was built in secret to safeguard its design from patent infringement as well as to protect investors in case of failure.
Noting that the flights were initially seen over California and only later over the Midwest, he speculates that the inventor was making a series of short test flights, moving from west to east and following the main railway lines for logistical support, and that it was these experimental flights that formed the basis for many – though not all – of the newspaper accounts from the era. Danelek also notes that the reports ended abruptly in mid-April 1897, suggesting that the craft may have met with disaster, effectively ending the venture and permitting the sightings to fall into the realm of mythology.
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Early sources citing the extraterrestrial hypothesis, all from 1897, include the Washington Times, which speculated that the airships were "a reconnoitering party from Mars"; and the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, which suggested of the airships, "these may be visitors from Mars, fearful, at the last, of invading the planet they have been seeking."[63]
In 1909, a letter printed in the Otago Daily Times (New Zealand) suggested that the mystery airship sightings then being reported in that country were due to Martian "atomic-powered spaceships."[46]
