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In this edition, we return to the rich topic of historical UFO sightings. As I showed way back in my Brief History of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, sightings of unusual lights and what appeared to be craft in the skies stretch all the way back to the beginning of recorded history. In that edition, I chose to conclude my enumeration of strange sights in the sky without covering the 19th century, but these marvels did not cease in the 19th century only to resume when Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting set off the modern era of UFO reports. There is, however, good reason to draw a boundary between the celestial wonders of bygone epochs and sightings that occurred squarely within the era of aviation. Now, many would point to Orville and Wilbur Wright’s invention of and first successful flight in an airplane as the beginning of this age, but mankind had devised ways to fly more than a century before this, at the dawn of the age of ballooning, and a great many men had been working on improving the technology, moving from captive and free balloons to lighter-than-air aircraft that made use of buoyant gas for lift but also had some means of propulsion and control. However, the engineers of these aerostats, more commonly known today as dirigibles, or blimps or zeppelins, depending on the rigidity of their structure, and back then usually just called airships, never quite mastered the trick of powered, steerable flight before the Wright Brothers launched their heavier-than-air craft at Kitty Hawk in 1903. It is therefore exceedingly strange that, a full seven years before Kitty Hawk, people all over the United States started to see advanced aircraft plying the skies overhead.

After numerous demonstrations of hot-air balloon flight, the first manned flight ever recorded occurred in France in 1783 in the Montgolfier brothers’ globe aérostatique. A decade later, in America, Jean P. Blanchard ascended to nearly one mile above the earth and crossed the Delaware in a balloon of his own, and thus the age of ballooning commenced. It continued through much of the 19th century, with few developments in the way of powered and steerable craft. These were hot-air balloons of the classic sort, although they varied in design, with buoyancy controlled by the release of hydrogen gas and the jettisoning of ballast, usually in the form of sand bags. Powered flight was not achieved until 1852, when Henri Giffard’s airship used a 3-horsepower steam engine to turn a propeller with three blades and drive his dirigible 17 miles or 27 kilometers from Paris to Élancourt. Such designs became more common, and improvements were made; for example, in 1884 Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs managed to return to their place of departure in their powered airship, La France. And dirigibles weren’t the only design being experimented with: Clément Ader designed more of a glider in the form of a go-kart with bat-like wings and a steam engine that never accomplished much more than sustained hops off the ground, and Otto Lilienthal is credited with several successful flights with what was essentially a hang glider modeled after the physical frame of a bird. Clearly, innovations in aviation were becoming more and more common, but most ended in failure, and some in catastrophe. Ader’s glider crashed over and over, and Lilienthal, buffeted by a stiff wind, actually broke his back and died. And perhaps some of the worst airship disasters happened in 1897. In that year, Swedish balloonist Saloman Andrée’s balloon expedition to the north pole ended with three men crashing onto the ice, where they remained stranded for months before dying. That same year in Berlin, Friedrich Hermann Wölfert demonstrated an airship powered by a Daimler motor, but sparks ignited the hydrogen, and he and his mechanic died in the resulting blaze.

You may have noticed that all of these flights were European attempts. The odd truth is that, after Jean Blanchard’s 1793 flight, which first ascended at Philadelphia, there are few reports of American aviation attempts. We have John Wise, who in 1835 made his first ascent in Philadelphia as well and would later use his balloon for postal delivery purposes, and then we have some instances of captive balloons being used for military reconnaissance during the Civil War. Then there was Charles Ritchel, the inventor of the funhouse mirror, who managed, in 1876, to fly a little one-man airship with a hand-cranked propeller at the Centennial Exposition, again in Philadelphia, and in the 1880s John Joseph Montgomery in California had some luck with gliders. But in the heyday of 1890s, no American stands out until Samuel Pierpont Langley of the Smithsonian Institute, who in 1896 flew several unmanned Aerodromes, or steam-powered gliders. Langley’s drones, which he launched with a catapult, made some successful flights that year, and Langley would go on to be a significant rival to the Wright brothers in the early 1900s. But if, in 1896, Langley’s gliders were the only aircraft flying American skies, as history would lead us to believe, it is unaccountable that, from late fall 1896 to spring 1897, hundreds of reports describing sightings of powered, steerable airships zipping through the skies appeared in newspapers across the country.

The San Francisco Call, 19 Nov. 1896, via Chronicling America — The San Francisco *Call*, 19 Nov. 1896, via Chronicling America

It began on a cold and gloomy evening in Sacramento, the capital of California, located east of San Francisco in the middle of the state’s fertile Central Valley. On November 17, after a gray and squally day, hundreds of witnesses saw an erratic light flying over the city, like an arc lamp, according to the newspaper reports. It made no noise, this light, and it appeared to be suspended beneath a dark shape that many would liken to a cigar. Beyond this, reports varied: it either had a rudder and propellers, or it did not, and some said pilots could be seen operating its workings, turning something by working bicycle pedals. More than that, they could be heard! When they descended to near the buildings below, witnesses heard them shouting to “Lift her up quick!” and some streetcar workers heard music and a voice that said, "Well, we ought to get to San Francisco by tomorrow noon" as the craft flew away to the southwest, against the prevailing wind. For the next few days, hubbub circulated in the Sacramento Evening Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Call, but there was little sign of the airship until passengers on an Oakland cable car claimed to have seen an airship with a searchlight on November 21st. That’s when it went from isolated incidents to a full-blown flap, with thousands of sightings in one day across multiple cities: Sacramento, Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco, where it floated over landmark buildings and the bay and scared off seals with its arc light. This of course would mean an impossibly fast ship, numerous ships, or false reports. And at least some hoax or mistaken sightings seem likely, since after that day, appearances of the airship or ships seem to spread in many directions. On the 25th of November, it was seen in eleven different places, again around Sacramento and the Bay Area, but also north of the Bay Area in Napa and Petaluma, where some ingenious entrepreneurs charged admission to view the airship through their telescope, and even as far as Chico, 81 miles north of Sacramento. By the end of November, sightings became intermittent. On November 29th, a Bakersfield paper reported a sighting, but also included the opinion of an astronomy professor that it had only been a sighting of Mars or Venus, and on November 30th, residents of Los Angeles saw three lights overhead, but a local expert on bicycles assured the newspaper it was likely just university students pranking the city by attaching reflectors to a balloon. On the first of December, another airship appeared over Oakland, a hundred-foot-long cigar-shaped object with a triangular fishtail rudder, its surface aluminum that appeared darkened by weathering, zooming off at high speed toward San Francisco but seen again later the same day making the same maneuver in the same direction. On December 3rd, an airship was seen in no fewer than 6 locations, in San Francisco, in Vallejo, where it had been reported that residents had been searching the skies, disappointed at not seeing an airship, and in a scattering of smaller towns to the east: Davis, Dixon, Brown’s Valley and North Bloomfield, all indicating an easterly flight path, except that later in December, on the 17th, a ship was seen farther west, in Biggs, and then the last of the sightings in California, after the New Year, happened away south of there in Lodi. Still, if one were inclined to believe in a real airship or airships flying around California that autumn, one might discern a vague course from Sacramento to the Bay Area, and back and forth and around for a few jaunts before setting off eastward, toward the interior of the country.

The first indication that the airship sightings were not over and done with came in February 1897, when an airship was reported skulking around Hastings, Nebraska, some 1,200 miles from where one had last been seen. Some assumed this was the same airship as had been seen in California, and that it had made a miraculous flight over the Rocky Mountains, even though the original report seems to indicate that the airship had been seen around Hastings during the previous fall as well and just hadn’t been reported on by the paper. Meanwhile, another reporter around a hundred miles north in Norfolk remarked that “[i]t would be interesting to know just what brand of liquor the Hastings correspondent drinks, that enables him to see airships carrying powerful lights gyrating about through the atmosphere. It must be a remarkable brand of goods, and…we would be glad to try a few gallons of it.” https://history.nebraska.gov/sites/history.nebraska.gov/files/doc/publications/NH1979UFOs.pdf But despite aspersions cast by snarky newspapermen, sightings continued. On February 6th, south of Hastings in Inavale, six folks leaving a prayer meeting heard voices overhead and spied a 30 to 40-foot airship with a bright headlamp and six smaller running lights. In fact, during this flap, reported sightings spider webbed out in all directions from Hastings, appearing, clockwise, in York, McCool Junction, Lincoln, McCook, Big Springs, and North Platte, where some trouble reportedly caused the ship to descend in a shower of sparks. By the 16th of that month, a ship arrived over Omaha, where a girl saw it and ran into a party being held at 26th and H, encouraging everyone to come out and have a look at the “funny thing in the sky,” leading to a few dozen more witnesses seeing the object aloft around 400 to 500 feet in the air. These airships, if real, seem to have been grounded for a while after that, but in April they returned in force, it seemed, with reports in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and all the way East to New York and way down south in Texas. Researchers have tracked down more than 150 sightings in around 20 states, far more than I could possibly survey in this podcast episode without it becoming repetitive and boring. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at a few of these encounters in April. The Chicago Tribune started their coverage by claiming that hundreds had seen a ship in Omaha on the 6th of April and continued by reporting on the 10th that hundreds had spotted a winged airship above their own windy city. The Chicago Herald thereafter printed the claims of one William McCann, who along with three others said he had seen and photographed an airship over Rogers Park. The Herald printed an illustration from a wood carving of McCann’s photo, which we still have today for examination. It is unfortunate that newspapers could not at the time print photographs, otherwise we might actually have a blurry pic of a phantom airship. As it turned out, however, the photograph itself has been lost, if it ever actually existed. We do, though, have reports that the plates of the photo were given an acid test and determined to be genuine before the Herald printed its illustration. But the Tribune, on the other hand, pronounced the photo to be a fraud on April 12th, citing the cryptic proof that it displayed “too much scope of lens,” whatever that means.

The Chicago Times-Herald of 12 April 1897 with the illustration of McCann's photo, via University of Florida

And while Chicago newspapermen squabbled, the airships seemed to float inexorably onward, appearing in both Jefferson, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, on April 15th, although these two couldn’t possibly be the same airships, even disregarding the fact that an aircraft travelling 450 miles in a day at that time would have been ludicrous, because the airship in Jefferson reportedly crashed into the earth. Town residents gathered at the huge smoking crater it had left and even sent someone down to investigate. The same issue of the Jefferson Bee that reported this reported multiple other airship crashes in Greene County. Curiously, just as the airship mania was reaching its highest elevation in the Midwest and reports of airships falling to the earth were becoming more popular, a spate of sightings took off in Texas, many of these reporting landings and crashes as well. On April 20th, the Galveston Daily News gave a highly detailed report of a ship seen in Uvalde, Texas, by Sheriff H. W. Baylor. A bright light and the sound of voices drew him out to an alley behind his house, where he found an airship with wings and fins. A crew of three men greeted him, asking for water and explaining they were on a trial run with their airship. One man called himself Wilson, claiming to be from Goshen, New York, and discovering that Baylor was a sheriff, asked after a Captain C. C. Akers, who used to be the sheriff of Zavalla County. Wilson claimed to have met Akers in Ft. Worth in 1877. Baylor told him Akers was then at Eagle Pass working for the customs service, and Wilson asked him to say hello from him. He and the other pilots then took water from Baylor's yard and flew away north. This uncommonly detailed story even had a corroborating witness in county clerk Henry J. Bowles, who apparently saw the ship leave Baylor's alley, and other articles appear to have confirmed with C. C. Akers that he had indeed made the acquaintance of someone named Wilson, although that is a common name. But the seeming credibility of the witnesses—a sheriff and a county clerk—has led many to give these reports credence.

Nevertheless, despite the apparent reliability of witnesses in these matters, it should be remembered that the true source of these accounts are the newspapers that reported them. If you are curious about just how scrupulous newspaper editors were when it came to publishing fraudulent stories to entertain their readers and sell more papers, just go and listen to my 10th episode, Joseph Mulhatton, the Liar Laureate of the World. Hoaxes appeared frequently in papers during these years, and often the reliable witnesses they named had come right out of the imaginations of the fraudsters who wrote them. And this was the dawn of Yellow Journalism as well, when sensationalist rhetoric often only loosely connected to facts dominated newsprint. Much Yellow Journalism centered specifically on the question of Cuba, which at the time was still a colony of Spain but had seen a revolutionary struggle for some years. As many Americans wanted to see the Spanish ousted, big newspapermen like Pulitzer and Hearst published a lot of stories depicting the Spanish colonial powers as villains and the revolutionaries as heroes, and they didn’t let a little thing like accuracy or truth get in the way of a good story. And to cement the very real connection between the airship flaps and the age of Yellow Journalism, not long after the sightings in California began, a well-known attorney named W. H. H. Hart was quoted in a paper as claiming that he represented the phantom airship’s inventor, and that the vessel had been built for the sole purpose of flying to Cuba and bombing the Spanish in Havana. Similarly, the San Francisco Examiner claimed to have it on strong authority that the airship was called the Thunderbird and was bound for Cuba with the mission of bombarding General Weyler, the island’s Spanish governor, with eggs.

The San Francisco Call, 29 Nov. 1896, clearly engaging in Yellow Journalism, via Chronicling America — The San Francisco *Call*, 29 Nov. 1896, clearly engaging in Yellow Journalism, via Chronicling America

With the question of the reliability of newspaper reports hanging over this entire affair, we now turn to one of the most fanciful explanations of these phantom airship sightings: that they were really extra-terrestrial spacecraft! There are in fact some newspaper reports that indicate the object in the sky may have come from away across the ocean, which would make it extremely unlikely that these were the maiden flights of experimental aircraft. On September 20th, 1896, a Professor Swift spied a light of the magnitude of Venus over the Pacific Ocean and sent a telegram to a Professor Perrins at Lick Observatory, wondering if he had discovered a new comet. And on October 22nd, none other than the mayor of San Francisco, Adolph Sutro, reported that several people had seen a light flying eastward about 500 feet above the surface of the Pacific, and that it emitted an electrical glow. But these reports do little more than indicate that Mars and Venus and meteors and comets might have been frequently mistaken for flying lights. Some reports of crashed airships in Iowa certainly added to this hysteria. In fact, the aforementioned man who climbed down into the crater in Jefferson carried a Volapük dictionary with him. Volapük, meaning “world language,” was a constructed international language, like the subsequently more common Esperanto. One can only imagine who the intrepid investigator thought he might encounter at the bottom of that crater to bring that with him. And of course, one does not need to wonder, as newspaper reports of other crash sites in Iowa, such as one at Churdan, described encounters with extra-terrestrial creatures! And on an empty road outside Springfield, Missouri, one W. M. Hopkins, a travelling salesman, saw a landed airship while driving his wagon, and outside of it, two nude aliens that he found beautiful indeed. He kissed their hands and boarded their craft when invited, and when it began to ascend, he escaped abduction only by leaping off! And late in April, we get a story out of LeRoy, Kansas, from a farmer named Alexander Hamilton, who with his son and a farmhand saw a 300-foot ship with a carriage-like construct beneath it, crewed by an odd looking family—man, woman and children. This airship actually lowered a rope and carried away a struggling calf. Hamilton and the others gave chase, but lost the ship. Later, another farmer named Lank Thomas found the calf’s remains, which consisted only of skin, legs, and a head. This would appear to be an early report of cattle mutilation, complete with reliable officials swearing to its veracity, as eleven men, including the postmaster, the sheriff, and the justice of the peace swore an affidavit. But then, all of these purported facts were reported in a newspaper, and if that isn’t already suspect enough for you, there’s the fact that the farmer Hamilton who reported the event and provided the affidavit was a known member of a local liar’s club.

Perhaps the longest-lived of these reports came out of Texas. In the Dallas Morning News of April 19th, 1897, a column attributed to a correspondent named Haydon with the headline “A Windmill Demolishes It” told a wild tale of an airship with some mechanical malfunction flying low over Aurora, Texas. It struck a windmill on the land of one Judge Proctor and exploded, spreading debris over acres of land. Those first on the scene, found only one pilot, horribly injured from the explosion, but still apparently whole enough for everyone to plainly see he was not of this earth. In fact, according to Haydon, a signal corpsman named T. J. Weems, given as an authority on astronomy, expressed the opinion that the pilot must have been a Martian. And to further excite speculation, Haydon reported that the pilot had some papers on his person, miraculously intact after the explosion that had so disfigured his body, and that they were inscribed with strange hieroglyphics. Finally, he claimed the ship was composed of some unknown metal, though he cites no expert opinion on this detail. Oddly, the piece ends with the tidbit that they would be giving this otherworldly creature a standard, Christian funeral. The simple fact that this news did not make many waves at the time tells us that those who read it probably thought it was one of the tall tales or hoaxes common in newspapers back then, which most people could easily discern were not meant to be taken seriously. Not until UFOlogists in the early 1970s looked into it did it really become a legend. MUFON investigators descended on Aurora and walked the land with metal detectors, hoping to turn up some of that alien metal. Some iron alloy that seemed to not display the magnetic properties one might expect actually was found, but this ended up being an iron-zinc roofing shingle. Undeterred, they scoured the local cemetery for the unmarked grave of the alien and, indeed, found a site with a marker that looked like it depicted an airship. Authorities, however, refused to let them go digging up graves, and when the marker ended up stolen, likely by one of the UFOlogists themselves, they cried conspiracy! But perhaps the real conspiracy had taken place back in 1897, for recent historical research indicates that Haydon, the author of the article, had an agenda. It seems that the town of Aurora had recently been devastated by agricultural problems, fires, a failed railroad, and so-called “spotted fever,” or cerebro-spinal meningitis, which had taken Haydon’s wife and sons. It has been suggested that Haydon may have penned the hoax in an effort to promote his dying town.

San Francisco Call article of 23 Nov. 1896 mentioning the inventor and his attorney, Collins, via Chronicling America — San Francisco *Call* article of 23 Nov. 1896 mentioning the inventor and his attorney, Collins, via Chronicling America

Even if one wanted to believe that the flying objects were real, isn’t there a simpler and far more believable explanation than that little green men were flying them? Why not normal, earthling men? After all, as I discussed earlier, it’s not like no one was working on creating flying machines. So the question then becomes, who were the inventors of these aircraft? Right from the very start of the California flap, there are plenty of candidates offered up by the newspapers covering the story. In the first article to report an airship, the Sacramento Evening Bee, by way of explanation for the outlandish sighting, claimed a New York man had built an airship and would be flying to California in it, though they offered no further details. And the LA Times, almost in the same breath as it insisted that the ships were all mistaken sightings of Mars and Venus then claimed that the ship’s inventor was a man from Los Angeles. And, well before the attorney Hart had made his claims about the ship’s mission to Cuba, another prominent lawyer, George D. Collins, claimed to represent the inventor of the ship that had been seen. The inventor’s name was E. H. Benjamin, Collins said, and after 7 years of work, bankrolled by a mysterious company and using parts manufactured on the east coast, he had been successful and had already made several flights. According to a New York Herald article that appeared during the April flap the following year, the ship described by Collins was 150 feet long, with two wings, and would fly eastward next, which would tend to explain the path of the sightings. On April 10th, the Herald claimed one Max Harrhar, secretary of the Chicago Aeronautical Association, claimed to be expecting a powered, steerable airship with a crew of three out of San Francsico, on its way to D. C. For full info, Harrhar directed inquirers to Octave Chanute, the well-known President of his association, who he indicated was the wealthy bankroller of the venture. Then on the 13th, the same paper reported on the authority of one Oscar R. Booth, an airship inventor from Chicago, that the famous airship making the rounds belonged to one Charles Clinton of Dodd City, Kansas. The Dallas Morning News of April 6th named a G. M. Padgitt of Springfield, Missouri, as an inventor engaged in balloon flights, and the Chicago Tribune of April 12th had the inventor’s name as A. C. Clinton of Omaha. Later that month, though, they revealed that A. C. Clinton was just a pseudonym of Clinton A. Case; this they had from one Wakefield, the Secretary of the Omaha Exposition, where Case had requested 87,000 Square feet for a landing place. Another suspect out of Omaha was one Alva J. Grover, who had reportedly shown people plans for a powered, steerable airship, and yet another was a country tinkerer named John O. Preast, who it was said had covered the walls of his home with drawings of his ships. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015679/1897-04-01/ed-1/seq-7/ The list goes on… the St. Louis Post Dispatch on April 25th reported an airship like a headless, tailless fish, with propellers and wings and a 9-foot-long passenger car. It landed for repairs, and its pilot, a Professor Charles Davidson, claimed to have left Sacramento a month earlier. And on May 7th, the Chicago Tribune gave a similarly detailed description of an airship that, according to a New York Times article describing the same craft, was 40 feet long, with propellers, attached to a bicycle for take-off. Its inventor was reported as Professor Arthur W. Barnard of Nashville, and he claimed he had demonstrated his airship at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition to general amazement but apparently little news coverage.

Not all candidates for inventing the airship were named by newspapers during the flap. For example, researcher Micah Hanks dug up a patent filed in April 1896 by one Charles Abbott Smith of San Francisco, an inventor of some repute who had previously sold some patents for tools useful to shoemakers farmers, and builders. In a San Francisco Call article some 9 months before the California flap, Smith talks about his proposed airship, and mention is made that the U. S. government may have been offering a $100,000 for the invention of working airship. This may be relevant to the story of another popular contender for our airship inventor. John Worrell Keely was a Philadelphian who, inspired by the vibrations of a tuning fork, began experimentation to determine how vibrations might allow him to tap into the power of luminiferous ether, the medium by which light was propagated and the stuff that many believed filled all empty space. By 1872, he claimed a breakthrough and convinced some wealthy capitalists to bankroll his motor company, for soon he would build an engine using his proprietary technology. In 1874, he demonstrated his etheric generator, a device that ran on the vapor produced by ordinary tap water, and yet produced enough energy to break iron bars and drive bullets into wood. Whenever his investors wanted progress, he always had a new device to demonstrate in a dramatic fashion, showing how musical tones he played on his flute or harmonica could through vibration activate etheric energy and thereby operate the machines he showed them, such as the “hydro-pneumatic pulsating vacuo-engine.” Some, however, suggested the music was only a signal to hidden accomplices, indicating when to operate the machinery. Nevertheless, his career was a long one. In 1884, he demonstrated a “vaporic gun” for the government at Sandy Hook, impressing some and not impressing others, who complained that a “healthy donkey could kick harder than the projectile struck.” Then in 1896, perhaps trying to win that hundred grand offered by the government, he gave a demonstration that showed revolving copper spheres and claimed it showed his manipulation of “polar-depolar force,” further explaining that “[g]ravity is nothing more than a concordant attractive sympathetic stream flowing towards the neutral center of the earth,” all of which to say that he would soon be able to control gravity and therefore raise heavy airships into the sky. While many would like to believe that it was his astounding science that raised the airships of that year, the truth is there is no evidence that he ever accomplished this or any of his other plans. After his death, skeptics raided his lab, and no one could ever make his devices work as he had in demonstrations. So he is remembered today as one of history’s greatest frauds.

John Worrell Keely, via Lock Haven University

While it is tempting to believe some inventor really made these airships, considering all the many inventors and true balloonists diligently working in those years to perfect a powered, steerable airship capable of the kind of flights reported in 1896 and ’97, the simple fact that these ships were not demonstrated to great fanfare in public exhibitions, as nearly every major flight before them had been, tends to cast doubt on the idea of them being real at all. The mysterious Wilson who supposedly piloted a ship around Texas claimed this was because no patent had been filed yet, so they didn’t want their invention stolen, but this strains credulity as well. What inventor would wait until well after the successful completion and flight test of their airship to file a patent? And even if one were to accept this explanation, there remains the final question of why, after the April 1897 flap, the airships were never seen again. Surely they had proven viable! Why would no one patent them and go public at that point? So then we are left with the theory that these sightings were artifacts of Yellow Journalism, a media hoax. Some have pointed out that the Midwest sightings clearly travel eastward along the path of the telegraph lines, suggesting that as one newspaper perpetrated its hoax, the next received word of it by telegraph and perpetuated it. But there are problems with this theory as well. Even in the era of Yellow Journalism, a newspaper’s reputation could be damaged by engaging in outright fraud, especially in such an extended way. These were legitimate news sources, not supermarket tabloids like we have today, and they were often in direct competition with other papers that would jump at the chance to prove their rivals were spreading falsehoods. Moreover, when these papers did print outrageous hoaxes, like those written by Mulhatton, they were usually standalone stories, often so absurd that their readers could easily determine what was news and what was satire meant only for entertainment. These sightings, however, were reported on over and over again, like real news, and in between eyewitness reports, the correspondents often injected their vocal skepticism, such as in the San Francisco Examiner of December 5th, 1896: “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.”

Perhaps it is impossible now to make heads or tails of this mess. It seems like people must have seen something, at least in Sacramento, at the beginning of things. If there truly were no ships in the sky and never had been, how did this hysteria ever get started? It’s possible that some combination of all the various theories offers the best explanation. Maybe there were real sightings at first, and maybe some or all of those had been mistakes, confusing Venus, which was bright that year, or a big box kite, as has been put forth as an explanation for the airship sightings. Then perhaps, as newspapers wanting to boost sales wrote up these reports, they embellished them, added details or increased the number of witnesses. After that, it was spread by telegraph to other locales, which then caused people there to look for airships in the skies and to make further mistaken sightings or even to perpetrate hoax sightings. Some newspaper articles even seem to playfully toe the line between professional skepticism and engagement in the hysteria. For example, in the April 14th 1897 New York Herald, a reporter expresses frustration over the unreliability of airship news but then goes on to report that a steam-powered ship called the Pegasus had been flying around for the last month. And in May, just at the tail end of the final flap, the Houston Daily Post published a piece about a reporter at a train station being told by a train official to ask a certain stranger about airships, for the official had heard that the man had something to do with them. Upon inquiring into it, the stranger, a Mr. Dodson from Texas, scoffed, “My, my, has that old stale April fool story ever received any serious consideration here? ...Why, that was a clean-cut fake from the start…a fake pure and simple, started by some enterprising reporter like yourself, and rolled along by all other scribes.” So there we have it, yes? An epic April fool’s joke. That could account at least for the massive spate of sightings that April, and it recasts some details as decidedly humorous, such as the Herald's April 10th article citing a Max Harrhar, which in retrospect sounds like it's quoting someone named "Utmost Laughter." But this Mr. Dodson of the Houston Daily Post article wasn’t quite finished. “I have the only airship which has ever been successfully invented,” he claimed mildly and went on to explain that he compressed air was the trick, for the eagle, he expounded, flies without flapping its wings simply by holding its breath. It was as easy as that. In order to float, he said, one only has to be full of hot air.

A contemporary cartoon and poem makes of the airship sightings a metaphor, via Chronicling America

The Phantom Airships of 1890s America

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