It appeared first in Sacramento, California, on the night of November 17, 1896 — a strange light in the rainy night sky. On that first night it was seen by dozens of people. Most saw only a light. Others made out a dark cigar shape behind the light. The most detailed description came from a streetcar motorman named Lowery, who said he saw a flying machine propelled by two men working bicycle pedals.
When the story hit the papers the next day, it caused a storm of controversy. The Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Call paid lavish attention to the affair, and sent reporters to interview witnesses. By contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle pooh-poohed the whole notion. After a few days, the story died down.
But on November 22, the “mystery airship” came back. It passed over Sacramento and appeared over Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose as well. During the next few days the airship was sighted all over California. The peak night was November 25, when it appeared in eleven places around the state, including Auburn, Chico, Fresno, Hayward, Napa, Oakland, Pasadena, Petaluma, Sacramento, San Lorenzo and Visalia.
From the beginning, the phenomenon was referred to as the “airship.” Though it was almost always seen at night, witnesses claimed they could see a vague shape behind the bright light. They spoke of cigar-shaped gasbags, flapping wings, and great wheels like those of a paddle steamer. A few said they heard voices, either in American accents or unknown tongues.
Accounts became wilder as the month passed. A Colonel Shaw of Stockton claimed to have encountered inhuman beings with the airship on a country road. A man in Indio claimed to have gone aboard the craft for a flight.
If the lights were indeed those of a flying machine, who was its creator? There were several claimants to the honor. Soon after the first sightings, a San Francisco lawyer named George D. Collins announced that he had been hired to represent the airship’s inventor, who preferred to remain anonymous. After a few days Collins retracted his statements, and said he had been misunderstood.
Shortly afterward, William H. H. Hart, the former Attorney General of California, proclaimed that he was in communication with the mysterious inventor, and that the airship would shortly be used to bomb the Spanish garrison of Havana and liberate Cuba. But when pressed for details and evidence, Hart also backed off from his claims.
The number of reports in California began to decline as November drew to a close. There was a brief encore on December 4, with airship sightings in Brown’s Valley, Davis, Dixon, North Bloomfield, San Francisco and Vallejo. Then the skies were quiet.
By December 7, California had tired of the airship — or vice versa. Reports faded from the news and people’s minds turned to more mundane matters. But the airship mania was not over. Far from it; the airship sightings had moved east.
The Airship On the Prairies
Beginning in January and continuing until April of 1897, a great wave of airship sightings slowly crossed the Great Plains from west to east. As in California, most of the reports were of a bright light in the night sky, leavened with a few more impressive tales. Sightings were reported from all over the center of the country.
Nebraska was a hotbed of airship activity. The first reported sighting came in late January, and newspaper accounts of sightings continued for months. The peak of the Nebraska wave was in April, when the pleasant spring nights drew people outside to watch the skies. The directors of a trade fair in Omaha got a letter purporting to be from the airship inventor, who signed himself “A.C. Clinton” and asked for three million square feet of space to exhibit his machine. He failed to appear.
The airship was first spotted in Kansas on March 26, and reports came in through April and early May. The most amazing account out of Kansas came from a farmer named Alexander Hamilton, in the little town of Le Roy. According to Hamilton, the airship had dropped down on his farm on the night of April 20. The pilots lassoed a heifer from Hamilton’s herd and carried it off into the air. Mr. Hamilton even produced a notarized statement from twelve prominent men of Le Roy, attesting to his honesty and truthfulness.
The small town of Aurora, Texas, had an even more dramatic incident. On April 19 the Dallas Morning News reported that the airship had crashed into a windmill in Aurora and exploded. The body of the pilot was recovered, and was identified as a native of the planet Mars. Despite this, the remains were buried in the local Masonic cemetery.
Chicago awaited the airship with great anticipation, and was not disappointed. The mysterious lights reached Illinois at the beginning of April, and lasted through the first half of the month. After a handful of reports during the first week of April, a spectacular series of airship sightings swept Illinois and Indiana during the week of April 9-16, with 110 reports over the course of seven nights. It was spotted all over Illinois, frequently in different parts of the state on the same night.
In nearby Wisconsin, a farmer found a letter, apparently from the pilots of the airship, describing its construction in Tennessee. Other letters turned up in Michigan and Texas, obviously practical jokes. The most celebrated “airship message” was found in Astoria, Illinois. It was addressed to Thomas Edison, and was seemingly a coded report to him from the pilot of the mystery airship. The great inventor called it a “pure fake.”
After Illinois and Indiana, the sightings began to taper off. They did not end at once; reports were still being published in June of 1897. But they were scattered and few in number. The great wave of airship mania had broken and receded.
Explanations
So what were all those people seeing a hundred years ago? One thing which is certain is that they were not seeing a real airship.
Airships did exist at the time, to be sure. The dirigible “La France” had flown a controlled circular course in 1885 outside Paris, and in Germany Count Zeppelin was building his first “Luftschiff” on Lake Constance. Efforts to build a dirigible flying machine in America dated back to as early as 1865, when Solomon Andrews of Perth Amboy flew his Aereon against the wind in New Jersey. In 1867, Frederick Marriott of San Francisco constructed a ship called the Avitor which had many of the features mentioned in accounts of the mystery airship — a cigar shaped envelope and wings. A scale model flew, but Marriott never built a manned version.
But none of the dirigibles in existence in 1896 could manage more than a few miles’ circuit in still air. It would not be for at least twenty years that a ship existed which could fly from San Francisco to Chicago. And the thought of trying to land a primitive blimp in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains during the winter — presumably without a ground crew — is daunting, to put it mildly.
The explanation popular in UFO circles is that the airship wasn’t the product of 1896 Earth technology. Obviously it must have been a ship from another world — or several ships, as the lights were spotted in widely separated places at the same time. It’s impossible to prove there weren’t alien spacecraft over America in 1897; whether or not one believes it is purely a matter of faith. But there are other explanations which are more probable, though not as entertaining.
The Press and the Airship
The airship mania was first and foremost a newspaper phenomenon. Rival papers often backed different explanations. In San Francisco, the Call was the most enthusiastic proponent of the airship, while the Chronicle was more staid and the Examiner repeatedly debunked the whole affair.
The Hearst papers followed a curious double standard. In California, where the Call and other small papers had seized on the story, William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner was skeptical. But Hearst’s eastern newspapers gave the story big play, for it was just the sort of story the magnate loved.
The newspapers may have been giving their readers what they wanted to hear, by making up reports of airship sightings. If this sounds like questionable ethics, it should be recalled that journalism was much more freewheeling in the nineteenth century. Hoaxes were common — from the inevitable April First story of sea serpents or fur- bearing trout, to elaborate deceptions like Richard Adams Locke’s Moon Hoax, or Edgar Allen Poe’s Balloon Hoax.
It is worth noting that a large proportion of airship sightings were published in relatively few papers. Most of the California reports appeared in the San Francisco Call. Half of all the Nebraska sightings were published in the Omaha Bee. The Atchison Champion was the primary airship paper in Kansas, and the Dallas Morning News published many Texas sightings. When the mania hit Illinois and Indiana, it was the Chicago Times-Herald that was the most enthusiastic reporter of airship sightings. These were not always the biggest or most influential papers in their regions. Major papers like the Chicago Tribune or the San Francisco Chronicle tended to downplay the airship, but smaller papers hungry for subscribers were drawn to the story.
The slow progression of airship sightings across the continent may not be the movement of any vehicle, but the propagation wave of newspaper stories inspired by similar accounts in nearby towns.
Practical Jokers
Practical joking was much more common in the 19th century than today. It would certainly be possible for someone reading reports of the mysterious “airship” to build a tissue-paper hot-air balloon and inspire some sightings. At least one case of this was verified, in Nebraska. Some of the anti-airship newspapers accused the pro-airship papers of deliberately launching balloons or kites to spur interest.
Even simpler is to claim a false sighting. The two most amazing stories from the airship flap both appear to be straighforward lies. Alexander Hamilton’s “cownapping” tale and the Aurora crash were simply tall tales. In Hamilton’s case it was nothing more than a bit of fun; years later, the editor of the paper in which the yarn first appeared recalled that Hamilton and a few others were joking around in the newspaper office one afternoon and came up with the cow story.
The Aurora event got some scrutiny from UFO investigators in the 1970s, drawn by the possibility of finding alien remains in a small Texas town. But their researches only revealed that there was no crash and no buried alien. The whole thing was made up by the Dallas Morning News stringer in Aurora, possibly as a way of getting some free publicity for the town.
There is also some evidence to suggest that many of the Great Plains reports were created by a group of railroad men and telegraph operators. Equipped with their own system of communication across the country, and with lots of idle time on the long winter nights, the railroad telegraphers were the 1890s equivalent of modern Internet junkies. They may well have had a hand in starting or promulgating the reports.
Natural Phenomena
Most natural causes can be ruled out as explanations for the airship sightings. Since the airship was seen in a score of states over a period of six months, whatever it was had to be long-lasting and widely visible. That eliminates short-lived phenomena like ball lighting, the aurora borealis or meteors.
The most likely culprit is the planet Venus. During the winter of 1896-97 it was visible in the evening sky, and was at its maximum brightness on March 23 — just at the height of the airship mania. Many of the airship reports were on cloudy or overcast nights. The bright disk of Venus shining through moving clouds might appear to be an airship in flight.
Migrating birds might be responsible for a few sightings, especially over cities with new street lighting systems. Spring is after all the season when birds return from their winter quarters. Birds might account for the occasional descriptions of flapping wings on the mystery airship.
Finally, the power of suggestion cannot be underestimated. Once people heard about the airship and began going outside to look, anything bright or unfamiliar in the sky would obviously be the mystery machine.
Great Expectations
Though no dirigible flying machine had yet proved practical, flight was a hot topic in the 1890s, and 1896 was a big year for aeronautics. Samuel Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian aviation pioneer, kept scrapbooks containing press clippings about flying, collected from papers around the country. His volume for 1896 includes accounts of at least ten inventors claiming to have conquered the air before the sightings began, and Langley’s book does not include clippings about Langley’s own experiments in May of that year, when he flew an unmanned model.
Clearly, airships were “in the air,” so to speak. And nowhere more so than in San Francisco. The San Francisco Call published an article in September of 1896, describing the patented airship of one inventor, including a large illustration. The machine was cylindrical, with flapping wings, portholes, and wheels — all the features seen during the airship mania a month later. Significantly, the Call was the most vigorously pro-airship paper in California.
So when people saw Venus shining brightly in the night sky, their thoughts naturally turned to airships. On the prairies, there may have been a strong element of wishful thinking involved. At the time, the railroads had a near monopoly on transportation in the great plains, and controlled many state legislatures. A new form of aerial transport would end the reign of the rail barons.
The parallel with the “flying saucer” flap of the late 1940s and early 1950s is remarkable. With the advent of rocketry and atomic power during World War II, it seemed the conquest of space was at hand. Noted scientists like Wehrner von Braun wrote glowing articles about space travel for mass-circulation magazines like Collier’s. So when people looked up and saw something bright and unfamiliar, they immediately thought of spaceships.
In our own day, there is widespread cynicism about government, uncertainty about the world in the wake of the Cold War, and a distrust of new technology. People seeing lights in the sky now call them “black helicopters” — sinister agents of oppression lurking overhead.
I’d prefer the airship, myself.
Sources and Additional Reading
The best book on the airship sightings is Daniel Cohen’s The Great Airship Mystery.
An exhaustively complete listing of all airship reports, along with all manner of other weird happenings, can be found in George Eberhart’s A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies.
Charles Fort was an indefatigable chronicler of odd stories and unexplained events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His books The Book of the Damned, NewLands and Lo! are full of peculiar things seen in the sky.