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The Airships of 1897
by J. Allan Danelek
FATE :: July 2007

Many people regard the Kenneth Arnold sighting of several flying disks over Mount Rainier in 1947 to be the official start of the modern age of ufology, but that would be incorrect.

Actually, it all started earlier than that—almost 50 years earlier, in fact—with the airship flap of 1896–97, which to this day remains one of the most controversial elements of the entire UFO debate.

For those unfamiliar with this brief but curious incident (or series of incidents, as the sightings lasted several months), it all started on the evening of November 17, 1896, when a bright light appeared through the dark rainclouds over Sacramento, California, and slowly made its way westward over the capitol building, only to disappear once again into the night leaving hundreds of the cities’ residents wondering what they had just witnessed. It was described by various witnesses as “cigar shaped” and reportedly sported oversized propellers and rudders on its undercarriage, all visible due to its low altitude and slow progress. Among those who saw the vessel was an assistant to the Secretary of State, who, along with several friends, watched the vessel for several minutes from the capitol dome. One person even described it as having wheels at its side “like the side wheels on Fulton’s old steamboat.”

The mysterious object was seen over Sacramento again five days later, this time witnessed by thousands of people, including the city’s deputy sheriff and a district attorney. Most agreed it was a cigar-shaped object of some size and that it moved slowly but methodically over the city before disappearing to the southwest. It supposedly appeared later that evening over San Francisco, some 90 miles away, where it was seen by hundreds of people and reportedly cruised over the Pacific Ocean, flashing its spotlight toward the Cliff House, one of San Francisco’s most famous landmarks.

The area papers quickly caught “airship fever” and began reporting the mysterious vessel appearing elsewhere over California and as far north as Washington State and Canada. The sightings, however, abated by the end of December, and nothing more was seen of the mysterious “airship” for nearly two months. When it reappeared, it showed up far from California, this time over Hastings, Nebraska, on the evening of February 2, 1897. Soon it was spotted throughout the Midwest, from Texas to Iowa and from Kansas to Missouri. It even supposedly appeared over Chicago on the evening of April 11, where a photograph was reportedly taken (the first UFO photo on record, if authentic) and four days later over Kalamazoo, where it crashed and exploded, according to one local paper. Though reports continued after that, they soon diminished until by summer the airship flap of 1896–97 was over and the world was left with one more mystery to ponder.

To this day, no one is certain what this object (or objects) might have been. Debunkers maintain it was all the product of yellow journalism—the tendency of newspapers to invent stories in an effort to increase sales—mixed with mass hysteria in which people imagined any light in the sky (sometimes speculated to having been an unusually bright Venus) to be the rogue airship. Today many in the UFO community, noting that UFOs are sometimes described as being cigar-shaped, have decided that these were early appearances by extraterrestrials, designed perhaps to test our level of sophistication (and apparently deciding we weren’t ready for them yet.) Both explanations, however, leave us with more questions than answers.

The hoax/mass hysteria theory, for example, fails to account for the initial sightings over California; newspapers didn’t report on the object until after it had been seen by supposedly thousands of witnesses, while the mass hysteria theory fails to explain how such a thing can occur in a generally geographic straight line (moving from California through Nebraska and Iowa and finishing in Michigan.)

Even if we assume that the majority of reports were spurious or mistaken, it is curious how mass hysteria is capable of affecting only people along a particular path. Further, it is uncertain how many Midwesterners would have been aware of the earlier California sightings and so be inclined to imagine that the mysterious airship was headed their way; newspapers rarely picked up general interest stories from other places in the country, preferring instead to stick with national headlines and stories of local interest.

Media coverage of the sightings tended to follow the appearances, not precede them as would be expected if the media was simply priming the country for more stories. Finally, the modern theory of extraterrestrials also seems unlikely, especially in view of the descriptions given by many witnesses that described propellers, wings, rudders, and undercarriages on the vessel—all appendages unlikely to be seen on an interplanetary vehicle.

So what was the thing that crossed the countryside that winter of 1896–97 to cause such a stir?

Read the rest of this article in the July 2007 issue of FATE

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