The Airship Flap of 1897

The first recorded sighting was in November of 1896, and in California, where all great fads must start. Over the course of the next year, there were hundreds of reported sightings of a long, cigar-shaped flying object the glided silently through the skies of the United States. Some reports said it had propellers, other talked about red and green lights. And a few even mentioned pilots. Before you knew it, we had the first major UFO sightings and the so-called Airship flap of 1897.

This was really big news back in the day. The government took it seriously. People were talking about it at home, in their workplaces, at dinners. Noted experts on science and technology, like Thomas Edison, were consulted. But it has been mostly forgotten in the hundred plus years because, well, most of the sightings were hoaxes, and human memory is short. Do any of us really think that our grandchildren are going to be taught the OJ Simpson murder trial? No way, not when their teachers will be hardpressed to include 9/11 in their curriculums. (It always disturbed me that none of my high school history courses seemed to have time to tell me who won the Second World War. ** OK. Except for an elective I took, but how many of my classmates graduated without being able to name the Axis powers?)

Anyway, lacking terms like "airplane," "flying saucer," and "blimp," the public stuck on the Edwardian term "airship." Now, before you go thinking that this was some misapplication of the would "ship" to the same phenomena we would call UFOs and describe as interstellar space craft today, you have to understand how weird this story gets. The descriptions of the objects were often pretty exact, and while they do describe derrigibles pretty closely, these were not "space ship-like" objects in the least. The airships were rather ornately designed and made blimp-like objects with fishy fins, batty wings, carved wood furniture, paddle-wheel-type fans, all kinds of craziness.

Also, as the story grew, a few reports of a mysterious inventor appeared, who was jealously guarding his secret in order to get it to the Patent Office after his "flight tests." One California attorney even stepped forward claiming to represent the inventor. In addition, there were stories of the airships landing and the pilots interacting with locals. In one case asking for some "lubricating oil, cold chisels, and bluestone." (Bluestone happens to be the predominant rock type in Stonehenge monuments, but whether or not that is in any way related is your guess.)

There was only one report that a crashed airship was from Mars. This happened in Aurora, Texas. The mystery pilot was buried (at least, according to the story) and his location was known until investigators, real newspaper reporters, went looking for him in the 1970's. The cemetery claimed they had meticulous records, and had no record of a John Doe related to this incident. However, the story surfaced that someone had exhumed the body and moved the gravestone.

So what is the likely truth? Was there a mysterious airship inventor? Well, in this case, the possibility isn't 100% impossible, but it is against the odds. What we do know is that the world was a very different place back then. Newspapers in the 1890s were known for enlivening slow newsdays with the kinds of distant wire reports we today only see in the Weekly World News. Telegraph operators use to entertain each other by making up outlandish stories to pass back and forth between each other, and sometimes these bogus stories were mistaken -- or intentionally passed off -- for real news. Maybe there was a kernel of truth to a few of these wild reports, but few have any hard evidence to attach to them. And we also know that no inventor, or his attorney, ever did file a related patent for an airship. At least, not in the United States...