Mystery airships: Wave of UFO sightings baffles the world in the 1880s and 1890s

mystery airships, UFO sightings, mystery airships UFO sightings, phantom airships
mystery airships UFO sightings

Mystery airships are a class of unidentified flying objects reported worldwide during the 1880s and 1890s and being best known from a series of newspaper reports originating in the western United States and spreading east during late 1896 and early 1897.

Also known as phantom airships, these strange sky phenomena are seen as a cultural predecessor to modern claims of extraterrestrial-piloted flying saucer-style UFOs.

Typical airship reports involved night time sightings of unidentified lights, but more detailed accounts reported ships comparable to a dirigible with human-looking crewmen and pilots. Sometimes the apparent humans claimed to be from the planet Mars.

Historian Mike Dash described the 1896–1897 series of airship sightings with the following words:

Not only were [the mystery airships] bigger, faster and more robust than anything then produced by the aviators of the world; they seemed to be able to fly enormous distances, and some were equipped with giant wings… The 1896–1897 airship wave is probably the best investigated of all historical anomalies.

The files of almost 1,500 newspapers from across the United States have been combed for reports, an astonishing feat of research. 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.

The Sacramento mystery airship

The Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Call reported the first sighting on November 18, 1896. Witnesses reported a light moving slowly over Sacramento on the evening of November 17 at an estimated 1,000-foot elevation. Some witnesses said they could see a dark shape behind the light.

 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. 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.

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 dirigible. A light was mounted on the front end of the airship.

Some witnesses reported the sound of singing as the craft passed overhead.

The mystery light reappeared over Sacramento on the evening of November 21. It was also seen over Folsom, San Francisco, Oakland, Modesto, Manteca, Sebastopol and several other cities later that same evening and was reportedly viewed by hundreds of witnesses.

The Stockton alien abduction case

The November 19, 1896, edition of the Stockton, California, Daily Mail featured one of the earliest accounts of an alleged alien craft sighting. Colonel H.G. Shaw claimed that while driving his buggy through the countryside near Stockton, he came across what appeared to be a landed spacecraft.

Shaw described it as having a metallic surface which was completely featureless apart from a rudder, and pointed ends. He estimated a diameter of 25 feet and said the vessel was around 150 feet in total length. Three slender, 7-foot-tall (2.1 m), apparent extraterrestrials were said to approach from the craft while “emitting a strange warbling noise.”

The beings reportedly examined Shaw’s buggy and then tried to physically force him to accompany them back to the airship. The aliens were said to give up after realizing they lacked the physical strength to force Shaw aboard. They supposedly fled back to their ship, which lifted off the ground and sped out of sight.

Shaw believed that the beings were Martians sent to kidnap an earthling for unknowable but potentially nefarious purposes. This has been seen by some as an early attempt at alien abduction; it is apparently the first published account of explicitly extraterrestrial beings attempting to kidnap humans into their spacecraft.

Phantom airships in Texas

In one account from Texas, three men reported an encounter with an airship and with “five peculiarly dressed men” who asserted that they were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and had learned English from the 1553 North Pole expedition led by Hugh Willoughby.

An account from Aurora, Texas, related in the Dallas Morning News on April 19, 1897, reported that a couple of days before, an airship had smashed into a windmill – later determined to be a sump pump – belonging to a Judge Proctor, then crashed. The occupant was dead and mangled, but the story reported that the presumed pilot was clearly “not an inhabitant of this world.”

Strange “hieroglyphic” figures were seen on the wreckage, which resembled “a mixture of aluminum and silver … it must have weighed several tons.”

 The story ended by noting that the pilot was given a “Christian burial” in the town cemetery.

Mystery airships in Nebraska

On February 2, 1897, the Omaha Bee reported an airship sighting over Hastings, Nebraska, the previous day.

An article in the Albion Weekly News reported that two witnesses saw an airship crash just inches from where they were standing. The airship suddenly disappeared, with a man standing where the vessel had been. The airship pilot showed the men a small device that supposedly enabled him to shrink the airship small enough to store the vessel in his pocket. A rival newspaper, the Wilsonville Review, playfully claimed that its own editor was an additional witness to the incident and that he heard the pilot say “Weiver eht rof ebircsbus!” The phrase he allegedly heard is “subscribe for the Review” spelled backwards.

An April 16, 1897, a story published by the Table Rock Argus claimed that a group of “anonymous but reliable” witnesses had seen an airship sailing overhead. The craft had many passengers. The witnesses claimed that among these passengers was a woman tied to a chair, a woman attending her, and a man with a pistol guarding their apparent prisoner. Before the witnesses thought to contact the authorities, the airship was already gone.

Mystery airships in Missouri

On April 10, 1897, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a story reporting that one W.H. Hopkins encountered a grounded airship about 20 feet in length and 8 feet in diameter near the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri. The vehicle was apparently propelled by three large propellers and crewed by a beautiful, nude woman and a bearded man, also nude. Hopkins attempted with some difficulty to communicate with the crew in order to ascertain their origins. Eventually they understood what Hopkins was asking of them and they both pointed to the sky and “uttered something that sounded like the word Mars.

Mystery airships in Kansas

An account by Alexander Hamilton of Leroy, Kansas, supposedly occurred around April 19, 1897, and was published in the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate of April 23. Hamilton, his son and a tenant witnessed an airship hovering over his cattle pen. Upon closer examination, the witnesses realized that a red “cable” from the airship had lassoed a heifer, but had also become entangled in the pen’s fence. After trying unsuccessfully to free the heifer, Hamilton cut loose a portion of the fence, then “stood in amazement to see the ship, cow and all rise slowly and sail off.

Mystery airships in Kentucky

In a variation of the usual airship, 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. 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.

Mystery airships around the world

In 1868, Charles Fort cited a mystery airship sighting in Copiapo, Chile. It was described as a gigantic, shining bird driven by a noisy motor.

There was a series of mystery airship sightings in 1909 in New England, New Zealand and various European countries. Later reports came from the United Kingdom in 1912 and 1913. 

What are the mystery airships?

Human airships

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. The technology to build a practical airship existed during the period in question. However, their capabilities were far more limited than the phantom airships.

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.

Hoaxes

During the 1896–97 wave, there were many attempts to explain the airship sightings, including hoaxes, pranks, publicity stunts and hallucinations. One man suggested the airships were swarms of lightning beetles misidentified by observers.

According to journalism historians, 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 1800s often would have expected the reader to understand that such stories were false.

Most journalists of the period did not seem to take the airship reports very seriously as the subject quickly fell from public consciousness. The airship stories were rediscovered in the mid 1960s and UFO investigators suggested the airships might represent earlier precursors to post-World War II UFO sightings.

Extraterrestrial origin

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.” 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.”

Were these mystery airships first UFO sightings or hoaxes? You tell me!

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