Alexander Hamilton's Airship Calf-Napping, Le Roy, Kansas (1897)

In the spring of 1897, America was watching the skies. Mystery airship reports filled the newspapers. Alexander Hamilton was a stockman near Le Roy, in Coffey County, Kansas. He had been a lawyer, a teacher, a militia captain and a state legislator. On Friday, April 23, 1897, the Yates Center Farmer's Advocate printed his statement.

"Last Monday night about 10:30 we were awakened by a noise among the cattle." Hamilton thought his bulldog was performing pranks. He went to the door and saw "that an airship was slowly descending upon my cow lot, about forty rods from the house." His son and a tenant saw it too. It had "a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath." The carriage was "made of glass or some other transparent substance" and "brightly lighted within and everything was plainly visible."

Inside were "six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said." Then the beings noticed the men. A searchlight swung onto them. Beneath the craft, "a great turbine wheel, about thirty feet in diameter," began to buzz. The vessel "rose lightly as a bird."

It did not leave alone. A red cable, half an inch thick, had looped around the neck of a two-year-old heifer and caught in the fence. The men could not free her. They cut the fence loose. Hamilton "stood in amazement to see the ship, cow and all rise slowly and sail off."

The next day a neighbour found the hide, legs and head in his pasture. He could find no tracks in the soft ground. An affidavit dated April 21 ran with the statement, signed by local notables including State Oil Inspector E. V. Wharton and Sheriff M. E. Hunt. They vouched for the man, not the airship: "for truth and veracity we have never heard [Hamilton's] word questioned."

The story was reprinted across the United States and in Europe. Hamilton had reportedly admitted beforehand that he had "fixed up quite a story" for a local liars' club, and he kept calling it a hoax until he died in 1912. In January 1943 the Buffalo Enterprise, a Kansas weekly, revived the tale. Ed F. Hudson, who had edited the Farmer's Advocate in 1897, replied that he and Hamilton had made it up together.

In 1976 Ethel L. Shaw, aged 93, told a researcher that shortly before publication she had heard Hamilton boast to his wife about the story he had invented. "The club soon broke up after the 'airship and cow' story… I guess that one had topped them all." In 1977 Jerome Clark published the full exposure in Fate magazine.

The legend outran the confession. UFO books came to call it the earliest report of cattle mutilation. According to the writer Jason Colavito, the 1979 documentary UFOs: It Has Begun, hosted by Rod Serling, still presented it as genuine. Jacques Vallée had contributed the film's section on cattle mutilations. Some still argue that the debunking is less credible than the testimony.

Today the Le Roy airship reads as a period piece. A deadpan tall tale from the age of the liars' club, dressed up in an affidavit. It kept its grip on readers long after its authors owned up.