Mystery Airship Wave of 1896 and 1897

In 1896 the Wright brothers were still years from flight. No practical dirigible had flown in the United States. Yet flying machines filled the dime novels, from the Frank Reade stories to Jules Verne's Robur the Conqueror.

November 17, 1896. Sacramento. Between 6 and 7 o'clock in the evening, a light came through the sky over the housetops. It moved out of the East and sailed unevenly toward the Southwest. Frank Ross, assistant superintendent of the electric streetcar company, called it "a brilliant electric searchlight, apparently twice the size and power of an ordinary arc light." R.L. Lowry saw something "oblong and egg-shaped, with fan-like wheels on either side." He thought he could make out four men who seemed to be pedalling.

Then came the voices. Horse trainer David Carl heard someone call out, "We are too low down here; send her up higher." Another voice warned, "Lift her up quick! You are making directly for that steeple!" E. Wenzel of Scheld's Brewery heard the occupants "trolling a merry chorus." The light stayed in view for more than a half-hour.

Within days it returned. Sacramento's deputy sheriff and district attorney were among the observers. In Oakland, a streetcar conductor and passengers saw something "resembling a huge bird in its outlines." At the Cliff House, the light reportedly frightened the sleeping seals into the ocean. Near Lodi, Col. H.G. Shaw described beings "nearly or quite seven feet high and very slender" who began "warbling" instead of talking.

Then the sky went quiet. February 2, 1897. Hastings, Nebraska. It began again. In Topeka, several hundred people watched "a blood red light moving slowly across the sky." Governor John W. Leedy was among them. On April 9, crowds numbering in the thousands gathered in Chicago. The next morning in Rogers Park, newsstand dealer Walter McCann said he photographed a machine whose "upper portion was cigar shaped, with a propeller in the rear." In Texas, a craft hung "almost stationary" and then "started off at a terrific rate."

The newspapers fed the frenzy. San Francisco attorney George D. Collins claimed to represent the inventor. Then he declared "I know nothing about the airship" and went into hiding. The Examiner, rival of the Call, wrote on December 5, 1896 that "the whole airship story is pure myth."

Hoaxes multiplied. At Aurora, Texas, cotton buyer S.E. Haydon wrote of a crash and a pilot "not of this world." In 1980, Etta Pegues said he "wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora." Alexander Hamilton's calf-napping story from Le Roy, Kansas, turned out to be a Liars' Club tall tale. In Dallas, boys tied kerosene-soaked cotton to a turkey vulture.

Venus was the favourite suspect. G.W. Hough of Dearborn Observatory proposed Betelgeuse. A Chicago Tribune expert laughed at McCann's pictures and suggested a paste-up. The originals do not survive. Robert Bartholomew called the episode mass hysteria. Michael Busby argued the flight paths fit "three separate airships" over Texas. Mike Dash concluded that simple sightings were mostly planets and stars, and complex ones mostly hoaxes. But "A small residuum remains perplexing."

There was never a government investigation. For about 70 years the wave was forgotten. Then, in 1966, Jerome Clark revived it in Flying Saucer Review. Today it stands as a precursor to Kenneth Arnold's flying saucer sighting of 1947. By one estimate, the witnesses may have exceeded 100,000.