The 19th century saw vast changes in society all over the world, mostly thanks to accelerating technological and scientific progress.
But strange alien intelligences were slowly noticing all those wires covering the land, and all those huge balloons starting to dominate the air, and they became curious.
Soon, all over the world people started to notice a phenomenal rise in strange visitors dropping by from outer space, while witches and warlocks all got scared by all those asian-looking foreign dudes with steam-powered laser guns and went into hiding. The number of witch sightings reached almost zero, as coincidentally the number of alien zeppelin sightings reached a crazed maximum of ca. 19 billion per hour.
This are the stories of the poor victims of those many, many alien explorers dropping by before the world wars scared them off for good*.
*If you want to read my source and all the bullshit contained within by yourself, the random book I selected to read about UFOs was a big clunker with the name „The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters: The Definitive Illustrated A-Z Guide to All Things Alien“. All the stuff in it was collected by the editor „Ronald D. Story“. No, really. That‘s the (totally fake, I‘m sure) name that dude put on his quite a mouthfull of a book. It‘s $1,49 on Kindle currently, so give it a try. Inflation destroys that amount of value every second you think about it, probably. So it‘s not like you‘re losing anything except time and sanity.
The Airship Wave of 1896
The end of the 19th century was weird: Zeppelins dominated the sky, people started doing crazy things with electricity, even the first real airplanes already existed, but a lot of the older generations were still confused by the fast pace of technological progress. All those newfangled machines scared people like TikToc scares old people today!
OK, but in all seriousness, the AW of 1896 happened in the land of the free, America, and the book claims by 1896 there was still the lofty number of exactly zero reported officially documented flights of aircraft or powered airships, so depending on how you want to look at it, all the following stories are either totally real, or even more obviously false. It‘s certainly a possibility that people in the US simply got excited by all those news about strange flying machines from Europe, where until the Brothers Wright, all early flight experiments took place.
The Wave of Alien Visitations began in November 1896, with reports coming in from California, Canada and Washington State.
Sacramento
The first reported event was in Sacramento, on the evening of November 17: A mysterious light in the heavens was seen. The local news went apeshit. My favorite is the headline which allegedly was „A Wandering Apparition, A Queer Phenomenon“.
As the story always goes, heavy overcast skies on the night of the first sighting prevented anyone from seeing any details. Most therefore only saw a shining light above them, except for a minority also reporting a dark body hanging above the light.
The event repeated on the evening of November 21, at which point most of the citizens of Sacramento came out to view the spectacle. But again, the sky was too cloudy, so no-one could see more than the light. The light soon moved away from Sacramento, and spooked a lot of people as it allegedly turned up in Folsom twenty miles to the west, and later in the night even in the San Francisco Bay area.
The story then got even stranger, as an attorney with the name George D. Collins told the press that one of his clients, a R. L. Lowry, had shown him his secret plans for a totally not bullshit experimental airship and mused that his client must have somehow completed his airship and had been conducting secret test flights. San Francisco newspapers gladly took up and ran with this totally not fake story. For a while, phantom airships was all anyone could think of in California, and Collins eventually had to go into hiding, since a growing number of reporters and total randos kept pestering more and more, until he regretted ever coming up with his bullshit.
But it was already too late, and the Invasion of Phantom Airships had begun, spreading even to Canada eventually.
A growing list of cities, including San Jose and Los Angeles, reported the same mystery light. Always as a bright mystery light in the western sky early in the evening, which to everyone up to date on their astronomy skills tells already one important fact: The invaders came from Venus.
Reports over the exact speed of the phantom airships were all over the place, always very slow (Venusians) or sometimes chaotic and erratic, like some sort of balloon floating in the wind (Balloonians).
In some cases, witnesses also reported a dark body hanging barely visible above the light, described alternatively in airship-sounding terms like “egg-shaped”, “cigar-shaped” or “barrel-shaped”. Or to be more precise, it always looked like a witness imagined an airship to look.
Curiously, just a month before a tree-headed meteorite had very slowly crossed the night sky, and there are at least half a dozen reports that can easily be explained as people getting confused in various ways about the whole thing: You know the drill, people reporting stuff from weeks earlier as happening currently, people misremembering stuff completely, and people suddenly remembering what they’ve seen long ago and reporting it right the fuck now.
The Invaders Are Landing
Besides all that stuff, there are some more reports Ronald D. Story couldn’t as easily dismiss as Venus, Balloons or Meteorites. And here thing get more juicy (or at least more drug-fueled):
Tulare, California: Christmas Elves Clowning Around
“Hundreds” of citizens, oddly all except about 15 too shy to mention their names to any reporters, witnessed a red, white and blue blinking light. This light allegedly dove down towards the ground, before suddenly stopping and going up again, finally blasting off westward. Rudolf Deer, one of the witnesses, claims to have heard bells jingling just before the light moved out of sight.
Tacoma, Washington: Drunk Angel Bender
“A” witness saw a “strange” object hovering above Mount Rainier during the night. It shot out multi-colored beams of light into each direction, like “spokes of a wheel”. The object swayed back and forth, all the while spewing light beams like a drunken angel, for over an hour. It was never seen again.
Rossland, British Columbia: Glowing Light Bulb Zeppelin
This allegedly happened on 12th August 1896. A flying object described as a glowing ball of fire which was surrounded by a halo of “variegated colors”. In about 15 minute, the object approached the town, hovered a moment over a close mountain peak, then circled the city a couple times before buggering off. A lot of people in Rossland saw (allegedly) this happen and where convinced only air ships could explain this phenomenon.
W. A.’s Story
The surely enormously well-known Sacramento Bee published a letter in its issue from November 24 which is one of the earliest times someone tries to connect the air ship invaders with actual extraterrestrial activities. This “W. A.” talked at length about how the UFA (Unidentified Flying Airship) seen above Sacramento could only been a spacecraft from Mars, on an exploratory mission. He then fantasized some more about potential materials used in this imaginary spaceship and theorized e.g. that it must have been powered by some electrical force (instead of coal, I presume) which he then used to explain the “space”crafts appearance as a glowing fireball.
He then further speculated the speed of such an interplanetary visitor must be “a thousand miles per hour”
Creatures of California
Another story surfaced around the same time: Two unknown men told the Stockton newspaper Evening Mail how they totally met three “strange people” they described as very tall, with small delicate hands and large, narrow feet. They were both bald with small ears and a small mouth, and very anime eyes. The men described those weirdos non-clothes as some sort of “silky natural growth”. The two (probably very drunk) men tried to talk to those strangers, but they only got unintelligible guttural warbling back.
IF these visitors on a road near Lodi in California were aliens, their space suits were kind of very basic, as the men further told the Evening Mail the visitors were carrying strange bags slung under their arm, and had to periodically breath through a nozzle attached to the bags. They also carried egg-like flashlights.
This story took a turn for the weird when the warbling maniacs tried to overpower the two Earthlings, but I guess the aliens came from a planet with vastly lower gravity, as they got themselves beaten up instead and had to flee the angry Terrans back to their cigar-shaped airship.
The men could only watch as the visitors jumped Loony Toons style through an access hatch and zoomed away.
Aftermath: Zeppelin 4.0
My source says the “UFO Craze of 1896” officially ended in December, but of course new sightings were reported in February 1897: Mysterious star-like objects careened across the skies and became a dire omen, as a new wave of hysteria, sorry I mean Zeppelin-sightings, swept across the American Midwest.
All this shit I’ve recounted from 1896? No-one gave a rat’s ass in the Midwest and East of the US. But the aliens were deeply disappointed about not being mentioned in Midwestern newspapers and soon more Americans felt their wrath.
(They still felt the need to pester and needle Californians during January-February 1897 of course, probably as revenge for being beaten up. And Delaware saw some surprise visits of airships, 3000 miles away from this action.)
Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan
February and March saw a wave of sightings of “unknown craft” and “mysterious lights” in many areas of Nebraska, but also Kansas. In late March, Michigan added “balls of fire” to the pile of definitely real airships visiting them.
On March 29th, “hundreds” of people in Omaha saw a large, bright light fly over the city, stop for a moment, then disappear towards the northwest. Meanwhile, “thousands” in Kansas City saw a similar event three nights later. In Everest (Kansas too) people claimed the object looked like a “native canoe”, allegedly 25-30 feet in length, and armed with a searchlight using a variety of colors.
Overall, the airships seen during these events were uniformly described as cigar-shaped, metallic and equipped with wings, propellers, fins and other unidentified outcrops. At night, these airships beamed brilliant lights around, revealing dark super-structures as shadows above the lights, but only sometimes! At this point please don’t go out into the night and try to identify dark structures behind a blinding light shining you into the eyes, or you might get eye damage. Also disappointment.
Skeptics, always questing to match drunken idiots in their observations, explained the airship-sightings with “Venus” or more creatively “Alpha Orionis”, which in my mind opens up more questions then it answers. Even if most people probably were not entirely accurate in their descriptions, telling someone who claims to have seen fucking propellers that it’s actually a bright star must be like the meeting of the morons, seriously.
Counterstrike
But the Airships from Mars (now showing in your closest movie theater, go and watch it) soon encountered resistance from vily Earthlings, as jokesters and pranksters used the wave of genuine interest in the nightsky to add their own UFOs to the mix. Tons of homemade balloons of all shapes were set adrift, and when dry spells hit during times when the Martian airships had to go home for refueling, wayward reporters started a competition to see which of them could concoct the stupidest, but most totally true story, by which I mean lie.
The wave of airship encounters continued through April 1897, this time reinforced with lots of colorful embellishments and further, totally made up stories. Now newspapers published ever more outlandish accounts: Airship operators were now seen regularly, and more and more witnesses came forth claiming to have talked with the visitors. Ironically, most of the fake stories involved the “witnesses” (witnesses of too much scotch, maybe
) meeting boringly normal Humans, who basked in the wondering admiration of the conveniently interested in airships people talking to them.
All those encounters of the boring kind went down similar roads: The airship operators were all trying out experimental airships and it had been constructed in secret (Iowa, New York, Tennessee are mentioned as some of the illegal airship construction sites).
Welcome to Earth, Asians!
But of course no all of these nutjobs were completely cursed with barren imaginations. In one notable airship visit, the nutjob was racist instead!
In the case of Judge Lawrence A. Byrne from Texarkana in Arkansas, we have a claimant retelling the touching story of him finding a landed airship crewed by “Orientals”. These three “Beings” spoke among themselves in a “foreign-sounding” language. They beckoned Byrne to come closer, and Byrne, like every protagonist in a horror story, immediately and gleefully entered their airship, leading to a long and detailed description of the machinery inside the craft, but at this point the author of my source ran out of space so you’ll have to imagine Judge Byrne’s adventures among orientals for yourselves. Please don’t.
Santa’s Coming to Texas
Another, appallingly vague case, retells how witnesses in Texas met airship crewmen claiming to be from some unknown region at the North Pole. Which I like to explain as aliens lying their asses off to some dumbasses pestering them during work.
West Virgina: Even More Fraud? I Mean Aliens
The author then has the balls to cite a report allegedly from the same time period, but “re-discovered” in the late 1970s, which takes the whole unreliability issue up to some new, previously undiscovered meta-layer of bullshit.
Anyway, this totally not forged report claims to be about a grounded airship with “Martians” on board.
Loren Gross: The Airships are From Mars, the Crewmen From Venus
Some guy named Loren Gross, who was apparently so important in UFO-reporting the author doesn’t even bother telling us anything about him, refers to a letter published in the Sacramento Bee on November 24, 1896, which calls the visitors “Martians”. I know this is vague, but this author is not very good at this, OK?
The Colony or The Colony Free Press, a Kansas-newspaper, speculated at one point the airships must have been operated by scientists from Mars. Why? I guess you have to go to Kansas, and search all newspaper archives of newspapers called either The Colony or The Colony Free Press to find out because this book seriously doesn’t bother giving more details.
Some other newspapers are mentioned, with added fun for the reader if they realize that just a couple pages ago the author of this book mentioned all those made-up stories and confabulations by excited reporters suddenly showing up in newspapers. They also talk up the possibility of the unidentified airships coming from Mars. Percival Lowell and Camille Flammarion are mentioned in those discussions to support the idea of intelligent life on Mars. The first one is the guy who thought he saw canals on Mars. The second I have never heard of before, and the book just goes “So? Google exists, fucko” on the matter.
Texas
In May 1897 the wave of airship sightings was still ongoing, but slowly petering out, with one last hurrah in Texas in June, with two airships being sighted at once.
This instance then makes the author go on a tangent about sightings in April, back at the height of the wave. It’s not a complete random swerve however, as he uses the double-sighting to point out that in this airship wave at least, sightings of multiple airships were exceedingly rare, but incredibly similar sightings, probably insinuated to be the same airship, often occurred in a wide range in a short amount of time. He cites for example(without any sources of course) ten different towns in Michigan, seven in Illinois, and one each in Iowa and South Dakota on April 15 reporting airship sightings.
I think the idea here being that’s the same airship just passing through at high speed. Anyway, the author then complains about research into the sightings remaining incomplete, as e.g. investigators never quite managed to lay their hands on the newspaper files in several unnamed states. I guess if you want to be an Ufologist, there you go! Show those lazy gits how proper researchers work!
The Rest of the World
There were more airships being seen in the rest of the world, to make it seem like this wasn’t just American hicks getting too deep into the moonshine, which gets kind of torpedoed by the fact the first real airship in Europe flew on the 24th September 1852, so “airship sightings” in 1897 aren’t really anything to get excited about anymore. The author mercifully remembers airships already existing in Europe a page later, making his short list of sightings of the coast of Norway, in Sweden and in Russia kind of pointless, as that could have been any manner of French, British or German machine operating, like an ancient version of modern US spy probes.
The Giffard I launched on September 24, 1852
After that the author goes back to the unexplained airship sightings in the US, were airships did not exist at the time. He brings up complete nonsense speculations from people, like airships from parallel dimensions, because apparently airships not fitting later UFO-sightings means they must be real but also not aliens for some reason? People are so dumb sometimes.
This article was brought to you by Lucius Farish, one of the writers of my source, the fabled The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters from Mammoth Books. Easy to get, I got my edition for like 2 bucks on Kindle. Full of fun stories about UFOs, but not exactly a scientific textbook. It utterly lacks any sources so I guess if you want to know more, you will have to do the research yourself.
Edit: I’ve added exactly one thing that’s not in my source. Can you find my addition?
Edit 2: According to Wikipedia, there actually was a third airship sighting wave in 1909-1913, mostly again from Europe, but this awesome exemplar of a book of course omits this. Scholarship this ain’t. Still, this means this spares us a bunch of more bullshit about those clearly perfectly normal airships being mysterious visitors from another dimension. Ugh. Here, have another awesome sketch to close this post out:_April_13_1897.jpg)
Further conclusions:
Well, I went into this with the explicit wish to see what exactly, a writer of a “Mammoth Encyclopedia” on UFOs would think necessary to include in terms of sources. I of course didn’t expect the total sources of the article on airship sightings to be zero. Hot damn. Good old Lucius seems to fall into what I call the “Talking to Friends”-Syndrome: He talks up a nice story, but brings it to us like he is talking to a group of friends. And when you’re just shooting the shit with your friends, you’re probably not ending every cute anecdote with “See p. 5 in Henry’s Collection of Newspaper Clippings, collected in 1969”. But this really means if you want to know more about the airship craze of the 19th century then what is in this book and Wikipedia, you actually have to go and track down some of those weird papers mentioned above and see what their archives say, which is probably a big ask for the layperson.
Too bad. At least the book is still a fun read, if not exactly a scientific source.
Blue Omen 