| The Great Airships | |
The story of the Great Airships reads like a Jules Verne novel.
You expect to find Captain Nemo or Robur the Conqueror
piloting the airship.
According to a FATE magazine article, rumors of airships go back to
the California Gold Rush in 1848. As news of the gold discovered at
Sutter's Mill spread across the country, people rushed to get to
California to stake a claim. Transportation from "Back East" to the
west coast was slow, mostly horses and wagons. The transcontinental
railroad wouldn't be completed for twenty more years. There was no
Panama Canal yet, so sailing involved going around South America.
Anyone who could have come up with a quick method of transport would
have made a fortune.
One company, "R. Porter & Company," of New York City,
advertised something that it could not deliver - an airship.
In the latter part of 1848 the company distributed an
advertising flyer in the eastern United States touting "THE BEST
ROUTE TO THE CALIFORNIA GOLD!". The company said it hoped to
begin making flights from New York to California around April 1,
1849, and that the round trip would take only seven days.
They were a bit premature. It would be over thirty years
before the first practical, steerable airship was invented in
Europe, and commercial airship travel would not begin until the
turn of the century. The first American dirigible was tested by
Roy Knabenshue in 1904, and that fact serves to make the Great
Airship sightings of 1897 even more unusual.
The sightings actually began in late 1896 in California.
From The Sacramento Bee, November 18, 1896:
There were quite a few sightings in late 1896 up and down
Northern and Central California, and stories about a man named
Benjamin who had invented the craft, but all of this amounted to
little more than hearsay and rumors.
The real wave of sightings began in the Midwestern U.S. in
March of 1897. The first major sighting of that year, mentioned
in Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee, was at Sioux City,
Iowa on March 26, 1897, where a man named Robert Hibbard was
supposedly caught by an anchor dropped from an airship and dragged
thirty feet or so. If the records are to be believed, there were
nearly a hundred sightings of airships in the United States in
1896-1897, most of them in the Midwest.
In at least three of these sightings, the occupants are
described as a young woman, a young man, and an older man with a
long beard. They supposedly subsisted on pigeons, which they
netted from the deck of the airship, and occasionally landed for
water and a change in diet.
The climax of these sightings seems to have occurred in
Aurora, Texas, on April 17, 1897, when an airship supposedly hit
a windmill, exploded, and killed its occupant. The occupant,
called a "Martian", was said to have been buried in the local
cemetery.
Were the Great Airship sightings real? You'll have to decide
for yourself. If one plots all of the reported sightings on a map
by date and location, he will found that either some of them must have
been hoaxes, or else there must have been not one, but several airships
flying around the U.S. in 1897. The sightings are widely regarded as having
been invented and propagated by imaginative newspaper writers
throughout the Midwestern U.S.
...the object was huge and cigar-shaped and had four large
wings attached to an aluminum body.
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