The 1896 Mystery Airship Sightings: A New Twist & Perspective

Truly an awesome thread, and great reading

An interesting item I have often wondered about is how those past "airships" which weren't too far from looking like things that might have been man made, could have been designed to appear that way, so the people that witnessed them would not really know for sure who they were, and would have an element of deniability as to their true origin.

Like a visiting race of actual spacefaring ET's might employ in order to observe things here without too much panic happening. (They don't seem to do that now though), Although I am sure there were also reports of craft that were not as easy to debunk as being man made balloons or zeppelins back then, but still, I like the idea that if visitors knew about us by very advanced remote observation, or whatever, and decided a closer look would require them to make ships close in appearance to an "airship" like a lighter than air zeppelin or something, it's an interesting theory to ponder over..

In order to reduce the perceived consequences of earth people seeing their usual craft which might have been truly frightening or more so than just seeing some fast airships.. Anyway, it's just a possibility they came here prepared to not look to scary to the natives.

There is also the history going much further back about lights and things on the moon, so maybe they built some advanced reconnaissance craft there, with their idea of a disguise to look the way they did, but as that one official back then mentioned, they were still very fast moving, so all things aside, still quite an intriguing mystery to be sure.

Nice thread Jeep3r!

originally posted by: stormcell
I've read about those stories too, and some reports said that the airship looked like it was made of canvas painted with tar, and had a railway carriage underneath.

If you were wanting to build an airship quickly, then using the resources of a railway yard would seem the best bet. You'd have old railway carriages that would make good passenger compartments, access to workshops that could be used as as hangars. There would be scraps of old metal and tar that could be used to make surfaces airtight.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin seems to be the most likely candidate:

en.wikipedia.org...

The dates around 1894 and 1896 seem to be relevant, with the patents for the "airship-train".

Quite!

The reports were of slight movements and gave the impression of gentle motions.... Not the sudden and completely unbelievable physics defying movements that have been observed in genuine reports of today.

Peace,

Korg.

a reply to: Korg Trinity

Well since you're quoting wikipedia and if you really believe airships were being built in the US at that time then obviously the wikipedia airship history page needs a complete update.

originally posted by: chunder
a reply to: Korg Trinity

Well since you're quoting wikipedia and if you really believe airships were being built in the US at that time then obviously the wikipedia airship history page needs a complete update.

Seeing as you don't research beyond a single Google search this might help....

A Very Brief History of Airships

Returning to Europe, Zeppelin further observed the use of balloons during the Siege of Paris, and, after seeing reports of the La France, he was convinced of the need for a German ship to counter the French.

So he petitioned the King of Württemberg for development support and worked fulltime with engineers to develop and refine his concept.

The result? The Luftschiff Zeppelin 1, or LZ 1, was launched before twelve thousand spectators on the banks of the Bodensee at 8 p.m. on the second of July, 1900. The Count himself was at the controls.

This was the result...



If you look at the sketch you can see the shape is very similar also.

Full Frontpage & Articles


Korg.

a reply to: jeep3r Red and green lights are indicative of modern lights used on wing tips so anyone viewing a craft can determine it's direction of travel. White and red flashing lights are used as anti collision lights. Seems that maybe they were visited by future human time travelers as I doubt aliens would adapt our exact same color choices for aircraft lighting. Also if human time travelers had their lights on then they certainly wanted to be noticed which presents an entirely new thing to consider. They would have no reason to use warning lights back in 100 unless they wanted to get attention.

One of the base assumptions with the UFO debate that I believe throws many, many people off is the idea that Aliens/ET's are somehow "visiting" earth when, in fact, if they exist at all, it is far, far more likely that they have been here perhaps even longer than humans have. When you think of how quickly we went from horse drawn carriages to walking on the moon (less than 100 years) It's obvious that technology leaps can happen really, really fast. Perhaps a past earth civilization had a highly secret, compartmentalized tech group that made the same leap but did it in a way to cause a lot less attention than what we see in our modern era? Maybe they broke away, decided to keep a low profile and just kinda run the planet with their far superior technology? Or, maybe there are many, many layers of management in the universe and earth was mapped and put on the radar of advanced civilizations a billion years ago? The idea that they just showed up recently is kinda ludicrous, when you think about it. If they're here at all, chances are "they've" been here a long, long time.

a reply to: jeep3r

Thanks, I appreciate that. He is the one who has credentials that even today we should be able to confirm he existed. The others I can find no information on, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. However, if it turns out that this was another story from the mid to late 1800's of papers jut trying to sell and running with tabloid material...

It was a common practice back then. People didn't have the means to check the authenticity of stories either.

history.state.gov...

Germans, Secret Inventors or Hot Air?

The great 'scareship' wave of 1909

















Interesting article from the Fortean times which concentrates on New Zealand

www.forteantimes.com...


It seems that the sightings spread slowly from the South Island to the North then abruptly ended.

By July (1909) it was New Zealand’s turn. Over a two-month period, hundreds of New Zealanders saw strange lights which appeared to be attached to a dark cigar shape. There were also some daylight sightings of a cigar-shaped airship. The sightings started at the base of the South Island and eventually spread 1,750km to Dargaville, near the tip of the North Island, before suddenly stopping........

At 2am on 28 July, Mr McNeill, a Dunedin resident, was woken by a frightful noise that passed over his house. He hurried outside and saw a bright aerial searchlight at the base of which was a black body.....

On 27 July, about 10am, Allan Mitchell and Alex Rich had been working near the mouth of the Pomahaka River when they saw, at a distance of roughly 4km, an airship as it dipped up and down in the sky. It was distinctly boat-shaped and appeared to have a long pole on top.........

Once again the Germans were blamed or seemingly a 'secret' inventor. However the known German airships were incapable of getting from Germany to the Southern Hemisphere.

Aside from light-hearted suggestions that Martians were visiting, the main theories were that the airship was flown either by German spies or a secret New Zealand inventor....

There is also an analysis of the sightings.

analysis showed that 63 per cent of reports were made by three or more witnesses (making fraud less likely); 70 per cent were of nocturnal lights, 13 per cent of nocturnal objects, and 17 per cent of daylight objects. [19] New Zealand had a higher percentage of good daylight reports than similar waves in the USA (1897 and 1909), Canada (1909), and Great Britain (1909 and 1913). These are the hardest to explain, as meteors, planets, stars, and fire balloons can be ruled out.

The final conclusion being that some of these airships were genuine UFOs (i.e unidentified objects not alien spacecraft).

So even though the sightings across Britain, Australia and New Zealand in 1909 were a good decade after the first US sightings reported, people were seeing something in their skies. It would be a stretch to believe it was mass hysteria although some sightings are almost certainly mistaken observations.

Could there have been a number of independent efforts to build an airship in various nations? It's plausible as the British were concerned as early as the Boer War that air power may well be used in a future war.

Or maybe something else was going on?

a reply to: mirageman

The New Zealand stories authenticity has always been questioned as no local NZ papers have the reports in their archives. If you can find those archives then that's awesome, but it seems the NZ reports were Yellow Journalism by UK prints.

What a lot of people need to realize when it comes to articles from the 1800's and early 1900's (the peak was the 1890's) is that many of these papers printed flat out false stories which had no grounding in reality. It was meant for entertainment. This is easily researched; Simply Google "Yellow Journalism".

en.wikipedia.org...

Clark writes that attempts to "uncover the truth about the late 19th century airship scare comes up against some unhappy realities: newspaper coverage was unreliable; no independent investigators ('airshipologists') spoke directly with alleged witnesses or attempted to verify or debunk their testimony; and, with a single unsatisfactory exception, no eyewitness was ever interviewed even in the 1950s, when some were presumably still living."(Clark 1998, 37)

a reply to: jeep3r

I have attempted on my own to verify he existed and found this reference that says he was the president of faculty from 1907-1909.

cdnc.ucr.edu...

And that he was Dean of Students in 1898.

books.google.com... KBqojUD7tY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KxKFU4-2HMmhogTAq4KQCw&ved=0CFAQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=Dr%20M.S.%20Cross%20university%20of%20the%20pacific&f=false

So it seems he was a real person. I am now adding this article to my "probably legit" list of modern UFO sightings

Chances are it was one of the air ships that were becoming common during that era though.

originally posted by: mirageman
a reply to: TDawg61

You aren't wrong the Aurora Crash was covered in the History Channel's Texas Roswell

And also UFO Hunters

It's amazing how the media carries on a 117 year old hoax... The man who published the story admits he made it up, well known historians in the area know it's a hoax, so many are on record know it's hoax... yet everyone believes this story?

Has anyone tried placing all these reports on a map of the planet according to date? If journalists were making up these stories to take the piss out of the original author, then there would be all sorts of clusters of reports going in all directions. If they were genuine, a flight path would appear.

I remember seeing the Orange blimp (large orange airship) above Edinburgh during the Festival, and bizarrely, also on the ground beside a reservoir. I could only imagine what people would have thought 130 years ago if they had seen that sight.

That looks like one of those planes carrying advertising banners.

a reply to: ionwind

I think there are a couple of very important things to consider. The first is that these types of sightings predate balloons or blimps or airships of any kind. And second, these types of sightings occurred before people were introduced to the idea of aliens in association with flying craft, lights in the sky, etc...That was still decades away. I bring this up because some claim that peoples' imaginations are creating these sightings, or making them out to be something they are not.

Notice how many of these reports do not mention aliens? They were doing their best to explain things with what technologies they had at the time, yet they were unable to do so. Even the idea of secret government projects to explain modern reports fails to account for these earlier reports. There is absolutely no way the military of that time could have craft behaving in the manners that are described, especially considering the first heavier than air craft had yet to fly, as you pointed out.

I will not come out and say these were alien craft, but eyewitness testimony tells us that there was a physical object in the sky, and if man had no objects in the sky at that time which could travel at anything approaching a high rate of speed, much less make pinpoint turns, then what other explanation is there? I suppose someone could say they are seeing refracted light from somewhere else, but there are reports from before the electric light was even invented. And this also fails to account for the reports in which multiple eyewitnesses clearly saw a physical object, not just a light in the sky.

I have never said I believed in aliens visiting earth, but when you come right down to it, it is the simplest explanation for the sheer number of sighting reports and what those reports describe. Especially if you include older reports like this one. And I also agree with the person who said people of earlier times were more intelligent and observant than many of the people today. People were not engrossed in technology like we are today. They actually did normal stuff, things lost on the modern generations, and I would imagine they also spent a lot more time sitting outside where they could see something.

originally posted by: raymundoko
a reply to: jeep3r

I have attempted on my own to verify he existed and found this reference that says he was the president of faculty from 1907-1909. And that he was Dean of Students in 1898. So it seems he was a real person. I am now adding this article to my "probably legit" list of modern UFO sightings.

Thanks for doing some research on your own, raymundoko, that's much appreciated. But I also found some sources pointing to M.S. Cross having been around before and after the event, incl. his affiliation with the University of the Pacific. The article below dates back to 29 July 1896:

Article Source

And here's another confirmation of his presidency from 1906-1907:
Article Source

The sources seem to be legit and there have been occasional reports about M.S. Cross (related to academic affairs) even up to 10+ years after the airship sightings. I think this shows that our primary source has indeed been a person of public reputation, at least at the university itself and perhaps even throughout the state of California.

originally posted by: JiggyPotamus
I think there are a couple of very important things to consider. The first is that these types of sightings predate balloons or blimps or airships of any kind.

Absolutle and total rubbish!!

A Very Brief History of Airships

As early as 1783, the Montgolfier brothers caused a huge sensation throughout the civilized world when, before a crowd including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, they heated the air inside an envelope of alum-varnished taffeta and launched a sheep, a duck and a rooster on an eight minute, two mile flight across the royal palace of Versailles, the first flight ever to carry a living creature. The Montgolfiers, subsequently, were rewarded for their efforts with elevation to the nobility, and standard hot air balloons are to this day known as Montgolfiers.

Geeze people... please please please educate yourselves before sprouting nonsense.

Korg.

a reply to: Korg Trinity

I think JiggyPotamus meant that these kinds of sightings (or similar observations) already took place in the remote past, long before the first balloons were built. Ancient UFO reports, so to speak ... in that regard, I fully agree with what he said.

originally posted by: jeep3r
a reply to: Korg Trinity

I think JiggyPotamus meant that these kinds of sightings (or similar observations) already took place in the remote past, long before the first balloons were built. Ancient UFO reports, so to speak ... in that regard, I fully agree with what he said.

Examples please??

I think seriously we need to take it case by case. I am willing to bet that there is an explanation that is scientific for each of them.

Peace,

Korg.

a reply to: Korg Trinity

My favorite example is Ezekiel's report about an aerial phenomenon in the skies, dating back to 592 B.C. Also see here for more details. But I'll get back to you with even more examples in a separate post later on.

originally posted by: jeep3r
First off, the 1890s wave of mystery airships over the U.S. never quite convinced me that something extraordinary was going on back then that couldn't be explained by early airborne vehicles of the time (eg. ballons, blimps or experimental craft).



Witness Testimony by Mr Hooson:

Now here's a description that really rang a bell with me: electrical white light (as reported by many other witnesses) suddenly turns into red and green lights emitted by the craft. This is not only a 100% match with many UFO reports f
So, is this just another episode of misunderstood technology or something more intriguing? You be the judge ... !

what I read is that these "points of light in the night skies"

were very much like Stars or Street lamps t a distance... that is the nearest connection between the 1890s time and the present sightings in 2014



the other thing that's shared between the two eras is the Mistakes in explainations....
I note that the "News Snip" you presented us said the white light turned either red-or-blue as if a colored lens were suddenly put in front of the projected light source

~but you went into a long explaination that modern UFO sighting still have those red-&-green lights associated with them...you engaged in a long winded mis-explaination linking red-&-blue lights with modern red-&-green lights



see-- Imaginations running wild.... seems the single valid link between 1890s-2014 sightings


thanks