The 1896 Mystery Airship Sightings: A New Twist & Perspective

Of relevance is IsaacKoi's recent excellent thread and in particular this thesis as section 1 gives a good review of the airship sightings and provides some valuable references.

According to that there was a picture in circulation taken of an alleged airship and when I get some time will see if I can track down.

a reply to: mirageman

Thanks for those, interesting read. Never knew they had 'model' airplanes flying around like that, although just what is meant by model I dont know.

You'd think there would be a indication of noise in the sightings, but seems to not have any mention of a sound.

You are 1000% wrong and apparently can't read:

After the announcement pilots could fly the F-117 during daytime

I understand you want to have wrong information so you can believe in aliens though, people like you love them aliens.

a reply to: chunder

a reply to: raymundoko

I would have graciously accepted the fact I was wrong if you hadn't made the stupid comment about aliens.

a reply to: raymundoko

Yes, I understand and appreciate your reply. I was, however, speaking in a different context...a different time and mindset where the difficulties of conducting this type of first-time experimental flights at night would seem to outweigh the benefits, in a time where communication and photography were quite limited.

Again, I appreciate the reply, but still am skeptical.

all reply to: FlyingFox

Incorrect. Especially back then test flights of potentially militarized craft were conflducted at night to prevent spying. This is why pilots had to be able to fly based off the position of the moon and stars.

In fact, the military air ships of the early 1900's were INTENDEDED to fly at night and that's how their pilots were trained. They were too easy of a target for small arms fire that they couldn't be effective during the day.

en.m.wikipedia.org...


Also, there was a race to patten the designs, so you didn't want to prance them around in broad daylight...

Alright then.

a reply to: chunder

I believe the etching reproduced here is supposed to be a copy of the photograph in question.

Either way excellent really in depth article on the sightings.

> 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).

There were no blimps back then, and what other experimental aircraft could there be?

However, what is never mentioned is the 1890s were the height of the penny press that literally just made up sensational stories to sell papers. And one paper often picked up what another paper invented. There were no journalistic standards back then, and almost no legislation. Much of what was written in the papers, not just about airships but anything, is not reliable.

the 1896 1897 wave in fact presents some 1898 cases


The true northerner., November 30, 1898

in fact there are cases in 1896 1897 1899 1900 1904 and 1909 too ... hte english waves take place in 1903 and 1909, the new zealand one in 1909 etc

an example from 1909

That Aurora Texas crash with PILOT was reported in their paper with a judge and school teachers and editor and mayor.....all swearing truth to the deal according to that movie.....Idk, but I went there in 81 before the grave by the tree all by itself disappeared.....went back in 92 and it was different...nothing by that tree