THE AIRSHIP WAVE OF 1896-1897
Robur the Conqueror is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne, published in 1886. It is also known as The Clipper of the Clouds. It has a sequel, Master of the World, which was published in 1904.
Film
The story was adapted into a 1961 film, Master of the World, with Vincent Price as Robur. The film kept the basic concept but added elements of intrigue and a romance to the plot.
In this version, Robur is an idealist who plans to conquer the world in order to put an end to tyranny and war. Using the Albatross he plans to bomb the nations of the world until he is acknowledged its ruler. (In contrast, the novel’s Robur has no such aims, and bombs only one ground target: an African coronation where a mass human sacrifice is about to take place.)
The Airship Wave Of 1896-1897
Mystery airships or phantom airships are a class of unidentified flying objects best known from a series of newspaper reports originating in the western United States and spreading east during late 1896 and early 1897.
According to researcher Jerome Clark, airship sightings were reported worldwide during the 1880s and 1890s.
Mystery airship reports are seen as a cultural predecessor to modern claims of extraterrestrial-piloted flying saucer-style UFOs. Typical airship reports involved night time sightings of unidentified lights, but more detailed accounts reported ships comparable to a dirigible.
Reports of the alleged crewmen and pilots usually described them as human-looking, although sometimes the crew claimed to be from Mars.
It was popularly believed that the mystery airships were the product of some inventor or genius who was not ready to make knowledge of his creation public.
For example, Thomas Edison was so widely speculated to be the mind behind the alleged airships that in 1897 he “was forced to issue a strongly worded statement” denying his responsibility.
Human Airships
Some argued that the airship reports were genuine accounts. Steerable airships had been publicly flown in the U.S. since the Aereon in 1863, and numerous inventors were working on airship and aircraft designs (the idea that a secretive inventor might have developed a viable craft with advanced capabilities was the focus of Jules Verne‘s 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror).
In fact, two French Army officers and engineers, Arthur Krebs and Charles Renard, had successfully flown in an electric-powered airship called La France as early as 1884, making no fewer than seven successful flights in the craft over an eleven-month period.
Also during the 1896–97 period, David Schwarz built an aluminum-skinned airship in Germany that successfully flew over Tempelhof Field before being irreparably damaged during a hard landing.
Both events clearly demonstrated that the technology to build a practical airship existed during the period in question, though if reports of the capabilities of the California and Midwest airship sighted in 1896–97 are true, it would have been considerably more advanced than any airship built up to that time.
Other Cases
Before 1896
Charles Fort cited a mystery airship sighting in Copiapo, Chile. It was described as a gigantic, shining bird driven by a noisy motor.
In a variation of the usual airship, on July 29, 1880 two witnesses in Louisville, Kentucky saw a flying object described as “a man surrounded by machinery which he seemed to be working with his hands” with wings protruding from his back. Merely a month later, a similar sighting happened in New Jersey. It was written at the New York Times that “it was apparently a man with bat’s wings and improved frog’s legs… the monster waved his wings in answer to the whistle of a locomotive.”
1887 wave
Several unusual aerial events were reported from the East Coast of the U.S. in 1887.
1909–1913
There was a series of mystery airship sightings in 1909 in New England, New Zealand and various European locations. Later reports came from the United Kingdom in 1912 and 1913. However, by this time airship technology was well advanced (Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had been flying his massive passenger-carrying airships for nearly a decade by then), making the prospect that these may have been small, private airships rather than evidence of extraterrestrial visitation or newspaper hoaxes more reasonable.
Wallace Tillinghast, a Massachusetts businessman, gained notoriety for claims he was responsible for the 1909 wave due to an airship he had built, but his claims were never substantiated.
The 1890’s Airship Mystery
A Case for a Secret Aeronautics Group in Post Civil War America with International Connections
The reports of mysterious airships were widespread and well documented, but disappeared quickly.
While some dismiss it as hoax, misidentification, or mass hysteria others have gone so far as to speculate extra-dimensional ultra terrestrials.
Some of the stories were pretty bizarre with the occupants allegedly telling the eyewitnesses they were from Mars.
Of course, others have speculated that these were in fact secret prototypes of advanced (for the time) air craft.
This is the most logical speculation and it turns out it has a fairly convincing amount of evidence that can not only lead down a very interesting rabbit hole, but may be an important example of just how far back the trend of secrecy around the topic of aeronautics goes as well as the confusion of it with mass hysteria or aliens.
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