Mystery Airship Craze of 1896: Martian, Man Made or Media Hype

 

“There may be visitors from Mars, fearful, at the least, of invading the planet that they have been seeking.”  --St. Louis Post Dispatch April 1897

Gaslights flicker as a soft late Autumn rain descends to the ground in San Francisco California.  It is a few minutes past midnight on November 21, 1896.

Suddenly, at about a thousand feet above ground just beneath the clouds, a bright light begins to move slowly across the sky.  The brightness of the light cuts through the overcast night sky with the intensity of a high powered searchlight.

Trailing slowly behind the bright light is the shadow of an elongated cigar shaped craft.  The craft is moving so deliberately that it almost appears to be suspended, or hovering, in mid-air.  Those awake at this time of night gaze upwards in amazement and perplexity.  People on the ground start to point, murmur and to even gasp in wonder as this strange flying object drifts by over their heads.

No one has ever seen an object like this in flight before.  The year 1896 predates the Wright Brothers invention of powered flight by seven years.  The cigar shaped object continues to move slowly but steadily across the night sky.  

Occasionally, the object will change direction, and more frequently it will change elevation--correspondingly dipping to get a view of the people and landscape below and then rising upwards to avoid church steeples and other tall buildings, but always staying just under the cloud cover.

Some witnesses report hearing voices emanating from the object--strange voices in an unknown language, but authoritative sounding voices as if giving commands.  The object moves steadily across the sky.  Over the next six months the object (or objects) will cross nearly the entire continental United States.  Mysterious flying objects, “airships” as they are dubbed in the newspapers of the time, will be sighted from coast to coast, beginning in California in November of 1896 and ending in Philadelphia and New York in June of 1897.  The airships will be seen by tens of thousands and hundreds will even claim to interact with strange visitors from airships which have either crashed or landed for impromptu repairs or reconnoitering.

History will record this as the Mystery Airship Craze of 1896.  It will come at a time when the only man made objects in the sky are dirigibles and hot air balloons.  The Mystery Airship Craze of 1896 and 1897 creates a media firestorm and causes speculation and conspiracy theory to run wild in the press.  It is history’s first, and to this day perhaps largest, mass UFO sighting.

        Author H.G. Wells begins his 1898 Science Fiction classic “War of the Worlds” by stating that, “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being visited by intelligences greater than man’s.”  But the real truth is that by the end of the 19th century many people believed exactly that.

Most Americans at the time, particularly those who read newspapers on a daily basis, believed that Mars because of its close proximity to earth was in fact almost certainly inhabited by a race of intelligent beings.  This belief in life on Mars was so pervasive in the years leading up to the 20th century that any form of extraterrestrial life was invariably referred to as “Martian”.

Just as Wells’ “War of the Worlds” is a byproduct of the prevalent belief in life on Mars of the time period, it is just as possible that the Mystery Airship Craze of 1896 and 1897 is a byproduct of the same prevalent belief in Martian life as well.

Most witnesses reported the airships as being cigar shaped, and though all claimed that the airships they saw were powered by some form of engine, some even reported having seen a gondola suspended from the ship itself from which Martians supposedly looked down upon the earth resembling a form of extraterrestrial hot air balloon.  

Many of the contemporary visual representations of the time period do portray the mystery airships as craft which resemble dirigibles or elongated hot air balloons, craft which were at least somewhat commonplace in the late 19th century, though unlike the “Mystery Airships” both dirigibles and hot air balloons were rarely flown over urban areas due to obvious safety concerns and difficulty in navigation.  Simply put, the aircraft of the time though somewhat resembling the mystery airships in appearance, could not have maneuvered the way in which the airships were described as maneuvering in first-hand accounts.

It is also worth keeping in mind that the 1890’s were a time of immense experimentation when it came to manned flight.  In fact, one inventor named E.H. Benjamin who was a dentist by trade, claimed that he invented the mystery airships and even released a statement to the press through his attorney, a Mr. George Collins in which he took full credit for having built and operated the mystery airships, but none  of Mr. Benjamin’s claims have ever been verified.

The end of the 19th century, in addition to being a time during which many people believed in the existence of life on Mars, was also a time when just as many people believed that burgeoning technological advancement and invention could surmount almost any challenge--and powered flight was no exception.

Many in the United States after reading about the mystery airships in the papers were so certain that Thomas Edison was behind it all, that Mr. Edison even had to issue a written statement denying any involvement with mystery airships.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Mystery Airship Craze is that it occurred at a time when newspapers were king and when reporters and editors would do anything to sell papers.  Just as today, where sensationalism and controversy can drive clicks on social media, so in 1896 sensational headlines sold newspapers.

It was the news media of the time which first labelled the incidents of airship sightings as a craze or wave.  It was also the press, as the first true form of modern mass communication, which informed Americans that what they were seeing in the sky was a nationwide phenomena, making talk and speculation about the origins of mystery airships that much more widespread and in some cases far-fetched.  

In total there would be upwards of 1200 newspaper articles written about mystery airships in over 400 newspapers across 41 states in a  little over six months.  This level of press coverage, by the communication standards of the time, caused the story of the Mystery Airship Craze, which began as a local story in central California, to go viral almost overnight and may have contributed to the large number of sightings across the United States.  

In many instances the media did play up the Martian angle when it came to the airships and rarely, if ever, gave much space to any other theories regarding the origins of the craft.  The late 1890’s were the era of Yellow Journalism, the same era in which editors and reporters almost single-handedly whipped the nation up into a jingoistic and militaristic frenzy that resulted in the Spanish-American War, so that it should come as no surprise to consider the possibility that those same editors and reporters may have caused many Americans to reach such a panicked and frenzied state regarding a possible invasion by Martians that many people might have begun to see things in the sky that weren’t actually there.

Despite the fact that dirigibles and hot air balloons were real; that many inventors were experimenting with powered flight at the time of the airship craze and that the press played into hysteria over Martian invasion to sell newspapers--there are still many anomalous factors regarding the Mystery Airship Wave of 1896 that are difficult to explain.

Multiple witnesses in Arkansas reported seeing an airship crash and then speaking to five crew members who claimed to be from the Biblical Lost Tribes of Israel.

Citizens of the city of Aurora Texas reported that one of the Mystery Airships crashed on a farm just outside of town and that the wreckage of the craft was covered in hieroglyphic writing.  They also reported having recovered the body of a burnt pilot which was mangled beyond all recognition that they then promptly buried.  This story has many similarities to the one told by residents of Roswell New Mexico in 1947 after a much more famous UFO crash.

Farmers in Kentucky in the spring of 1897 reported the first instance of what people today in the UFO community would refer to as cattle mutilation after mystery airships passed by overhead.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of witnesses in St. Louis reported seeing many beings, like passengers, being transported inside one of the airships in April of 1897.

Given the sheer weight of testimony regarding the Mystery Airship Craze of 1896 and 1897 other worldly paranormal, or Martian explanation cannot just simply be discounted as a fantasy produced by overactive imaginations or mass hysteria.

Waves of Airship sightings would return again to the United States and worldwide.  The United Kingdom would experience its own airship craze of sightings less than a decade later and “phantom” airships would be reported all over the world once again in the years 1909 and 1910.

Whether the Mystery Airship Craze of 1896 and 1897 was man made, Martian or simply a media hoax designed to fuel hysteria is anyone’s guess, but never before or since would so many Americans claim to have seen something so strange across so many states in the sky in such a short period of time.  Perhaps, today, we are more cynical and less inclined to believe what the media tells us than our counterparts of over 100 years ago were, but we also should not believe that technology and invention have all the answers when it comes explaining all the things that we do not understand or surmounting all the challenges that this universe presents