The Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909 and the Mystery of Wallace E. Tillinghast and his Incredible Flying Machine
The evening of December 22, 1909 was clear but definitely cold enough to snow as temperatures dipped well below freezing once the sun set that afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Worcester at the end of the first decade of the 20th century despite being known as a statewide transportation hub, and the largest city in central Massachusetts, was still predominantly a walking city. Some automobiles had already begun to clog the newly paved streets of the city and illuminate passersby with their headlights on the night of December 22, 1909 but as workers rushed home from factories and offices and headed out to the shops in Worcester’s busy downtown to buy last minute Christmas gifts for their kids, the majority of them still travelled by foot and the sidewalks that night were packed with pedestrians.
At exactly 6:45 just as the holiday shopping crowd was at its peak on that cold winter’s night in Worcester, over a thousand of the city’s inhabitants looked up in the nighttime sky and witnessed an unexplained aerial phenomena so unusual, and so spell-binding, that it made front page headlines the very next day in the nation’s largest newspaper--The New York Times.
In blaring bold faced headlines the front page article in the next day’s New York Times stated, “The mysterious craft made its appearance over the city about 6:45 o’clock tonight, sailed about in circles and was seen by more than 1500 people…during much of the time the airship was near the city the aviator was sweeping the earth and skies with a powerful searchlight.”
What would become known to history as “The Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909” and what would be, before it was all over, one of the twentieth century’s most sensational news stories, began on that cold December night in the relatively small city of Worcester, Massachusetts. Before it ended, or rather simply subsided and faded from the headlines in February of 1910, hundreds of thousands of people--including many celebrities such as famed novelist H.P. Lovecraft--all over the northeastern United States would claim to have seen strange lights and large flying craft dubbed “airships” at the time flying over their heads in the nighttime sky from Maine all the way to New Jersey. Soon, the sighting craze would spread across the Atlantic and sightings of mysterious lights in the sky and flying airships would be reported all across Great Britain and France and even as far away as Russia and Brazil.
During the peak of worldwide sightings one man from Worcester, Massachusetts, would come forward and claim responsibility for the entire thing and what the press had, at first, eagerly reported as perhaps an otherworldly phenomena, instantly became a supposed worldwide hoax of unimaginable proportions.
That man’s name was Wallace E. Tillinghast. Tillinghast was born in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1870’s to a respectable New England family of some wealth. In his thirties he took a position as the Vice President of a manufacturing company and moved himself and his family to Worcester, Massachusetts. It was while living in Worcester, less than six full years after Orville and Wilbur Wright had achieved self-propelled powered flight by inventing their Wright Flyer I and successfully flying it over the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for twelve seconds in December of 1903 that Tillinghast supposedly began to take an interest in becoming an aviator and dabbled in creating his own “heavier than air” flying craft.
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| Wallace E. Tillinghast newspaper depiction 1910 |
And although Tillinghast would claim responsibility for “The Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909”--his Wikipedia page states that, “Wallace Tillinghast was a Worcester, Massachusetts businessman and the originator of an airplane hoax in the early 1900s,” even today, well over 115 years later, both primary and secondary sources can’t seem to agree on whether or not the supposed “Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909” was even a hoax at all--or was it something more real? Something like a mass hysteria that first gripped New England and then thanks to a voracious press and avid reading public obsessed with flight at that time spread to the entire world? Or was it, even, something more otherworldly?
Interestingly enough, before it ran the sensational article about the unexplained aerial phenomena witnessed by crowds of pedestrians in Worcester on the night of December 22, 1909 the New York Times, and other newspapers across New England had run a much smaller article ten days early on December 12, 1909 (perhaps paid for as a publicity stunt by Tillinghast himself) which ran:
“Wallace E. Tillinghast, a well-to-do citizen and Vice President of a Worcester, Massachusetts manufacturing company declares that he has successfully invented, built and tested an aeroplane capable of carrying three passengers and in which he says he has flown from his station near Worcester to New York City , thence to Boston and back again, a distance of 300 miles at a speed of 120 miles an hour at various times.”
Although Tillinghast claimed to have flown his craft at least ten days prior to the start of the airship sighting craze on December 22, 1909--no one reported (as far as we know) seeing his flying craft in New York City, Boston or Worcester on the 12th. No one ever came forward claiming to be one of the three passengers on his strange flying invention, no one knows where he took off from or where he landed, and most importantly, even after Wallace Tillinghast came forward as the perpetrator of the “Great Airship Hoax” he never showed anyone the flying craft that he used nor was he ever able to tell anyone what had happened to it.
Did Wallace E. Tillinghast invent an airplane in 1909 that was decades ahead of its time? Or was he simply an opportunist seeking fame and attempting to cash in on the mystery behind a truly unknown aerial phenomena that occurred in the skies above the eastern U.S. seaboard in late 1909 and early 1910?
In order to attempt to answer that question it's important for us to travel back 115 years and examine the newborn state of aviation at that time. As stated before, December of 1909 was only a short six years removed from December of 1903 when Orville and Wilbur Wright, in their Wright Flyer I made the first manned flight in a heavier than air craft by flying for a distance of just over 850 ft in their 12 horsepower engine biplane.
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| Iconic Flight of the Wright Flyer December 17, 1903 |
Of course, by December of 1909 when Wallace Tillinghast first made his outlandish claims and when the mystery airship craze began in the skies above Worcester aviation had definitely come a long way, but it really hadn’t come all that far.
In January 1909 the first monoplanes had made their appearance and then in July of that year the greatest achievement in engine powered flight in history to date occurred when a French aviator named Louis Bleriot successfully flew in an aircraft across the English Channel, a distance of 26 miles, a then world’s record. Only two weeks after crossing the channel Bleriot made his way into the record books yet again when the French flyer became the first aviator to fly an aircraft that carried a passenger. So, although aviation technology here on earth was steadily progressing by the end of 1909--airplanes were still light years away from being able to fly on journey’s of 400 plus miles and carry multiple passengers as Wallace Tillinghast claimed.
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| Louis Bleriot July 1909 |
Most people in the United States and Europe at that time would have been familiar with zeppelin technology through newspaper reports and pictures in magazines though, most likely, the vast majority of Americans probably had never actually seen a zeppelin in flight. There’s also a far less likely chance that Wallace Tillinghast himself built and piloted a large dirigible craft but there is no evidence whatsoever to support that theory.
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| Zeppelin in flight ca. 1910 |
After the initial reports from Worcester in December 1909 thousands of mystery airship sightings began to occur across the eastern United States. Eventually, most people in the New England states, after reading his claims in the newspaper, began to believe that what they were in fact seeing in the nighttime skies were Tillinghast’s airships, though it should be noted that many astronomers at the time believed that people were misidentifying the planet Venus, or witnessing some other celestial phenomenon that could be explained by science, which is why sightings of so-called “Mystery Airships” seemed to have abruptly stopped (or at least abruptly stopped being reported in the newspaper) in February of 1910. Even during the Edwardian Era national and international news cycles didn’t have the longest attention spans.
What is most remarkable about the Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909 and 1910 is how it simply faded away and then disappeared from the public consciousness. Wallace E. Tillinghast claimed that he had perpetrated the whole thing, but he never produced any evidence to substantiate his claims, and the media despite over a thousand claims of “Mystery Airship” sightings eventually accused Tillinghast of being a charlatan and decided that the citizens of the eastern United States must have been mistaken about the heavier than air craft with searchlights that they had seen in the nighttime sky and had simply misidentified either the planet Venus, stars or dirigibles as supposed “airships”.
On Christmas Eve 1909 a member of the United States Immigration service named Arthur Hoe who was tasked with monitoring the coastline off Providence, Rhode Island, claimed to have seen strange lights in the sky and an object that moved at an incredible rate of speed. When this was reported in the press, Tillinghast claimed that what members of the United States Immigration Service had witnessed were lights from his aircraft which was then supposedly flying from Maine to New York City.
In the new year of 1910, Wallace E. Tillinghast claimed that he would bring his aircraft to compete in the Harvard Aviation Meet to be held that September in Boston and that he would put his strange aircraft, which was capable of remarkable feats of speed and distance on display for all the public to see. America waited for the appearance of Wallace E. Tillinghast’s Mystery Airship at the Harvard Aviation Meet, but despite his claims in the press, Tillinghast and his aircraft never showed up.
No one ever saw Wallace E. Tillinghast’s “Mystery Airship”. Tillinghast died in the summer of 1932 in a hospital bed in Providence, Rhode Island, years after the Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909 had faded from everyone’s memory and the whole begs the question--If Wallace E. Tillinghast was indeed a fraud, what then did people see in the nighttime sky during “The Great New England Airship Hoax of 1909”?
For more information on the life and “Mystery Airship Hoax” of Wallace E. Tillinghast check out this fascinating article from 2023 written by Kelly Sullivan and published in The Warwick Beacon
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