Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

In the last post, I brought together all the sightings of the October 22 1896 Meteor I could find, and was able to conclude that they were all indeed sightings of an unusual meteor (rather than of a mystery airship). So… what remains? What was the first actual sighting of the 1896 California Airship Flap?

Daniel Cohen’s extra sightings

Cohen adds some early extra sightings that weren’t in Loren E. Gross’ book, that I thought need checking out. For example, Cohen reports (p.9) that “in the last week of October [1896], C. T. Musson, a fruit rancher from Placer County, California, also reported three lights in the sky. He estimated that they were moving at about 100 miles an hour, and were the “prettiest sight” he had ever seen.“

After a few searches, I found the original story in the San Francisco Call of 25 November 1896 p.2:

Sighted Triple Lights

A Rapid Aerial Traveler Observed in Placer County

BOWMAN, Placer County, Cal., Nov. 24 – The articles published in THE CALL and other papers in reference to the observed mystical aerial traveler have aroused great interest here. Several persons in this locality have been favored with a view of the strange visitor.

C. T. Musso, a fruit rancher, and several members of his family affirm that about four weeks ago and shortly after dark they saw a singular sight, which they are now convinced could have been nothing else than the much-discussed airship. Mr. Musso says he saw the “prettiest sight that his eyes ever viewed.” It appeared to be three very bright lights moving horizontally and easterly at a rate of perhaps 100 miles an hour.

A. H. Thompson, a painter, states that about the same time he saw a similar sight, which he describes as being three very bright and large lights appearing about eight feet apart, and the forward one as being larger and brighter then the rest, and moving horizontally eastward rapidly and gracefully.

Professor S. D. Musso states that about two weeks ago he and his wife saw a similar sight moving in the same direction and with about the same velocity. He feels quite confident that it was not a meteor, as there were three lights appearing about seven feet from each other in a direct line, the forward one being larger than the other two. The light, he states, was different from meteoric light, the velocity was too slow for a meteor, and it was traveling horizontally as long as was seen, which was for several minutes.

Cohen also briefly mentions (p.9) a sighting from around this earlier time by “a young San Francisco woman named Hegstrom”. Again, I eventually found the original report in the Record-Union of 23 November 1896, p.4:

Miss Hagstrom, who resides on Telegraph avenue, saw the same object about six weeks ago. The feature that impressed her most was the bright light which she distinctly saw. On returning home she told her brother of what she had seen, but nothing more was thought of it until she read recently that a similar object had been seen in another part of the state.

So, replacing Musson/Hegstrom with Musso/Hagstrom, I feel reasonably confident that both were in fact sightings of the October 22 meteor, rather than first sightings of the mystery airship. I’m also reasonably sure that Cohen was relying on a type-written (and probably somewhat faded) list of sightings.

“A Hunter named Jordan”

Our final pre-Sacramento sighting appears in Cohen (p.9): “One of the most astonishing tales was attributed to a hunter named Jordan, who said that he and some friends had tracked a wounded deer to a remote part of Tamalp[a]is Mountain northwest of San Francisco. There in a clearing he came upon a hidden workshop, and in it were six men working over a strange-looking vehicle.“

Gross’ book on Charles Fort tells this same story (but without giving a source) (p.7): “For example, a hunter claimed he had come across the airship and its inventors while walking through the woods in Marin County. The inventors were quite ordinary people he asserted.“

Once again, diligent searching revealed the full story as recounted in a letter published in The San Francisco Call, 23 Nov 1896, p.2, right at the zenith of Californian mystery airship mania:

OTHERS WHO SAW IT

Stories that Corroborate the Fact of the Invention

The following letter from San Rafael explains a phase of the story that has not yet come to light:

SAN RAFAEL, Nov. 22, 1896

Editor Call: The mysterious light mentioned in your valuable paper this morning as seen by several citizens in different parts of the State, and which seems to mystify yourself as well as your readers, is nothing more than an airship, and of this fact I am perfectly cognizant. I think now that I am released of my obligation of secrecy, which I have kept for nearly three months, as the experiment in aerial navigation is a fixed fact and the public or a few of the public at least have seen its workings in the air.

In the latter part of last August I was hunting in the Tamalpais range of mountains, between the high peak and Bolinas Bay. I wounded a deer, and in chasing it I ran onto a circular brushpile about ten feet in height in a part of the mountain seldom visited even by hunters.

I was somewhat astonished, and my curiosity prompted me to approach it, when I encountered a man who sang out: “What are you doing here and what do you want?” I replied that “I had wounded a deer and was chasing it.” He said “that they had been camping here for a month or so and had not seen a deer, but if you think your deer is in the neighborhood I will assist you in finding it as we need a little meat in camp.” This man went with me and in less than 500 yards found my deer. We carried it into the brush corral. And what a sight – a perfect machine shop and an almost completed ship. I was sworn to secrecy and have kept it till this moment. Six men were at work on the “aerial ship.” It is this ship that a few people have seen at night on its trial trip. It returns to its home before daylight and will continue to do so until perfected. Yours, WILLIAM JORDON.”

Once again, even though Cohen’s account has a coupling of niggling typos (Jordan/Tamalpis for Jordon/Tamalpais), it does basically seem to have been well-sourced.

As an aside: according to Familysearch and MyHeritage, there are plenty of “William Jordon”s in California, but my guess is that the right one would prove to be closely related to William Charles Jordon (born 1817), who was registered to vote in San Rafael in 1872 [myheritage], and (I guess) who Familysearch thinks married Mary J. Devine in Sonoma on 15 July 1865.

Mountain Man named Brown

Our final sighting appears in Cohen (p.9), and mercifully doesn’t involve three bright lights in the sky. He writes: “A reclusive mountain man named Brown said he actually observed some sort of vehicle rising from the trees on a mountain ridge near San Francisco. He could not see the thing clearly because of the mountain mist, but he was sure it was quite unlike anything he had ever seen before.“

Well… I’ve searched newspapers.com (and elsewhere) for this without any luck at all (and it doesn’t seem to appear in any of Loren E. Gross’ books). I think there’s a high chance this story did appear in a newspaper around that time, but perhaps a spelling mistake crept in. All the same, this certainly seems to at least be consistent with William Jordon’s story.

Still, three out of four’s not a bad hit rate, and perhaps I’ll find the fourth at some point in the future.

OK, now that I’ve collected a ton of reports, it seems abundantly clear that the October 22 1896 Meteor sighted in California was indeed a meteor, and not an airship. What seems to have happened is that once the 1896 airship “flap” sightings began (in mid-November 1896), people started misremembering what was seen at Cliff House. However, the original press report (“A Queer Thing in the Sky”, San Francisco Examiner, Oct 23 1896) of what was seen at Cliff House was clearly ‘of a piece’ with all the other reports.

So, my apologies to Loren E. Gross and Daniel Cohen, but it seems that this meteor should be removed from the 1896 California Airship Flap timeline.

Additionally, Stefano Guidoni suggested in a comment here that Professor Lewis Swift’s observation of a comet near the horizon on Sept 20 1896 might well have been of Comet 205P/Giacobini not long after it had split into two. I think this too is very likely: and so, apologies again to Gross and Cohen, but this sighting should probably be removed from the same timeline.

October 22 1896 Reports

(The following includes a brief report from Oakland that appeared in here.)

• Oakland – CDP
  • Origin: “a little north of west”
  • Height: “rose like a sky-rocket” “parallel to my horizon” “remarkably slow”
  • Path: “an arc of ninety degrees or more”
  • Split: “into four parts, but not with the usual explosive effect”
  • Duration: “about ten seconds”
  • Disappeared: 6:09pm PST “behind the Berkeley Hills”
• Napa – Mr D. J. Brown
  • Appeared: “about six o’clock”
  • Origin: “from the west”
  • Height: “quite near the Earth, speed slower than that of any other like body”
  • Path: “passing over the valley in the direction of Napa Soda Springs”
  • Split: “head divided into three parts”
  • Disappeared: “went to pieces like a spent sky-rocket”
• Hunter’s, Tehama – Mr H. F. Stivers
  • Appeared: “6:10 p.m. P. S. T.”
  • Origin: “in the west” “fifteen or twenty degrees above the […] horizon”
  • Path: “directly towards the moon”, “must have described the complete arc of the heavens”
  • Split: “separated twice, making plainly visible three pieces”
  • Duration: “ten to fifteen seconds”
  • Disappeared: “in the moon’s light, not more than ten degrees from that luminary”
• Wheatland
  • Origin: “in the west as a star of the magnitude of the evening star and in close proximity to Jupiter”
  • Path: “towards the east” “very steadily and slowly”
  • Height: “parallel to the horizon”
  • Split: “increased in size until it gradually separated first into one comet-shaped meteor, then in two, and finally into three distinct comet-shaped meteors”
  • Disappeared: “when five degrees north of east it suddenly disappeared”
• Highland Springs
  • Appeared: “6:13 o’clock”
  • Path: “from southwest to northeast”
  • Split: “three large balls of fire”
  • Disappeared: “as if the [fire] balls burst on the mountain north of Clear Lake”
• Nevada [City], California – W. M. Richards
  • Appeared: “ten minutes past 6 o’clock this evening”
  • Origin: “a few degrees above the western horizon”
  • Path: “a direction a little north of east”
  • Split: “three balls of fire, all in a row and connected like a train of cars, with a long fiery tail”
  • Disappeared: “high in the heavens, apparently somewhere over the Great Dipper and North Star”
• Oakland
  • “The same phenomenon was witnessed in this city, and noted as a remarkable sight”
• Between Gold Flat and Grass Valley – Capt. Henry Richards and son (was this “W. M.”?)
  • Origin: “West”
  • Path: “from west to east”
  • Height: “on a horizontal line”
  • Split: “in three parts and the line of fire, resembling the tail of a comet, […]”
  • Disappeared: “did not fall to the earth, but passed into space”
• Stockton – Dr Foreman, John Ahern, Rodney the dog
  • Appeared: “ten minutes past six o’clock”
  • Origin: “a little north of west”
  • Path: “a bit north of east” “The Aurora mill obstructed our view of a portion of it”
  • Height: “appeared […] to traverse space on a level”
  • Split: “three large balls of fire […], the first largest. From the third a rail of fire extended”
  • Disappeared: “gradually faded from our view, going beyond the range of our vision, I suppose”
• San Jose
  • Origin: “out of the west”
  • Path: “easterly across the city”
  • Height: “apparently quite close to the earth” “on a horizontal line”
  • Split: “divided into two parallel lines of light, each with several balls of fire at regular intervals”
  • Disappeared: (while traveling)
• Cliff House, San Francisco – Mayor Sutro’s staff
  • Appeared: “shortly after 6 o’clock” “6:15 o’clock”
  • Origin: “about 10 miles out at sea” [west]
  • Path: “eastward, as if it had important business on the other coast”
  • Height: “a straight line horizontally”
  • Split: “seemed to have a head” “a long trail of fire extended behind”
  • Duration: “a few minutes”

Searching for “W. M. Richards” (who took “A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor”) following my last post, it struck me that that person might well have been an astronomer. Though it seems Richards wasn’t, this hunch quickly led me to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for 1896, which contained a section on the “Meteor of October 22 1896“, which is what the good folk of that society called the phenomenon that was widely observed on 22 Oct 1896.

Even though some of this overlaps with what I have previously posted, I think that the entirety (pp.324-326) bears reproducing in full.

Note that “CDP” was Professor C. D. Perrine, Director of the Lick Observatory: hence if you wish to see the actual letters to Professor Perrine transcribed below (hopefully with the omitted sketches), I believe you should go to the Lick Observatory Records at UC Santa Cruz. Having said that, I don’t believe any of the 148.5 linear feet of correspondence in the archives there (UA.036.Ser.01) has yet been digitised (bah). Though I am (of course) going to ask if they can retrieve the two drawings omitted from the text for me.

Meteor Seen at Noon (November 1).

A meteor, leaving a broad scintillating track, traversed fifteen degrees of the northwestern heavens at about ten minutes past noon yesterday. It was seen at a point about thirty degrees above the horizon, and the half second of its flight shone as an electric light. The shooting star was seen by a visitor at the Park, in San Francisco. – S. F. Chronicle, November 2.

A Bright Meteor Seen on October 8, 1896.

Mr. P. Perrine, of Alameda, reports a meteor four or five times as bright as Venus on October 8, 1896, at 7h 32m p.m. It was of a brilliant white color and moved rapidly from an altitude of about thirty degrees to near the horizon, inclining toward the east at an angle of about forty-five degrees. C. D. P.

The Meteor of October 22 1896

In the evening of October 22d, while in Oakland, I saw an unusually interesting meteor. I first saw it a little north of west, where it seemed to rise like a sky-rocket, which it so much resembled that at first I had no thought of its true character. Its apparent motion after the first few seconds was almost exactly parallel to my horizon. At first sight the head appeared to be single, but after two or three seconds (during which time it rapidly increased in brightness), it separated into four parts but not with the usual explosive effect, for all the parts pursued the same course in a straight line, each leaving its train of sparks which reached to the next part, a long train following all. The last portion was much the faintest and soon disappeared, while the remaining three were of more nearly equal brightness, the first being somewhal brighter than the others.

After traversing an arc of ninety degrees or more, they all disappeared at 6h 9m 30″ ± 10″ P. S. T. in the smoke of the city and behind the Berkeley hills. When at their brightest, each portion considerably surpassed Venus in brilliancy.

The apparent motion was remarkably slow, the meteor being visible for about ten seconds.

C. D. Perrine.

Mount Hamilton, October 31, 1896.

Abstract of a Letter from Mr. D. J. Brown to Professor Holden.

“Last Camp,” Napa, October 23, 1896.

“At about six o’clock, p.m. yesterday, there appeared in this vicinity a meteor of such remarkable appearance that I deem it proper to report its passage to you.

“It came from the west — its flight was quite near the Earth, and speed slower than that of any other like body I have ever seen. At first it had a solid head, with a train of considerable length. Soon this head divided into three parts, presenting an appearance like this, [the sketch is omitted] slowly passing over the valley in the direction of Napa Soda Springs. It went to pieces like a spent sky-rocket.”

Letter from Mr. H. F. Stivers, at Hunter’s, Tehama County, Cal., October 26, 1896.

“Seeing a meteor, the other evening, that appeared to me more than ordinary, I have roughly sketched [the sketch is omitted] and described its appearance and would be pleased to know if it was seen at the Observatory. Friday, October 22d, at 6:10 p. m., P. S. T., I saw a very brilliant meteor in the west. My attention was drawn to it by the great light it gave. At first view it was not more than fifteen or twenty degrees above the western horizon. It sailed majestically along like an immense rocket directly towards the Moon, and disappeared in the Moon’s light, not more than ten degrees from that luminary. Its zenith was about ten degrees north of mine, on passing which it separated twice, making plainly visible three pieces, the largest the apparent size of a closed hand, the others diminished to about one-half each.

“It was visible from ten to fifteen seconds, and had a trail of twenty-five or thirty degrees.

“It emitted a white light, tinged at times, I should judge, with red and yellow. It must have described the complete arc of the heavens and had it not been for the brightness of the full moon, should nearly all have been observable by me.”

Wheatland, [Yuba County] October 22. — A most remarkable meteor was seen a few minutes past 6 o’clock this evening. It appeared in the west as a star of the magnitude of the evening star, and in close proximity to Jupiter. [i.e. Venus] It increased in size and gradually separated, first into two and finally into three distinct comet-shaped bodies. Following each other they sped toward the east and disappeared. — S. F. Chronicle

Highland Springs, October 23. — At 6:13 o’clock, last night, a meteoric display, such as is seldom seen, passed over here. It was composed of three large balls of fire moving from southwest to northeast. It looked as if the balls burst on the mountain north of Clear Lake.

Three Meteors in Line.

Nevada, Cal., October 22. — A triple connected meteor was observed in the northern heavens at ten minutes past 6 o’clock this evening. Three balls of fire, all in a row and connected like a train of cars, with a long fiery tail, flashed in view just a few degrees above the western horizon and traveled in a direction a little north of east. In half a minute they disappeared from view high in the heavens, apparently somewhere over the Great Dipper and North Star.

The sight was magnificent and awe-inspiring, and one long to be remembered, as it did not appear to be over forty or fifty miles above the earth. A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor was taken by W. M. Richards. — S. F. Examiner, Oct. 23, 1896.

This meteor was also seen by many visitors at the Cliff House, near San Francisco.

Following on from my post yesterday, I found a copy of the Stockton Evening Mail for 23 Oct 1896 (p.5) in newspapers.com, which (to my delight) told the story of what happened in Sacramento really rather well. Rodney (John Ahern’s dog) even gets a starring role, which will no doubt please many passing animal lovers. The best thing I can do is reproduce the article in full…

A Wonderful Meteor

Three Balls of Fire with a Trail Pass Across the Northern Sky

A wonderful meteor consisting of three parts connected by a fiery band was seen last evening at ten minutes past six o’clock.

“Four of us had as good a point of observation as anybody, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Foreman to a Mail reporter to-day. “There was myself, John Ahern, the night watchman at the Sacramento-street railway station, a policeman and a fourth party whose name has slipped my memory just at present. We were standing at the corner of Main and Sacramento streets. I happened to see it first. It appeared to start just a little north of west and to traverse space on a level, taking a course just a bit north of east. Three large balls of fire were strung together, the first appearing to be the largest. From the third a tail of fire extended apparently fifteen feet long, while the balls seemed to be ten feet apart. Of course, the distances were much greater than that, but that is how it appeared. It gradually faded from our view, going beyond the range of our vision, I suppose. The Aurora mill obstructed our view of a portion of it for a moment.

“A rather singular thing in connection with it,” continued the doctor, “was the inexplicable conduct of John Ahern’s dog. You know the dog carries his master’s lantern, and has never been known to drop it even when he sees a handsome lady dog that takes his eye. But as soon as the meteor disappeared the dog dropped the lantern and blew the light out. Ahern, who never saw such a phenomenon as a triple meteor before, thought that the end of the world was at hand, and when he witnessed the strange action of the canine he turned pale.”

At Wheatland, Yuba county, about 75 miles north of Stockton, the meteor appeared in about the same quarter of the heavens as it did here. A telegram from there says: “It appeared in the west as a star of the magnitude of the evening star and in close proximity to Jupiter. It increased in size until it gradually separated first into one comet-shaped meteor, thin in two, and finally into three distinct comet-shaped meteors. Tandem it sped toward the east, parallel to the horizon and when five degrees north of east it suddenly disappeared.

“Parties who witnessed this rare sight are at a loss to explain what it really was. In brilliancy it resembled ordinary meteors, but in view of the fact that it moved very steadily and slowly when compared with a meteor’s flight and was not attracted to the earth, but traveled parallel to it, it is believed to have been in space beyond the atmosphere of the earth.

“Its sub-division into three parts, which resembled as a whole three comets joined one to another, is unprecedented and beyond explanation.”

It is possible that the supposed meteor was really a group of asteroids which, in their journey around the sun, chanced to pass near the earth’s orbit. In that case the light they shed was reflected sunlight.

Associated Press

The Wheatland part of the above article had been run by Associated Press Wire, which is why it also appeared in the Los Angeles Daily Times, the Los Angeles Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Berkeley Gazette (all with different levels of abridgement).

However, there was a completely separate article in the San Francisco Examiner on the same day from Nevada City (close to Grass Valley, 50 or so miles north of Sacramento):

Three Meteors In Line

Residents of Nevada, Cal., Witness a Thrilling Light in the Heavens

NEVADA, October 22. – A triple connected meteor was observed in the northern heavens at ten minutes past six o’clock this evening. Three balls of fire all in a row and connected like a train of cars with a long fiery tail flashed in view just a few degrees above the western horizon and traveled in a direction a little north of east. In half a minute it disappeared from view high in the heavens, apparently somewhere over the great Dipper and North Star.

From all accounts this grand sight was not generally observed as the hour and time did not find many people on the streets. The sight was magnificent and awe-inspiring, and one long to be remembered as it did not appear to be over forty or fifty miles above the earth. A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor was taken by W. M. Richards.

Coincidentally, the Examiner printed this on p.7 immediately below “A Queer Thing In The Sky”, which was its report of Mayor Sutro’s staff witnessing a “novel spectacle” on the very same night, which started at “6.15” and “only lasted for a few minutes”.

Timey Wimey Problems

Before Standard Railway Time zones were introduced in 1883, US railways used a complicated mesh of close to 100 local times, while local communities used possibly several thousand different local times. Yet Standard Railway Time only fixed the railways’ use of time: many communities still used their own local time. Standard Time (which imposed a similar but different set of timezones onto the USA) only became legally binding with the Calder Act in 1918 (which, controversially, also brought in Summer Time).

Hence we have the awkward situation that while railway employee John Ahern may well have been working in Standard Railway Time (which, for California, would be Pacific Time), Dr Foreman might equally well have been using Sacramento’s local time. So even in one town, you could very easily have two timezones active at the same, ummm, time. Perhaps someone will now tell me that that was why waistcoats had two pockets, one for each timezone.

Anyway, a good first step here would be to dig up some kind of local historical ‘time map’ or database that says what time each time was, e.g. in Grass Valley, Sacramento, San Francisco, etc. But… if there is such a thing, I haven’t found it yet. So there’s still plenty of work to do here, alas.

My copy of Daniel Cohen’s (1981) “The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO of the 1890s” arrived yesterday, and I’ve started working my way through it. Initial impressions are that it definitely earned its place on my essential Airship Flap bibliography: it’s thorough, well written, and the author is a definite UFO skeptic. Where Cohen has evidence, he’s usually ready to bring it to the fore to support his point.

Having said that, the very first story he tells about the 1896 Californian Airship Flap (p.8) is about the astronomer Professor Swift (this also appears in Loren Gross’ book): but neither Cohen nor Gross expand on the story very much. It seemed that neither had a copy of the story, and recounted it second-hand.

I found it in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Volume 26, Number 17, 6 November 1896 (p.1, column 6):

Saw the Comet With the Naked Eye

Dr Lewis Swift, astronomer in charge of the Mount Lowe observatory and discoverer of comets, was interviewed in regard to his latest find and said:

“At sunset on Sunday, Sept. 20, I saw an unknown luminous object with the naked eye about 1 degree east of the sun. Examining it with an opera glass, a faint companion was visible. Both were seen by all the visitors at the hotel. My first thought was that it might be a small fire on the mountain, but a moment’s observation dispelled this idea, for one-half of the sun was below and one-half above the mountain, and the object was still above the sun. It was also seen to descend and set, as did the sun four minutes previously. Tuesday evening I essayed to examine them with the 4½ inch comet seeker, but did not succeed until one-half the sun had sunk below the mountain, when it became visible, but whether it was the bright or the faint one I cannot tell. It is not unheard of for a comet to break into several pieces, and, of course, it might be a case of this kind. Through the telescope it was no bright than when seen with the naked eye on Sunday. I infer it was the companion. This time it was north of the sun instead of east as before. It was a strange affair. I hardly know what to make of it, but that it was a comet is certain. Both seem to be growing fainter. Such a discovery has been made on two or three occasions heretofore.” – San Francisco Examiner.

The Marysville Daily Appeal, Volume LXXIV, Number 87, 10 October 1896 had noted that “Dr. Lewis Swift, the astronomer in charge of Mount Lowe Observatory, has discovered two new comets“. Similarly, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Volume 25, Number 147, 7 October 1896 noted (in an article saying how the Mount Lowe Observatory was likely to soon close) that “[s]ince Professor Swift came to Echo Mountain he has discovered four comets, the last about a week ago, a double comet“. (The same appeared in the Call.)

What I’d really like to do is to cross-reference the location of the “hotel” (from which Professor Swift made his naked eye observations at sunset) against the direction of the sunset on 20th September 1896. However, this wasn’t immediately obvious from the story, though the California newspaper archives didn’t seem to have any copies of the San Francisco Examiner.

Also: while looking through the Californian newspaper archives, I found the following story in the Morning Union, 23 Oct 1896 [Grass Valley, CA]:

A Strange Meteor

Capt. Henry Richards and son, while coming into town from Gold Flat last evening, noticed a meteor or falling star passing through the northern heavens from west to east on a horizontal line, which was of such brilliancy as to attract considerable attention. The star or meteor seemed to be in three parts and the line of fire, resembling the tail of a comet, looked to the naked eye to be about 100 feet in length. The three parts were quite a distance apart and appeared to be as big as footballs. The strange meteor or whatever it was did not fall to the earth, but passed into space.

For reference, Gold Flat is about 3 miles NE of Grass Valley (so not far at all).

This sighting seems almost identical to the one from around the same time by “a Stockton man named John Ahern” (Cohen pp. 8-9), who saw “three large balls of fire [that] were strung together“, with a tail of fire extending from the third, that Ahern estimated to be “about fifteen feet in length“.

I’d note that the Stockton Record ran a story on 10 August 1896 on the tricks John Ahern (watchman at Southern Pacific’s Sacramento railroad depot) and his dog Rodney used to detect different people’s voting persuasions. (Here he is mentioned again in August 1896, though sans Rodney.) So I suspect that despite the Stockton Record’s location in Stockton, this very early sighting is far more likely to have been in Sacramento, where the early bulk of the California sightings happened.

Furthermore, I found another report from Sacramento from 22 October 1896 in the San Jose Mercury-news of 23 October 1896:

Brilliant Double Meteor

Early this evening, a brilliant meteor came out of the west, traveling on a perfectly flat line and apparently quite close to the earth. As it passed easterly across the city, it divided into two parallel lines of light, each with several balls of fire at regular intervals. When lost seen it was traveling on a horizontal line.

The picture I’m getting here is that on the night of 22nd October 1896, Captain Henry Richards (and son), John Ahern, and the third (unnamed) spotter in Sacramento all saw the same aerial object, perhaps travelling from the Grass Valley area to Sacramento (about 50 miles south as the dirigible flies).

It also sounds to me (from the “balls of fire”) as though the airship crew was still fine-tuning the size of the nitroglycerine pellets (make them too big and you’d end up spitting out “balls of fire”, right?)

John Ahern

Finally, I found a record in the Sacramento Bee of John Ahern’s death in 1900 at the age of 71:

AHERN—John Ahern, an old and well known citizen of this city, died this morning shortly after 12 o’clock in the Railroad Hospital, from the effects of injuries which he received a few days ago in the railroad yards. Mr Ahern was an old employee in the yards. The other day, he started to walk between some cars standing on a switch, and as he did, so an engine started to switch the cars to another part of the yard. The cars came together and Ahern was caught between them and severly crushed. An investigation at the hospital revealed the fact that one of his ribs had been broken and he was injured in other parts of his body.

Deceased was a native of County Cork, Ireland, aged 71 years. He was the father of Thomas, David, Alice, and Maggie Ahern.

I’ve previously included a link to Dr Battey’s (1893) “Aerial Machine” patent on Google Patents (it was even cited in a 2018 patent!), because it seems to me to share many features with the mysterious airship in the 1896 & 1897 Airship Flaps. I thought it would be useful to post a description of Battey’s patent, particularly its novel propulsion back-end. So… here we go, then.

Battey’s Aerial Machine

Here’s the artist’s impression of Battey’s airship published in Scientific American. The main sections are the streamlined balloon envelope, the wings on the side (for ascending and descending), the gondola below, and the curious-looking propulsion device on the back, all connected via standard Heath Robinson ropes / pulleys / sprockets straight out of every Victorian schoolboy’s My First Engineering Kit.

Battey doesn’t claim anything inventive about the aerodynamic balloon envelope. He describes this as having “the shape of a double cone with the bases united […] preferably made of light sheet metal, such as aluminum”. Internally, the envelope is “strengthened […] by a suitable framework […], preferably composed of vertical and transversely disposed braces”. His innovation is all in his “propellor”…

Battey’s Propellor

What Battey actually “claim[ed] as new and desire[d] to secure by Letters Patent” is his “propellor”, by which he means the mechanism to propel an airship forward. To illustrate this, I’ve grabbed the two relevant figures from his granted patent, cleaned them up (by removing all the arrows and letters), and then annotated the various parts in red using the terms used in the text.

As embodied here, the entire “propellor” mechanism is driven by the ticking of a clockwork mechanism (driven by a clock mainspring), which at regular intervals pushes a piston downwards along a short vertical cylinder. This piston (somehow) drags a nitroglycerin pellet out from the end of a J-shaped magazine feed pipe, and then pushes that pellet downwards towards a firing cup. When the pellet lands in the firing cup, the pellet itself completes a circuit between two wires connected to a battery (not shown), causing the pellet to explode. The shock from the detonation hits the dish-shaped propellor, and so propels the aerial machine forward: the spring beneath the firing cup yields, and so the firing cup is not damaged by the explosion.

Your thoughts, Nick?

Many people’s immediate reaction to this design would be that anyone who would combine a huge airship envelope full of hydrogen with external explosions every few seconds was a suicidal maniac. But knowing a little more about balloon history, I’m not sure that’s entirely fair.

In the 1930s, one of Jean Piccard’s innovations with his Pleiades multi-balloon setup was to attach explosive charges to ropes to release groups of balloons: before that, balloonists had used knives or even pistols to do the same thing, but these were often highly unsatisfactory. At the time, everyone thought Piccard was insane, but it wasn’t many years before just about everyone started copying him. So maybe Dr Battey’s design wasn’t quite so, ummm, batty after all.

The key limitation on the range of Battey’s airship would seem to be how many explosive pellets would fit in the magazine feeder pipe. If a pellet exploded every, say, six seconds, then you’d need ten pellets per minute. Annoyingly, the design doesn’t seem to have any means of stopping the clockwork piston (the only control over the mechanism seems to be to disconnect the battery), so it seems that once started the piston would keep pushing pellets down the cylinder until the magazine was empty.

So… the maximum length of a single flight would be determined by the number of pellets in the magazine. Even taking the dimensions of the magazine broadly as drawn (say, 5cm diameter x 2m tall), its capacity would be about 4,000 cm³ (and unless anyone knows better, I’d guess each explosive pellet would be about 1 cm³ in volume), so around 3500 or so pellets. This would give roughly 350 minutes of flight on a single magazine load, which would seem to be plenty for reasonable length night flights.

But would these nitroglycerin pellets have been powerful enough to propel Battey’s aerial machine at all? The figures given by Wikipedia are 1.6 g/cm³ for density, and 1.488 kilocalories per gram, so a 1 cm³ pellet would contain 2.38 kilocalories of energy. I believe that this is about half the energy density of gasoline, but I would be happy to be corrected.

I suspect the easiest way by far to determine how much power this would produce in practice (without all the losses to heat, light and sound etc) would be to build a test rig, but given that I have precisely zero desire to have the anti-terrorist squad kicking my door down, I’m not going to be doing this. Sorry for not going 100% gonzo on this etc etc.

After my last post, I went looking for a source for the 1896 Airship Flap that concentrated specifically on the reports of flying machines and strange lights in the California sky in late 1896. Specifically, I wanted to know whether there was anything particular about the California sightings that might differentiate the 1896 Airship Flap in California from the 1897 Airship Flap in other states.

Eventually, I found scans of a privately printed book by Loren E. Gross: this had first been published in Fremont, CA in 1974 as “The UFO Wave of 1896”, before being reprinted (2nd edition) in 1987 as “UFO’S: A History 1896”.

Despite the title, Gross’ overall angle was far more Fortean than Ufological. Apart from quoting a local “W.A.” [I read elsewhere that this was “William Ahern”] at the end (who thought that the airship had been sent by “The Lord Commissioner of Mars” [p.27]), the phenomena were largely reported as if they were man-made, with some dissenters thinking it was a hoax.

William Randolph Hearst

In many ways, the story painted by Gross is as not so much about airships and strange lights in the sky as about how the competition between San Francisco newspapers shaped and presented that unfolding history. On one side, The San Francisco Chronicle and particularly The San Francisco Call eagerly searched out airship stories to an engaged public who couldn’t wait for the mysterious airship to do its (much anticipated) Big Reveal downtown so that everyone could see the unknown geniuses behind it. Yet on the other side, William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner went out of its way to rubbish the coverage (particularly from the Call) at every step.

We can see this in a poem (ok, doggerel) in the Examiner 26th November 1896 (reproduced in Gross’ Foreword), where the penultimate verse is aimed squarely at the paper’s competition (might this have been the Call’s editor John McNaught?):

One editor is certain / You really are a ship,
And most adroitly manage / To give his sleuths the slip,
He thinks that now, or later, / The human race will fly;
So can’t you, as a favor, soon / Take him aboard and try?
For if your motive power consists / Of force akin to wind,
He is as large a bag of that / As you will ever find.

The final verse continues the Examiner’s jabbing, basically asserting that the other paper is more interested in profiting from what the Examiner thinks is basically a fake story, designed to catch “suckers”:

Our faith it might be stronger, / But earth is rich in liars
Who do not pause to ponder / The future and its fires.
They’d see a ghost on every cloud / To sell the tale for space,
And spend the price for pie and cake / Wherewith to feed the face.
But come again, oh, toy balloons! / We rather like your style–
We see your catch of suckers / And join you in a smile.

Previously, William Randolph Hearst had taken the reins of the Examiner from his father in 1887 at the age of 17, but by 1896 had switched his day-to-day attention to the New York Journal. Even though Hearst lived on the East Coast, it was well-known that he kept a steely grip on the Examiner‘s editorial policy back in California.

All of which was why The San Francisco Call took so much relish, in late November 1896 at the end the Californian Airship Flap, in pointing out that the two Hearst papers had (in Gross’ words, pp.25-26) “engaged in a two-faced game”. While the Examiner on the West Coast “warred against the Call’s big headlines about mysterious airships by vigorously blaming the aerial visions on people who were under the spell of the Roman god Bacchus”, the New York Journal on the East Coast “excited New Yorkers with sensational tales of powered balloons zipping all over California”.

From the point of view of a modern-day historian looking back at the whole sequence, I think it’s quite clear that there really were plenty of witnesses who saw strange lights in the sky at dusk and at night, many of whom were able to see enough of the shape of the form to identify it as an airship, albeit one with an electric arc-like light and a strange lolloping bat-like motion. The only real reason the Examiner printed so many hoax-y / doubting stories was, I think, to supply a counter-narrative to the Call, not because its editors thought that counter-narrative was actually true.

So, the real battleground here was arguably the bitter American newspaper war of 1896, where Truth was always going to be the first casualty: any pretence at honest reporting was to be jettisoned like useless ballast if it got in the way of elevating Hearst’s newspapers’ circulations yet higher. In fact, my suspicion is that the Examiner‘s dishonest reporting of the 1896 California Airship Flap may well have been what caused so many later writers to erroneously conclude that this was merely some kind of “mass hysteria”. All Hearst’s Examiner needed was a counter-narrative not to inform but to annoy and enrage: you shouldn’t have too far to look these days to find newspapers that still employ this trick to great profit.

The 1896 California Airship Flap begins..

According to Gross, the first substantial sighting of the 1896 California Airship Flap was made by the household staff of silver magnate Mayor Adolph Sutro, at his (somewhat implausible-looking French chateau-style) mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean west of San Francisco.

It seems a “strange object” had hovered in the air just offshore over Seal Rock. The darkness had masked the features of the unknown aerial thing, but a powerful light had been discernable on the rear portion as well as a row of lights down its side, as the object suddenly flew away toward the east, passing overhead at an estimated 500 foot altitude. [p.1]

We can see Seal Rocks roughly 200m due west of Cliff House in this early map of San Francisco:

What I find hugely interesting about this is that all the key elements of the mystery airship ‘template‘ we see throughout the main 1897 Airship Flap are already fully present here. We have a mystery airship with an unusually strong light (like an electric arc lamp) at the rear, a row of lights down the side, rapid acceleration, dusk or night-time flights, and a flight-path close (but not too close) to large cities and to nearby railway lines.

From a template to a secret history…?

What I’ve been trying to do is to use this template to ‘build’ my way back into the secret history of the device. For what they’re worth, here are my current thoughts:

The only practical means of achieving lift available in 1896-1897 was hydrogen gas: but because there are no descriptions of the airship ascending rapidly, my working theory is that it was not primarily intended to rise by dropping ballast, but that it instead used hydrogen gas to achieve neutral buoyancy. I further suspect that it had no air ballonet inside its main gasbags, to control its height above the ground.

In turn, what I think that means is that despite staying buoyant in the air like an airship, it handled more like an aeroplane (i.e. by driving it forward and adjusting its wings to rise or fall slowly in the air) even though aeroplanes hadn’t yet been invented. This mystery flying machine was, in short, a hybrid.

I also suspect that dusk to night-time flights were chosen not primarily for secrecy, but because of technical problems with maintaining stable buoyancy during the (hot) day-time. This makes me suspect that the airship design had practical problems with managing the pressure of its internal gasbags.

Furthermore, I suspect that railway lines were a hugely important part of the airship’s testing process, because they would have provide a reliable means for night-time navigation, and possibly a way for owners to track progress (via messages from telegraph offices, often located near railway lines).

As an aside, an airship flying at 500 feet or higher should have had no fear of running into things: the tallest building in San Francisco in 1896 was the Chronicle Building, which was a mere 120 feet high.

Finally, I think the bright light has to be a huge tell. Anything on board an 1896 airship would have had to have there as a matter of R&D necessity, not as a luxury or a nicety. And the kind of huge battery that would have been needed to power an arc lamp would have weighed (not literally, but not far off) a ton. Hence something else on board must have been creating that intense light, and it must have been creating it for a really good reason.

Having now spent a while trying to link all these strands together, I come back time and again to Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey’s airship design. This was a dirigible based on neutral buoyancy, with means for (what one might call) external combustion to propel it forward (in a moderately steerable way), and with controllable ‘wings’ to adjust the altitude. My suspicion is therefore that what people thought was the “bright light” was in fact actually the flying machine’s means of propulsion, the core inventive step of Battey’s patent.

I also can’t help but wonder if the mystery airship was built elsewhere in California and followed (on this very early test flight to Cliff House and Seal Rocks) the railway tracks going west through Oakland, specifically the Overland Route that headed way across to Nebraska and Iowa. The most obvious location on this line would have been the state capital Sacramento, some 90 miles distant from Mayor Sutro’s gingerbread-style Cliff House. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first newspaper report of a sighting (on the night of the 17 Nov 1896) was by Charles Lusk “at his place of residence at 24th and “O” Streets” in Sacramento [Gross, p.1].

The attorney E. B. Collins, who claimed to be representing the inventor (and whom the San Francisco Call harassed for days), asserted that it started its flight from “Oroville, in Butte County, and flew sixty miles in a straight line over Sacramento”. But… I have to say that I have my doubts that this was true. Dr Charles Abbott Smith at one point was registered to vote in East Bear River Township near Yuba, so I’m actually wondering whether Collins was representing Smith (and I believe that Smith wasn’t yet ready to build anything in 1896).

Thoughts on Gross

I think that Loren Gross did a very good job of bringing these newspaper reports together, and his book offers an excellent (if necessarily all-too-brief) walk-through of the 1896 California Airship Flap: well worth a read!

His first (1974) edition was based on a set of newspaper clippings collected by Vincent Gaddis. His second revision (1987) relied instead on folklorist Thomas E. Bullard’s “The Airship File: A Collection of Texts Concerning Phantom Airships and Other UFOs, Gathered from Newspapers and Periodicals Mostly During the Hundred Years Prior to Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting” and its supplements.

I cannot, of course, find enough words to say how much I now want to see Thomas Bullard’s Airship Files. I’ve contacted Bullard via Academia.edu, but if anyone has any other suggestions as to how I might get to see “The Airship Files” and its supplements, I am – like an overevolved rabbit – all ears.

The 1896-1897 Airship Flap is a slice of Forteana that I think is tasty enough to satisfy the appetites of both Ufologists and steampunk enthusiasts simultaneously. As such, it has plenty of devotees and debatable documentation, where much of the latter seems (unfortunately) to recycle the same underlying material. This post tries to filter out bibliographical noise to get a little closer to the faint signal beneath.

Essential bibliography

As always, even though there are more complete bibliographies out there, relatively few books and articles genuinely define the topic. So, here’s my suggested essential bibliography (please excuse spoilers):

• Clarke, Jerome (1966) “The Strange Case of the 1897 Airship”
  • (Spoiler: it’s aliens, but disguised as men with beards, because reasons)
• Keel, John (1973) “Operation Trojan Horse” (Chapter 5)
  • (Spoiler: it’s aliens, but somehow outside time and space)
• Cohen, Daniel (1981) “The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO Of The 1890s”
  • (Spoiler: it’s Venus, plus mass hysteria)
• Bartholomew, Robert E. (1990) “The Airship Hysteria of 1896-97”
  • (Spoiler: it’s mass hysteria)
• Busby, Michael (2004) “Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery”
  • (Spoiler: it’s C. A. Smith’s airship design, sort of)
• Danelek, J. Allen (2009) “The Great Airship of 1897”
  • (Spoiler: it’s some San Francisco millionaire in Sacramento / Oroville)

The last two of these are available as ebooks, and focus specifically on airships. Of these, while Busby is better on patents (though didn’t pick up on Dr S. B. Battey’s patent), Danelek is better on logistics (such as the likely connection with railroads). As possible aluminium suppliers, Danelek also flags both Alcoa (actually, Pittsburgh Reduction Company) and Swiss-based Alcan (so gets applause from the gallery for that).

Incidentally, Danelek includes not only the famous etching of Walter McCann’s photograph, but also another picture supposedly of the same airship. However, it looks to me (after a quick Google image search) like he was taken in by a grainy fake (the original was an 1875 etching of “A street in Parsons, Kansas”, below). Notice how everyone is standing in the same place and positions, 22 years later. 😉

Incidentally, Jerome Clarke remarks [p.16] that “one noted ufologist has concluded – and will so argue in a forthcoming book – that the airship was invented by an American scientist“, though I don’t know who that “noted ufologist” was. But in the end, Clarke’s argument seems to boil down to the assertion that “one must conclude, as Thomas Edison did, that “it is absolutely impossible to imagine that a man could construct a successful airship and keep the matter a secret”.” [p.16] The singular problem with Edison’s reasoning is that, for all its cleverness, the airship may ultimately have been unsuccessful – cock-up plus cover-up normally trumps a pure conspiracy argument.

1896 Airship Flap vs 1897 Airship Flap?

One thing to bear in mind is that there were (technically speaking) two separate airship flaps. The first flap was solely in California, started on Thanksgiving Day 1896 and ran for about a month. This was followed by a second (much longer) flap that started in Hastings, Nebraska (about a thousand miles away!) on 2nd February 1897, but then spread through many other states. The final sighting was (probably) over Yonkers, New York in later April 1897 (quoted in Danelek). There was also a report (Denver Evening Post, 13 May 1897) of the crash of a large balloon or airship off the coast of New York (quoted in Busby).

Even though many writers assume that these two flaps were both the same flap, that remains no more than an assumption. Jerome Clarke concurs that “there is no justification for the view […] that the airship worked its way eastwards from California after December 1896“. [p.10]

In fact, the history of invention is full of situations where two or more teams with technologically similar solutions are racing against each other: in this “race to market”, it can be almost impossible to prove who genuinely made the original inventive step. So we should always be suspicious of every source where the two flaps are automatically taken as a single “mega-flap” – right now, we simply don’t know either way.

And finally… William Randolph Hearst?

Nicely, Bartholomew (p.175) quotes Klass’s “UFO’s – Explained” (1976, p.314), that cites William Randolph Hearst in the San Francisco Examiner, 5th December 1896:

“Fake journalism” has a good deal to answer for, but we do not recall a more discernible exploit in that line than the persistent attempt to make the public believe that the air in this vicinity is populated with airships. It has been manifest for weeks that the whole airship story is pure myth.

What I find amusing about this is that Busby highlights Hearst as exactly the kind of capitalist ‘robber baron’ who would look to capture (and, of course, monopolise) this emerging airship mode of transport. Would it therefore be a surprise if Hearst – who himself had become so extraordinarily rich from the same fake ‘yellow journalism’ he criticised here – turned out to be both a critic of the 1896 wave and a backer of the 1897 wave?

Right now, I don’t really think so, but for now that’s no more than a guess. Certainly, though, it would not surprise me one little bit if the secret history behind the 1896 and 1897 airship flaps turns out to be far subtler and technologically competitive than previous writers have imagined.