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.
By the 1890s the basic airship technology existed, though the challenges of structure, buoyancy, propulsion, and control were still daunting. So the 1896-7 airship flies below the plausible but still above the possible– an altitude we find intriguing. If there’s a grain of truth in the story, what might it be? We can think of only one reasonable possibility.
First, the eastern sightings of winter-early spring 1897 are not credible. Airships were never all weather vehicles, and weather in the Great Plains and Midwest at that time of year is usually awful. Otherwise it’s unpredictable– we’ve seen temperatures drop 30 degrees Celsius in a few hours. Our experience convinces us this is not a realistic season to test an airship.
April in Yonkers is pleasant, but if we assume the 1897 sighting is bona fide, we assume the earlier sightings are prescient. So the Yonkers sightings are not tenable.
That leaves California in 1896. Sacramento is a better candidate than San Francisco, because there are no hills or bodies of water to crash into. The weather is usually milder there as well. Also, the first sightings took place in Sacramento.
We post an original report of the sighting in a separate comment. (Forgive us for not correcting spelling.) The story sounds credible, with the reporter interviewing numerous witnesses. But what did they see and hear?
If the ‘fan-like’ wheels are a propulsion system, they must face forward– not sideways as the illustration represents. Eyewitness accounts of the envelope vary, from egg shaped, to cigar shaped, to ‘He had no, idea, however, that it was anything but a balloon…’ Witnesses unanimously report a bright light on board.
Witnesses heard voices, but what they did not hear was especially significant. They did not hear the chugging of an internal combustion engine nor the whoosh of a hot air balloon’s burner.
We don’t believe the craft could be a dirigible. When Graf von Zeppelin built the first dirigible four years later, he calculated that the craft would need to be quite large (128 m) in order to have a viable lift gas volume to frame weight ratio. Something that large would attract a lot of attention and be impossible to hide. If the craft was real, we see two possibilities:
1. The airship was a small blimp. The propulsion was electric, accounting for the silence. As electric motors and batteries offer a poor power/weight ratio, the lifting gas must have been hydrogen. The craft must have been something like Renard and Krebs 1884 airship ‘La France’.
2. The craft is a balloon– traveling on a wind that blew a few hundred feet above the ground. In this case the lift gas could be hydrogen or coal gas– Sacramento had a gasworks as early as 1854.
The first step towards verification would be determining whether the witnesses quoted by The Call really existed. (Danelek may have done this already.) If possibility 1 was valid, ‘Captain Nemo’ needed the motor, batteries, and lots of hydrogen. Perhaps these could be traced.
Possibility 2 could be more difficult to verify, but if airship mystery originated with a balloon, it would explain why no airship ever turned up.
One final note– there was a hot air balloon in Sacramento two months before the airship sighting:
https://www.valcomnews.com/east-sacramento%E2%80%99s-mckinley-park-has-rich-heritage-as-east-park/
East Sacramento’s McKinley Park has rich heritage as East Park
‘Also drawing large crowds to the park were hot air balloon ascensions and parachute jumps by such notable aeronauts of the time as Professor Robert Collier and Professor Chris Nelson.
An unusual incident occurred at the park on Sept. 6, 1896, as a large crowd awaited the ascension and parachute jump of Professor Collier. But the event was cancelled when Collier’s balloon burst as it was being inflated and the balloon fell to the ground in a fiery heap.
‘But unfortunately for Collier, his balloon could not be properly inflated due to a heavy breeze and the balloon began to descend when it was only 40 feet in the air.
‘Collier told the Record-Union that his disappointment with the rescheduled event was greater than the disappointment experienced by the crowd.
About three years later, Collier was involved in a non-fatal accident in Oak Park [Sacramento], as he had difficulties with his balloon and descended to the ground without a parachute. Apparently, the worst of Collier’s injuries from the accident was a severely sprained ankle.’
San Francisco Call, Volume 80, Number 172, 19 November 1896
STRANGE CRAFT OF THE SKY
Sacramento Men Describe the Airship
Claim They Saw Its Occupants and Heard Them in Conversation.
(University of California Riverside– California digital newspaper collection
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SFC18961119.2.2&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–)
SACRAMENTO, Cal., Nov. 18.— The one topic of conversation in this city to-day has been the reported appearance of an airship over the eastern portion of Sacramento last night. While there are hundreds of people who, failing to catch a glimpse of this mysterious visitant, are extremely skeptical, there are hundreds of others who are positive in their declaration that they did see its brilliant searchlight traveling over the city, and who will also swear that they heard the voices of its occupants and distinguished their merry song and laughter. The there are others who declare that these aerial travelers used the English tongue, and that they plainly distinguished the words used and commands uttered for the guidance and care of the air vessel.
In investigating this mysterious visitation the local representative of The Call obtained personal interviews with scores of reputable citizens who reside along the route passed over by the air craft. Many of them lived fully a mile or two distant from each other, but their accounts all agree.
As far as can be learned from eyewitnesses, the body of the craft was oblong and egg-shaped, with fan-like wheels on either side, whose rapid revolutions, beating the air, served to propel the vessel directly against the wind, and in so doing caused the vessel to sway from side to side with a wavering motion, similar to that of a boat being forced against the rapid current of a stream.
Midway of the vessel and suspended directly beneath it was a brilliant searchlight about twice the size of an arc light, evidently so placed that the occupants could ascertain when the vessel approached too near the earth and was in danger of collision with lofty objects. Above the egg-shaped body towered a tall, indistinguishable mass, whose shape it was impossible to ascertain, owing to the fact that the onlooker’s eyes were blurred by the brilliancy of the searchlight.
Such is the description of the vessel given by R. L. Lowry, who also claims to have been able to distinguish four men, who were seemingly engaged in propelling the vessel by its fanlike wheel?, much after the fashion of a bicyclist driving his wheel over a boulevard. It is also claimed that a bystander in the vicinity of Mr. Lowry shouted to the men in the aerial vessel and inquired their destination, and that they replied they were bound for San Francisco and intended arriving by 12 o’clock— midnight. This, however, could not be verified, as no one appeared to know the name of the reputed interrogator.
J. H. Vogel, who claimed to have been in the same locality, also states that the vessel was egg-shaped, and that he distinctly heard the voices of its occupants, but says that as the vessel was rapidly rising he was unable to distinguish any word, and that after a brief glimpse of the body of the airship it faded from view and all that was visible was the brilliant searchlight, winch moved slowly away in a southwesterly direction, going toward San Francisco, and being visible for upward of thirty minutes, growing more and more dim, until it disappeared in the distance. E. Wenzel, who is employed at Scheld’s Brewery, verifies the stories of Vogel and Lowry as to the shape of the vessel, but claims that when it passed over him the occupants were trolling a merry chorus, which, though distant, sounded sweet and clear in the evening air. The first person who, as far as can be learned, caught a glimpse of the reputed airship was David Carl, a horse-trainer at Agricultural Park. When he first caught Bight of the craft it was within a short distance of the ground, and he states that he heard a voice saying: “We are too low down here; send her up higher.” Then a discussion followed as to the advisability of attaining too great a Height, as the occupants were evidently anxious to reach San Francisco before midnight. He stated that the vessel then started to rise, doing so on an incline and not going directly up as would be the case had ballast been cast from a balloon. He had no, idea, however, that it was anything but a balloon and had never even thought of the possibility of an airship. He was positive in his declaration that it contained at least two occupants, as he could clearly distinguish two voices discuss, iv the strata of air best adapted for rapid traveling. T. P. de Long when interviewed said: “I could not distinguish the shape of the vessel. All I could see was a brilliant light moving seemingly against the wind, but I could plainly bear the voices of its occupants, who were singing, and it sounded to me like the noise produced by a phonograph. At this time I should judge the vessel was several hundred feet high.”
LeifFraNorden: thanks for that! My next post is purely about the 1896 California sightings, I think you’ll like it a lot!